even tho a trucker is meant to have limeted hours on the road what if i dont feel tierd

The hard cases seem to be able to learn video games, or how to find drugs and porn and money without working. Only a tiny percentage of people can't learn. Most of those not learning don't want to learn SOMETHING that is not immediately easy, fun, lucrative. They learn lots of other things when they want to.

 

Yeah, you kinda are. If he had an ELD, he wouldn't have been able to fake a 34 hour restart 5 days before the crash and pass an inspection 3 days before the crash. If he had an ELD, it would have been apparent that he was outside of his 8, 11, 14 and 70 at the intitial investigation and he would have been charged with a (probably several) felonies instead of the two misdemeanors he was. The ELD mandate was aimed at guys like this. When you say "ELDs actually cause more accidents and the mandate should be ended", what you are saying is we should give carte blanche to drivers.

As to the link you posted - the problems I have with it are many:

• It's an article about a study. The article is from January 2022, while the study was initially published in July of 2020.
  
• The title of the study is "Unintended responses to IT-enabled monitoring: The case of the electronic logging device mandate" . The study is using the eld mandate as a case study for the idea that electronic monitoring doesn't actually result in a net benefit as it increases other "illicit" behaviors.
• The study uses data from Jan 1, 2017 to Sept 1 2018. It doesn't even use the full year of 2018 or look for larger trends. We all know that many carriers subject to the 2018 deadline were not fully complainant until mid year. We also know that many carriers began transitioning early in 2017. With out paying for access I can't tell if they are breaking the numbers out month by month or if they just assumed that everyone flipped a switch on December 1. The short time frame of data used does not allow for an 'adjustment period'. A longer time frame could well show a small spike of 'incidents' followed by a steady decrease.
• The study finds "that crash counts for small firms did not fall relative to large firms, and may have increased." Yet many large firms did not transition to ELDs until 2019. Yes the had AOBRs, but an AOBR is not an ELD, so how can you compare small firms running ELDs to large firms running AOBRs?
• The study argues that incidents of speeding went up while citations for hos violations went down. What were the total number of citations and did LEOs switch their focus in regards to CMV enforcement? How many cmv inspections happened in permanent weigh stations, how many were 'random' road side enforcement, and how many were targeted enforcement?
• Even if the incidence of risky driving behaviors go up, does it matter if total crashes and fatalities go down?

Those are why I think the article you linked isn't worth much.


2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
crashes 161103 167237 171337 182008 164410
fatalities 4367 4629 5153 5242 5244
vmt 3095373 3174408 3212347 3240327 3261772
c/vmt 0.0520 0.05268 0.05334 0.05617 0.05041
f/vmt 0.0014 0.0015 0.0016 0.0016 0.0016

The table won't paste in right, but you can see there has been no real change in crashes and fatalities per million miles since 2017.

All the data came from here:
A&I online - Motor Carrier Analysis and Information Resources Online

 

My point is not to dredge up something personally painful for you, nor defend bad actors, but your bottom line

"The table won't paste in right, but you can see there has been no real change in crashes and fatalities per million miles since 2017"

Shows no evidence of elog mandates doing f-all for actual safety. THATS my problem. Compliance simply ISNT the same thing as safety.

 

Compliance isn't the same thing as safety, no argument from me on that.

Saying ELDs increase accidents - that's untrue. Unfortunately, the 2020 data is suspect due to covid and final 2021 data isn't available yet, so making a real conclusion on the impact of elds is very difficult. Yet there were fewer crashes in 2019 despite more miles traveled and the early data shows that 2017 is an inflection point in both the crash and fatality rate. 2017 is also the year that smaller carriers started their ELD transition. Might be a coincidence, might not. It would be interesting to add in new entrants (both authority and cdl) and see how that changes the analysis.

What ELDs do is enforce accountability. For those with integrity, that accountability is a minor annoyance. For those with low scruples, the ELD encourages responsibility. As Jason W Miller (the author of the study you linked to) says "financial performance measures uniquely affect carrier safety". By making carriers bear financial liability for HOS compliance, they are less likely to 'force' drivers to make the risky choice.

 

You're gonna need multiple ECM's and the same number of ELD'S.
Don't know if that will work so let us know if you go that route

 

I simply dont agree that every rule law and regulation needs to be catered to the lowest common denominator, its authoritarian and shows a "drive to 0" mentality that simply isnt realistic.

Encouraging poorer driving behaviour by those "with low scruples" even if the fatality or accident rate isnt increased strikes me as a poor idea. If a law designed to lower fatalities and increase safe driving behaviour turns out to have no impact on those things, thats what i call a BAD law because its done nothing to address those things.

It would be fair to say that the data is not in, IF nhtsa or the fmcsa ever actually bothered to review data granularly enough to prove their crap was working. Remember that the elog mandate was pushed by an act of congress (roadmap whatever) because of "popular sentiment" and then taken up by the largest companies already on aobrds (you may say its significantly different than an elog, i cant agree there) well, news flash, popular sentiment is frequently not correct, and its quite clear that there was a beleif from the big companies that somehow elogs for all would improve *their* bottom line.

Lets move to a different realm altogether, ive been out here 12 years, in that time the rates of drivers that did cocaine to go coast to coast is as high as the ubiquity of truckstop prostitutes, that is to say statistically insignificant, had my door knocked on 2 times... 2 times in 12 years. And ive NEVER personally seen any drug interactions (sale or use) that signal that cocaine or other drugs are even available much less rampant in the industry.

 

I think it can be argued that ELDs force HOS compliance more to the carrier. Then it is up to the carrier how it goes forward. I have discovered that a driver determined to do something will indeed do just that! With all this said, I don't think HOS violations are the primary cause of accidents. I think it is bored "tuned out" drivers that are driving a CMV as if it were their pickup truck! Can't do that folks! I have had this conversation many times over the years with safety critters as well as with DOT cops! This is a very complicated issue with many causes. Think about this for a minute. How many as a % of all drivers currently on the road today have less than one year of experience?

 

Winner. Ban chewing gum from trucking, and suddenly everyone who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time qualify.

 

As we developed out eld, I ran an aobr and an eld side by side. On average, there was a 3 hour difference in the 70 each week. To prove a point, one week I played all the games I could with the aobr and got a 12 hour difference in 6 days.

On Tuesday, I overnighted at the customer, bumped the dock at 0600, and was done 0730. On an aobr, I would not have needed to log the 1/2 mile drive from the parking area to the dock. I could have started my 14 hour clock at 0730 instead of 0600. With an extra 1:30 I could have driven another 100 miles that night, gotten to the customer and done the same thing on Wednesday.

AOBRs and ELDs are not the same thing.

You say you haven't seen that cocaine or other drugs/prostitution are rampant in the industry. So does that mean we should end drug testing?

From my company's internal data, that would be a REALLY BAD IDEA. It is mind blowing the number of guys who fail their randoms.

If you look at crash and fatality data from 1998 onwards, you'll find a definitive trend line that begins with the implementation of the 2004 HOS through 2012, where things plateau before starting to rise before peaking in 2017. Fatigue used to be the number one cause of cmv crashes, now it's distracted driving and "driving too fast for conditions ".

You can argue that setting rules for the lowest common denominator is dumb, but it's those people who create the need for the rule.

 

I keep hearing it is about 18 out of every 100 on randoms and about 28 out of 100 on pre-employments (DOT Urine only) Mostly THC!