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

First off, you and I have the same amount of time in the industry. I got my CDL in August of 2010. I was in the first class of trainees to use AOBRs. With the exception of a couple of weeks here or there when the QC went down I've never really run paper logs.
The rules are the same, regardless of the method of logging. The difference is in how accurate a driver is forced to log. On a paper log, as long as times more or less match up with any 'supporting documentation', you're good to go. Even then, it takes a lot of effort to reconcile paper logs with the supporting documentation. An audit might catch the discrepancies, but a roadside inspection won't. On an AOBR, it's much easier for an audit to find the discrepancies, but at a roadside inspection it's little different than a paper log. It was very possible to cheat an aobr without being caught. I remember one time I was supposed to pick up at a Lowes DC in Ohio. I got to the rest area just before the exit for the DC and shut down. At O'Dark-Thirty I got up, did a pre-trip, fired up the truck and rolled. By the time the QC loaded up I was at the next exit and shut the truck off. This meant that I logged no drive time and more importantly, when the QC recorded my location it didn't matter I was 3 miles from where I shut down before taking my 10. It was chalked up to "gps inaccuracies". I went the two miles down the road, spent an hour getting underneath the load before officially going on duty as I was out-gating and then ran a full 14 hours. This kind of BS was expected of drivers. As long as a driver could get onto a customer's property, then "who cares what the appointment time is". Shut down at 1900, but get up at 0100 to bump the dock, then pull out at 0300 and at 0500 you better be ready to roll on the next load.

Back in the fall of 2016 I was interviewing for a 3rd #### management role. I "lost" the job because I wasn't willing to "work grey". Because of my work with out IT road test team, I'd been running our first versions of an ELD and knew what was coming. I was plain in the interview that we would have to do more load saves and tow more trucks to "safe and legal" because the way we were operating wasn't going to fly in two years. I was right and the hiring manager was wrong - she quit/got termed for advising her staff to tell drivers things that would have worked on an aobr but would be violations on an ELD.
So in a direct answer to your question - I've driven tired under all three. Least on the ELD, most on the AOBR, with paper logs being a welcome reprieve. Given a choice for myself, I would chose to use paper logs. Given an choice for the industry, I would choose ELDs.

I know I'm a responsible individual who knows how to say "No". After 10 years of training, I also know that most new drivers and many experienced drivers do not know how to say "No". I also believe that the "White Volvo Mafia" crowd will avoid any regulation they can. I had a student come through my truck who had been driving OTR for 2 years on a class D license. He had been running a day cab all over the lower 48 until his boss got raided by FMCSA/IRS and shut down. Lukas decided to go legit and get his cdl. He could drive the truck, back into a spot, and run around the scales but had no idea on how to slide tandems to get legal for axle weights/kpra restrictions, let alone trip plan for legal driving. Regulations are put in place to control bad actors like the man Lukas was driving for.
Werner was forced to adopt AOBRs, but what happened to their incident rate after adopting AOBRs? As a hint, look other articles the author of the study you're linked article is based upon has published. If you don't want to pay for the article, their DOT preventable accident rate went down. If you talk with the safety critters at the megas, you'll find a similar pattern. For my company there are three major inflection points in our crash records in the last 30 years. The first is when they turned the trucks down to 60 mph (circa 1998), the second in when AOBRs were introduced (2010-2011), and the third when CMS were added (2012-2016). I don't have access to industry wide preventable accidents (please see the author you linked to about the problems with self reporting), and as I've previously said DOT reportable accidents have remained stable with a slight decrease since the ELD mandate, but I do have access to my own company's data. That data shows that ELDs have made us "more safe" in that we have fewer DOT reported accidents and fewer citations.

Moving on to point 2 - drug testing. If drugs aren't an issue in the industry why are we doing per-employment and random screenings? I know my company spends almost as much on drug testing as they do on ELD compliance so why isn't there a push back on drug testing? Since drug testing has been mandated, drugs have become a minor issue in the industry. That doesn't mean that we should abandon drug testing - it means the regulation is working. In the same vein, if you look at the data (again, see FMCSA crash data), in the first two years drug testing was a law it showed almost no impact, but over the long run it has kept a lot of idiots off the road.

The 2004 HOS changes are the causal link to accident rates. You can spin the data any way you'd like, but accident rates per million miles traveled started dropping in 2005 and continued until 2012, when it plateaued before beginning to rise in 2015. Looking at the data, particularly from large carriers, it's easy to see why lawmakers were persuaded that if everyone was following the rules the roads would be safer. It was not "public sentiment" that created an unnecessary regulation, it was the data. The data also showed that drivers who graduated from a PTDI accredited school were safer drivers and C0ngress mandated that FMCSA update their training criteria. The ELD mandate was enacted because it was law while the training mandate languished in bureaucratic hell before becoming an impotent regulation. Given a choice between updating the CDL requirements and the ELD mandate I would chose initial training every day of the week, but the choice wasn't given to me.
Any law or regulation is aimed at the least of the participants. Look at the rule book for any race car track - almost all of them have a clause that say's "if it's not expressly approved, it's forbidden". Why is there an off sides rule in soccer? Why is there a shot clock in basketball? We can argue about the structure of the rules and what would/could be the best form, but an unregulated industry would have the CR Englands and CRSTs abusing drivers with no comeuppance.

 

As a world view I am leery of any one size fits all solution. That is philosophically the bedrock of why i dont agree with you on i think every single point.

You say large carriers experienced lower accident and oos violations following aobrd adoption, warner being the poster child for this as they were the first (and i think only) one that had them forced on them. Fair enough, punishment and heightened scrutiny for proven bad actors is fine, that makes sense, they were the worst of the worst (megas) in logbooks. But youre trying to tell me that because a bad actor improved that you must in the name of safety implement the exact same and more stringent scrutiny on EVERYONE (i know YOU didnt say this, but i hqve actually heard this arguement made "and that as a result you will see just as big a saftey gain industrywide", you see the problem right? People do NOT think, "warner improved, everyone else will also improve at the same rate."

Thats just bs, a company with 0 violations/accidents CANT improve.

Again the core is how its "one size fits all." YOU say elogs are better FOR YOU and result in less fatigued driving. I say that ive had the opposite experience, neither of us have to be lying for both to be true, but the starting point matters. My deduction therefore is that YOUR company was a bad actor that shaped up, whereas ive been with companies that were already compliant and safe, as a result elogs did nothing to improve anything, they just increase micromangement of time to a level thats not good for the driver.

Elog guy gets up, goes to fuel island, fuels, shows pti and rolls on for the day, paper log or aobrd (im lumping these two together because functionally its about the same if you already log legal) does the same, the difference in start times may be 15-30 minutes, both drivers were up an hour before they went to fuel, but elog guy is already behind and fuming the whole time theyre waiting on the next guy to pull up because that ate an extra 15 minutes and navigating the lot to the island was another 15. If you can Tell me that honestly thats a healthier way to live your life, stressing over things you have little to no control over, where every single minute you are on the clock is hyperscrutinized.

I had a super tight run where on elogs i was called by saftey and compliance and had a report about my flagrant violation of the hos and disciplinary action because i went over by 1 minute on my elogs (14) because i stopped to get coffee at hour 8 instead of driving straight through. My 15 minute coffee/pee break didnt make me less safe, quite the opposite. They literally said that the correct thing to do was to park on the off ramp 2 miles from the terminal and wait the 45 minutes to an hour for them to send someone out and drive it in. NO. Thats not safer or better, you know it, aobrds or paper, this isnt an issue. Edge case, yes, but illustrative of the point, safety doesnt matter to crappy companies, only compliance.

I am not there anymore obviously, i run paper on an old truck as an oo now, i barely average 2k miles a week and almost never hit 10 hours of driving in a day if i can help it, or if i do, its only driving that day, are my nearly 800k 0 accident miles proof that i need to be on a headache-inducing anxiety raising nanny? Because IM the bad actor? Your support for elds thinks thats the case, I refer back to my underlying problem, one size fits all simply doesnt.

This doesnt mean you shouldnt be free to run elogs, you say its better and reduces your fatigued driving, go for it, but dont pretend that its nothing but flagrant violators of hos (like i was on elogs for a ^$&#*@$ MINUTE) out here that see elogs as garbage i want nowhere near me.


The problem with using large carriers data to shape policy is how abusive of drivers we know they all are, sure some smaller companies are too, but the fmcsa itself admitted that under 20 units, csa scores literally mean nothing, because the law of averages on inspections cant capture enough data to differentiate bad actors from noise though. (A 5 truck company with 1 dot inspection in a year and oos for say brakes out of adjustment is a 100% fail rate for csa...) they could have been pulling power only and amazon's trailer screwed it up, or they may literally never grease the slacks and their trucks are rolling deathtraps held together by baling wire and duct tape and only driver skill and shop downtime keeps them from accidents. The data set is too small to be indicative of anything.
Tangent, but illustrative of how even clerical bs can f things up, our insurance nearly dropped us last year because of an unreported fatality... sounds bad, is bad, our driver was first on the scene to a suicide jumper off an overpass, the cop took his statement, and insurance took it as "our truck involved in a fatality and we didnt report it to them"

 

Well stated.

 

Biggest reason I still run paper logs to this day

eld were mandated for compliance (and money) not for safety, and the anti trucking association themselves admit that, it’s always easiest to spot them on the road too, because anyone you passed in the last 10 miles will go back by you still on the governor in a construction zone or are up into the high side flying through the truck stop

and legally they are not the same, paper is rounded to the quarter hour, and eld is to the minute, so you legally have an extra 14 minutes on paper

 

You stop before your clock stops.

 

I wonder how many proponents of ELD's have or wouldn't hesitate to jump in their POV's on vacation or any other reason, with family in tow, and drive 12, 15, 20, 24 hrs or more straight through? Pull over and take a quick nap and keep going? Stop for gas, hit Mickey D's drive-thru and keep going? How many brag about it? We've all sat around and told the stories or listened to them. What are they gonna say when the government want's to put an ELD in their POV? Never happen? The government is currently trying to get the technology to install DADSS (Driver alcohol detection system for safety) in our POV's so that one can't drive after having a couple or more drinks. How many here have done that? What's next? Your POV having technology installed that shuts itself off after so many hours of operation? Far fetched? Anymore I don't put anything past what the government won't do in the name of "safety" because they're getting away with whatever they want to do now so why not keep going?

A tired or distracted driver behind the wheel of a 4 wheeler is just as dangerous as one behind the wheel of a big truck. Why? A 5,000 lb vehicle kills people just like one that weighs 40,000, 60,000, 80,000 lbs and there's a whole lot more of em than there are trucks.

When you have a head on collision with a tree, another vehicle or any stationary object because someone fell asleep at 65 or 80 mph in a 4 wheeler it usually doesn't matter how much the vehicle weighs, people are just as dead.

I'm not knocking those who are in favor of ELD's, most of the drivers nowaday's don't know different anyway, and there are plenty of the "back in the day" drivers here that like them also for various reasons. My problem is that I consider myself a very responsible driver, and have been for the past 44 yrs, I don't need to be told when and/or how to drive, in any vehicle.

I would also be curious to know how many O/O's that are still running on paper and LOVE what they do and don't know anything else would get out of the industry if they were mandated to run ELD's no matter what.

Just my .02

 

You shouldn’t need a law for protection from hard work. You should have the stones to say yes I can no I can’t or I thought I could but fluff it. Men stand their ground boys run and tattle or scream they made me.


What E-logs have done is create a whole new level of stupid and dangerous way worse that the 90’s when I started. Everyone is in a rush, trying to beat the clock. So the driver is still forced to hear them tell it just in a different manner. Results are the same. Again stones would stop it nothing else but what they need is more protection. Just because a man is outside the guidelines of the law doesn’t make him unsafe. Just like because he is in them doesn’t make him safe.

 

This post needs to be made a sticky. Perhaps added to the dictionary definition of common sense as well.

 

Ah.. more professhnals.. and they still wonder why the world thinks they're morons