Tracking who uses EOBRs

well good news cuz everybody on here who wants eobrs says how much more money truckers will make......cant wait

 

"We are now getting calls from scale houses looking to verify if a driver was or wasn't on a load. What we are showing in terms of in and out times. State DOT calling and checking what we are doing to keep track of drivers (because we do not have satellite tracking)."

The scale house at Cottonwood in California frequently pulls my companies drivers in for paper checks. We haul a lot of pre-loaded product from a shipper in SoCal and the time stamp for the load on the trailer is often a day or two before it's picked up. The DOT officers have gotten into a habit now of calling the security check-out folks to verify when the load actually left the facility.

The EOBR is not a complete fail safe option. However, as you indicated IF the folks in compliance are paying attention to what's going on with a driver's data being generated by the EOBR, it cleans up a lot of the hokie pokie practices of the paper log drivers.

I would much rather stay on paper logs. However, my company has no choice but to transition over to the EOBR. So many of our drivers do the stupidest things regarding their paper logs and with the ever increasing scrutiny and enforcement of CSA2010, the company owner has no choice but to put them in, DOT carries a big stick you know,

 

I got two logbook violations OOS last year. Silly mistakes on my part, the first one I had just started using a phone app to do my logs. I thought it qualified as an EOBR because it was gps'd, but it did not because it was partially editable. So I should have been printing out every day and I had been using it two days without any print outs.

Second one, I handed the officer a BOL which delivery date didn't match my log. I explained to him that the load shipped a day early, but he said I should not have signed the BOL if the date was incorrect. I have court on that one 4/4 we'll see what the judge says but it's already on my CSA scores.

avoiding the hits on my CSA and being hassled by DOT would be kind of nice, I don't really care if it goes through.

 

EOBRs are not a matter of "if", but "when" and the way the Feds are going, it will not be as long as some people think it might be.

 

When will they do the study of how much revenue will no longer be generated through minor infractions? How will that be replaced?

 

What's the cheap, quick, easy solution for an independent O/O ? I haven't done much checking around. Do any of the gps's which offer logging qualify as EOBR ?

 

The scoring system in CSA is flawed in that it doesn't allow for due process. You are guilty until proven innocent. However, the way the scoring system is structured, the likelihood of ever having a violation reversed is almost never.

I was pulled in for a level 1 inspection in Gilroy, CA a couple of mos. ago. I had left Watsonville, CA less than an hour before and pre-tripped my equipment. I was happy that I was being pulled in because I "knew" everything was in good working order. I was driving a brand new Volvo and pulling an almost brand new trailer.

The inspector completed the inspection, placed a sticker on the windshield and then told me he wanted to "show" me something. I walked to the rear of the trailer and he pointed out that the rear tandem axle tire on the inside was flat. It wasn't off the rim, it hadn't blown out, it went flat somewhere between when I left and before I pulled into for the inspection.

He put OOS and a repairman came and fixed it. He noted that the flat must of just recently happened because there was a fresh slice on the inside of the tire face, something I would have never been able to see as a potential problem in all likelihood anyways.

I received a negative weighted score of 30 points on my CSA. I used the CSA DataQ service to challenge the violation. I received an email back from the officer who did the inspection. He said he couldn't remove the violation because the tire was flat when I pulled into the inspection bay and that the system didn't allow for for a reversal of the violation.

Last weekend I stopped at the Cottonwood scale in California and discussed the situation with the attending officer. He said that the Feds have essentially tied their hands from being able to even to even implement a common sense approach to dealing with inspection flaws, etc.

I asked if I were being pulled in for an inspection, would I be able to stop in the parking lot to check the current condition of the truck and trailer and if I found something like a tire had gone flat, a light had burned out, etc, since my last pretrip, would I be allowed to remedy the problem BEFORE I pulled into the inspection bay? To which he emphatically replied NO! His response to me was that I shouldn't worry to much about as other positive inspections (with no violations) would bring my scoring down significantly. To which I asked if I would then be able to voluntarily pull in and request level one, two or three inspections in order to pull my CSA score down? He replied emphatically, NO! WHen I asked why, he said that if we started doing doing that as drivers, "the feds would catch onto what we are doing and probably implement some kind of time limit between inspections."

Can you believe that?...

This goes back to my supposition that there is no due process in the way they are implementing these new regulations. You're danged if you do and danged if you don't!