There have been a few reports recently that run parallel to the thinking of a great many truck drivers that ELDs have not shown an improvement in the number of truck crashes in the United States. In fact, it seems the number of fatal work injuries has risen by almost 20% in one Bureau of Labor Statistics study.
A look at the increase in fatalities after five years of mandated ELD use in all trucks
The call for ELDs to be used in commercial vehicles goes back to July 6, 2012, as part of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21). After a few years of resistance and arguing about the differences between electronic onboard recorders (EOBRs) and electronic logging devices (ELDs), ELDs were finally mandated for use in all trucks on Dec. 18, 2017.
Now, after five years of use and plenty of scientific studies to chew on, many are starting to say that ELDs have not fulfilled their mission statement of making the roads of America safer. In fact, it seems it has done the opposite.
Business Insider’s Bianca Giacobone penned an article on the subject, mainly on the Bureau of Labor Statistics study that showed the fatal work injury rate per 100,000 equivalent workers increased from 23.6 in 2013 to 28.8 in 2021. That’s 19.2% more fatalities since MAP-21.
The proponents of ELDs love to show that in recent years the rate of fatalities has fallen drastically. Well, there was this little thing called COVID going on and for a while, it was just trucks on the roads and no one else to bother us.
But before the pandemic, in the period from 2017 to 2019, crashes rose 11% according to the FMCSA. Data for the crashes in 2021 and 2022 is not available.
Why do the current HOS regulations make trucking more dangerous?
The current HOS regulations push drivers to work as hard as possible, shoving their daily lives into a governmentally micromanaged electronic device. A constant reminder on your dash or in your hand that time is ticking away and that you need to stay rolling.
They force drivers to drive faster than normal, having to fit their daily workload into a box the exact size of 11 hours of driving and 14 hours of working. Anything more is a violation of federal law.
Drivers must log in whenever they get out of the sleeper berth, known as Line 2, then move to Line 1, Off-duty status, and get freshened up in the morning. Then they log Line 4, On-duty status, and do a pre-trip inspection of their equipment.
Drivers will go to Line 3, the Driving line, and head to the shipper/receiver, go back to Line 4 while they wait to be loaded/unloaded as you are considered by law to be working even though they might be locked in a hotbox far, far away from the loading dock.
Drivers log Line 1 or Line 2 during their 30-minute lunch breaks, but your butt must be in the sleeper for Line 2 to count. No sitting in the driver seat munching on a burger while on Line 2.
Rinse and repeat for the second half of the workday, and you can see how irritating filling out a Record of Duty Status (RODS) can be. You will feel like you have not had the rod spared against you after a long day’s work.
Then there is the whole mental gymnastics of filling out all the graphs and forms inside the ELD. Administrative errors are an easy place for inspectors to find violations.
Drivers also have to call brokers or dispatchers, figure out their routes, grab a shower, do laundry, etcetera, etcetera, inside this firm timeframe.
Why were ELDs brought about in the first place?
One of the main reasons that ELDs were installed in the majority of commercial trucks in the country was simply because some truckers are liars. We lie on our logs, our bills of lading, and to our wives about what we have been doing in our time on the road.
Truckers have been caught running two, three, or four paper log books back in the outlaw days. We put different times on the BOLs to match up with the lies we told on the logs to make everything kosher.
But after someone runs 48, 72, or 96 straight hours, hyped up on medicated coffee, high-speed chicken feed, and Heaven only knows what else, it becomes a matter of “if and not when” they’ll have some form of an incident that causes the lies to be revealed.
We were told the ELDs were supposed to fix the problem of lying on logs. But no, they have not. Look at the long list of revoked logging devices on the FMCSA website and wonder how they got there.
All the government will say is that they violated regulations, and not say the actual cause of the revocation. But many drivers have shown proof that some ELDs are able to be manipulated, either by changing driver’s log entries or driver profiles on the move to give them another shift to drive.
Are ELDs really to blame here?
Are ELDs the root cause of the injury increase? I say no. In my opinion, after dealing with ELDs every day of my life since their inception, it’s the 2020 Hours Of Service (HOS) regulations that are the cause of the issue here.
The ELD is just a device that shows you how big the box of hours you have to work with is. It does not do anything to adjust that box’s size, although some can use it to make it otherwise.
Opponents of the safety issues we are facing should be targeting the true culprit here and not the pinata mounted to your dashboard, the Hours of Service regulations. Stakeholders should be working with the FMCSA to address this issue by revising the HOS to better serve the commercial driver’s lifestyles and to lessen the fatality risk involved in trucking and the greater logistics industry.
Being paid by the mile is another issue that pushes drivers over the edge. “If you’re not rolling, you’re not earning” is the catchphrase that is taught on Day One of trucking orientation.
Recognizing that drivers should receive payment by the hour, receive overtime for hours worked, and recognize that there is a retention problem in the industry and not a driver shortage would help alleviate this issue.
Read more by Rooster and follow me here! Need to reach out to me, send me an email!
Sign up for the Back The Truck Up Newsletter!
Listen to the Back The Truck Up Podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcasts!
