Video shows ‘ghost co-driver’ added to trucker’s ELD to skirt HOS rules
freightwaves.com
freightwaves.com
I can’t see any way this could happen without clear intent to break the laws. It’s also strange that it’s being done in a way that is plainly obvious to the trucker.
Meanwhile some CDL bus driver or day cab driver clocks out at the end of his shift, commutes an hour home, has dinner, gets woken up for 10min at 3am by his infant and then clocks back into work at 4am and the government is fine with it.
Same number of waking hours. Same number of driving hours. But the white collar bureaucrats give the latter a pass.
Back in the day they just cooked the books but now with ELD they can't anymore.
A zero-to-sixty (kilometer) on par with a Miata, no loudly revving diesel engine or exhaust, and approximately 40 tonnes between coach and passenger weight should not be so quickly dismissed.
Safety is pretty damn low on bus priorities. Even with our damn children, school buses are often driven by underpaid, overworked, inexperienced people, and the kids have nothing to protect them in an accident. City buses don't have belts or safety either, but at least they are usually in very low speed collisions.
We had to implement an annoying rule about stopping before train tracks so they'd stop trying to cross in front of trains!
We ignore it because fixing it would cost tax dollars
This is not so straightforward when drivers are paid by the kilometer. In such cases government could mandate minimum waiting pay rate is average equivalent hourly pay rate of driving hours from same shift, or such like.
[0]https://www.harpercollins.com/products/arriving-today-christ...
Back in the day I’d drive a few hours, stop and take a nap and/or mess around for a while then go back to driving until I was ready to shut it down. Never, ever, had to drive in rush hour because I’d just wait it out.
Nowadays you basically have to drive 8-10 hours straight because once your clock starts you have 14 hours. It is possible to split it up but not like the old days and, like all things gov’t, it’s super complicated.
They also claimed when they changed the law they’d make sure we had plenty of parking so everyone could run legal but, of course, that never happened so drivers have to make their own parking spots which is why you see them parking wherever the hell they want — which encompasses two of my many pet peeves.
You HAVE to have very very clear limits like this. Truckers are an adversary in the process. They would try driving 24/7 if they physically could keep their eyes open. They ALWAYS think they are one of the safe ones while pushing their mental health.
You needed an 8 (or 10, we’ll assume 10) hour break for every 10 hours driving so you could drive 5 hours, take a 4 hour break, drive 5 hours, take a 6 hour break, drive 5 hours, &etc… until you reached your destination or ran out of your 70 hours. You can still do splits but they are 3 hours maximum or 7 hours minimum…need a degree in mathematics to fully understand the hours of service rules and don’t ask the logs department because they will just put you on the “watch list” instead of telling you why the computer thinks you’re in violation. No, not bitter.
In practice nobody could do splits like that for very long because you’d get stuck at a shipper or receiver (or both) and end up getting in a full break.
Now you basically have to drive your whole day at once which is very tiring. Driving 8 - 9 hours straight sucks. I almost always drive at night but sometimes have to drive during the day when I’m usually sleeping which also sucks, is more dangerous and, ironically, is the reason they changed the rules so tired drivers weren’t, umm… driving.
If you know the signs of being tired and can stop and take a break there’s no real problem but the current system forces you to drive tired because once that 14 hour clock starts you pretty much have to deal with it. It can be paused once, during the first half of a split, but usually isn’t very practical to do that.
Today’s a perfect example, I got into town this morning but don’t load until tonight so am taking a (probably, would have to look) 8 hour break before driving to the shipper to get (at least, these people don’t get in any sort of hurry) another 2 hour break before driving all night. I’d have rather driven down here just in time to get loaded but then I’d wouldn’t make the delivery on time because of the way the hours would work out so now I get to drive all night on 5 hours of real sleep. Perfectly safe.
And it seems in the USA that is... just an app?
If a truck driver gets pulled over, they need to prove to the officer that they are operating within their hours. In the past, this was done with a physical log book.
JimBob, the driver in the story, is about to hit the end of his Hours of Service where he'd have to park the truck and go take a federally mandated break.
JimBob calls the e-logging vendor, who logs him out of his e-log system, creates a fake driver profile, attaches it to the truck, and assigns all his driving over to the fake ghost driver.
To the DOT, all they can see at this point is that Someone Else was driving the truck this last week. Someone Else doesn't have to be in the truck at all, when JimBob gets stopped for a truck inspection, he can merely say "Oh, Someone Else was dropped off at the Loves five miles back and I took over this truck from him" as a bullshit lie as to why he has a fresh log on the road.
The ELD vendor and JimBob in this story are both quite flagrantly guilty of abusing the e-log.
My understanding is that in many regions, driving when exhausted is treated as being just about the same as driving drunk. So they're basically cheating their exhaustion breathalyzer. I imagine a lot of financial pressure is placed on them through the usual methods: giving unreasonable quotas or paying them by the job/mile so they're indirectly incentivized to cut corners.
While driving at night, high speed on an unlit country road, I didn't even realize I was drifting and managed to clip the grass and nearly lose control of the vehicle. Thank the heavens I was able to recover and avoid a crash, but it was also a massive wake-up call. Like, "oh, crap, I really can't focus right now. When did that happen?" I slowed down, found the next rest area and napped before continuing. Since then, I take breaks much more seriously on long trips and try to avoid driving for long periods after dark. I don't understand where these long haul truckers find their stamina.
I've spent quite a lot of time driving on I5 in the western US which has a very high volume of truck traffic. I can pretty confidently say that a lot of these truck drivers do not have the stamina you think they have. Many of them are driving just as fatigued and unfocused as you describe yourself being. I make it a point to avoid going over either the south California mountain passes, or the north California ones, after dark, for that very reason.
Each driver has a single unique physical "driver card" which needs to be inserted into a tamper-proof recording device in the vehicle. Driving hours are recorded both on the driver card, and on the vehicle-bound recording device. Want to use two drivers in a shift? Well, you gotta put it on dual-driver mode and insert both cards. Good luck trying to explain where your ghost driver is when you get pulled over for a random check.
It seems ELD Rider is just a random Android app instead. No wonder people are committing fraud with it - there's no way to ensure the accuracy of that!
Physical access dominates, every single time.
In my line of work we use Scale Indicators that are calibrated by Weights & Measures Canada. Once the audit is completed the unit is sealed with a destructible seal and record of inspection is recorded. If that seal is ever tampered with by someone not authorized to do so there are big fines.
So yeah, it would be easy for us to snap those seals and drop custom programs into the indicators all day every day. There's also stupid-obvious methods to prevent tampering.
Hey here’s a YouTube video on it: https://youtu.be/xUJtqvYDnkg
And let’s not even discuss software exploits
The screws securing the sensitive parts of the terminal have holes through them where you thread the seal through several of them. Basically it is impossible to loosen the screws without breaking the seal. The entire device is a metal enclosure so the only way in is through the screws.
Yes, grandparent said tamper-proof instead of tamper-resistant or tamper-evident. So? It's obvious what they meant.
The only way you could avoid it is paying a flat salary. But the companies would never do that because then the drivers would go slowly and follow all the laws, cutting their profits. And besides, most truck drivers are owner/operators, so there is no one to pay them a salary.
Unless the government steps in. Have the government pay them for resting, so they make the same money either way. That's about the only way I can think of.
That doesn't make sense. Whether you delivered one load or two loads in 12 hours, you get paid the same. In addition, it incentivizes the idiots at load and unload to do their job as the trucker doesn't care if he sits as he gets paid the same.
"Per hour" is really the only thing that aligns the truck drivers with overall safety.
You still need these kinds of trackers as the trucking companies will then be incentivized to give drivers 12 hours to drive 2500 miles, but at least you won't have the truckers trying to subvert them, as well.
The other issue here is that it seems that the truck companies are given too much latitude to run their own monitoring systems. The monitoring should be done by/through an entity that is incentivised to detect violations rather than cover them up.
I envision truckers being legally responsible for their AI and it operating the vehicle similar to autopilot in an aircraft. Never autonomous, only a driving aid.
No one would take the job of sitting unpaid in a truck all day, so that will never happen.
A system that cannot be cheated can also not be corrected, and even then people will discover ways to cheat it if they want to.
My understanding is that class 6/7/8 trucks only cause a tiny fraction of the crashes they're involved in. That's why they get so pissy when people who work in offices tell them they're the ones who have to suffer more regulation in the name of safety.
Citing states like % of fatal accidents doesn't mean much unless you know the accident has anything to do with something we regulate. No amount of sleep is going to stop someone from texting and driving nor will it change the physics of what happens when a 4k sedan rear ends 80k of truck.
Not even kidding…
It will always be possible for someone to claim to be driving, while someone else was actually driving.
The only fix is to have police on the highway randomly pulling over trucks, and checking that the driving license of the actual driver matches who the computer thinks is the driver.
Anyone who is 'accidentally logged in as someone else' gets a warning... And if they are caught again, a lifetime commercial trucking ban.
There are 3.5 million truckers in the USA, with typical career lengths of perhaps 30 years. So you need to inspect 3200 trucks/day.
If an inspector takes 15 minutes to do an inspection (checking name, as well as visual roadworthiness checks), you need 100 inspectors. Or about 2 per state.
As soon as word gets out that flouting these rules is career-ending, then the industry will probably mostly regulate itself. Seems pretty easy to solve this problem...
This has already happened, there's a reason most trucking companies last less than 18 months.
Or just check 100% of audit logs against payroll/taxes. Ghost drivers would show up as not being paid. The real drivers would have fewer hours logged than they’re getting paid for.
No stops required.
It really depends on how they feel about you how detailed they get.
Crimes as a business is just not policed anymore.
You would compare the audit logs to the payroll logs.
If someone is getting paid for hours that aren’t in the logs, it’s a clear violation.
> The only fix is to have police on the highway randomly pulling over trucks, and checking that the driving license of the actual driver matches who the computer thinks is the driver.
That wouldn’t even address the problem. The historical logs are being altered, not the current driver. If you pulled them over then the computer would have them shown as the driver.
Definitely not that hard. Just audit payroll and driver logs to see if they match. The truck drivers aren’t driving extra hours for free.
This is super, super common. Interestingly enough, if your federal scores (FMCSA ratings) drop too low, the police are obliged to stop the truck. Needless to say, this is not conducive to a prosperous future in trucking.
More generally, this will keep happening until drivers start getting paid for their time at pickup/dropoff. Right now, the suppliers can basically just ignore the driver for as long as they want, as it doesn't cost them anything. The driver, however, is capped at 10 hours driving or 14 hours total, so they have to lie and pretend to sleep when at a destination.
Truckers are basically where instant delivery meets the cold, hard realities of physical existence.
Federal licensing, lifetime industry ban for your second bug violation, video monitoring and keycard access, etc, etc. Imagine if the stuff that's being floated in here for truckers was instead being floated for us. It'd be like forcing your average CRUD developer to work in a SCIF. There would be an uproar.
I hope nobody wonders why educated white collar professionals historically don't do too well at the hands of the lower classes when regimes change.
If I was a owner of a trucking company I would be livid at the waste of employee, expensive capital asset (the truck), and fuel. I would definitely be tracking this behaviour from clients and factor that into quotes and contracts.
> I would definitely be tracking this behaviour from clients and factor that into quotes and contracts.
Yeah, I think they'd like to, but that basically means you'll go out of business as the suppliers have a lot more pricing power than the trucking companies.
Yeah, I thought of that. The ideal would be to price it at a level which makes it attractive but draw up the contract such that excessive messing around on the part of the client results in penalties or extra charges.
From what I've seen the CEO and upper management probably aren't aware of how much the yard manager is messing drivers about. For every truck load incoming there are probably 10 people throughout the business desperate for what's on that load.
If drivers are only showing 200 hours in the logs but getting paid for 250 hours of driving, you know something has gone wrong.
Sometimes, but often not, the trucker is technically a tiny little independent company even if dispatched by a central company and driving a truck painted brightly in that company's colors.
The laziness of the American policeman knows no bounds except when they think someone has drugs or cash on them.
A fun game I used to play was 'how many log books do you have'. Lowest was 1, the guy was following the rules as best he could. Highest was 6, 1 for himself, 1 for his boss, and 1 for the cops. Not sure what the other 3 were for (he could not explain them).
Can't supply a freshly-made printout? Guess you're getting a fine!
Republicans then get to bray about how "useless" laws/regulations are.
See: gun legislation. The average gun-tard loves to shriek about assault rifle regulations being about "cosmetics" and so on and how useless/stupid they are.
That's because republicans pushed to make the bans about specific items/appearance/lengths so that the gun industry could make a rifle that was a tenth of an inch shorter and not sell it with a particular grip from the factory and skate right on by the regulation.
I think the problem most pro-2A people have with proposed gun regulations after a shooting is that none or very few of the proposed regulations would have done anything to prevent it. I'm happy to debate a 10-round magazine limit or something like that on its merits, but when there's a gang shooting with an illegally-modified AR-15 and you start talking about 8-round limits instead of 10, or when there's a school shooting with a legally purchased AR-15 but you start talking about banning unrelated ammunition you lose a lot of credibility in my opinion. If you want to ban something just to ban it let's talk about the merits of that proposal, but let's not pretend that changing the NFA barrel length from 18" to 16" is going to do anything.
Create ELD company
Get banned by the feds doing what your customers want you to do.
Start shell company.
Buy bankrup banned company using shell company.
Re-brand your software to be for the shell company.
Print money.
Repeat.
Short of north-korea type enforcement or rich western european attitudes toward complaince with the law (fat fucking chance of that considering who becomes truckers) the problem is probably gonna persist.
Umm, no.
They just had to take a 10 hour break and/or wait until midnight to get more driving hours.
The only time you have to take a 34 hour break is if you burn out your hours because you either know you’re going to take a break (like going home) or you’re really bad at time management. You can run indefinitely if you manage your hours properly.
A couple times I had to perfectly time my start time so I would both run out of hours and get hours back at midnight to make it to the receiver 15 minutes late. Fun all around.
—edit—
Downvoters, tell me how I’m wrong.
Scaling this up, I would invite you to think of a similar scenario with rest rules on plane and train operators being broken, and see how you feel about being a passenger on one of those. Are those rules harassing pilots? Air travel is booming! Pilots want to fly! Let them fly!
"You know what trucking really needs? Stricter solutions and harsher punishments! DRM in vehicles, so the government can electronically disable a car to prevent truckers from driving beyond the number of hours we agreed on! And lifetime trucking bans for trying to evade it!"
You keep going down this route, and you'll suddenly find yourself in a totalitarian society where breathing requires an X.509 cert.