this seems like a situation where audit logs would make regular tampering extremely obvious? is there just no oversight?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
This has already happened, there's a reason most trucking companies last less than 18 months.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not even kidding…