New book considers the impact of electronic logging devices on drivers
truckersnews.com
truckersnews.com
So I'm a former driver and I have a good example of this, with paper logs, I could fudge, I might log that I shut down at X time in Y place, when I actually shut down 20-30 miles further down the road - where I could get safe parking in a rest area - instead of on the side of the highway. I'd still take my 10 hour break from the time that I stopped, and mark my logs up as if I started a half an hour before I did. Was this illegal? yes, absolutely. Was it unsafe? no, I'd argue the opposite.
Thats the rub, the ELD system is meant to eliminate the bad actors, but the flexibility and agency is steals from drivers makes everyone less safe, and make the job less pleasant to do. The road was fun, in the days when Truck Stops still had a decent restaurant, before paper logs went away, before the tightening of the DOT Physical rules - now, its not so fun anymore.
I have a hard time believing this. You gave a great example of fudging logs for the "right" reasons, but I have countless stories from my uncle who was a truck driver before ELDs who would drive well beyond the limit of what anyone would consider safe.
Clearly, not every example of drivers breaking the rules was in the interest of safety.
The bad actors in most cases won't follow them anyhow, no matter how draconian they are.
IIRC, I heard a very liberal biologist (Robert Sapolsky @ Stanford) say capital punishment does stop a certain amount of the population.
> 'You're a card, Mr Spangler,' said Mr Wilkinson. 'It won't be the same without you around, and that's the truth.'
> 'Not for me, at any rate,' said Moist. This was, once again, treated like rapier wit. Moist sighed. 'Do you really think all this deters crime, Mr Trooper?' he said.
> 'Well, in the generality of things I'd say it's hard to tell, given that it's hard to find evidence of crimes not committed,' said the hangman, giving the trapdoor a final rattle. 'But in the specificality, sir, I'd say it's very efficacious.'
> 'Meaning what?' said Moist.
> 'Meaning I've never seen someone up here more'n once, sir. Shall we go?'
-- Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
The fallacy about enacting stricter and stricter laws to curb lawlessness is that the lawless never did and never will care about abiding the laws.
And yet, in countries with gun controls, there is significantly less gun crime.
I daresay this is the case for most laws. Yeah, there will be always be some people skirting the law, but implying laws have no effect is ridiculous and untrue.
That doesn't mean I support this kind of logging for private vehicles (it really feels like the government overstepping the safety/freedom boundary), but it did have very positive effects on heavy road transport safety.
That's why there's a move to ELDs - it's not a matter of making punishments harsher, it's a matter of automatically enforcing the rules so that it's much more difficult to break them.
Sure. I mean, who else are the rules for?
A law against murder only applies to murderers.
I'd say it's closer to "do you build rules that treat humans as if they were cogs in a machine"?
I think what you mean is that drivers had some sense of dignity. Let's not confuse that with fun. We need to be clear about what's being lost; it's no laughing matter.
I got to be what was effectively a professional tourist for a couple of years. It was fun.
Due to the electronic monitoring he couldn't just drive those extra 20 minutes and sleep in his own bed.
I know I'd be pretty mad.
The limits on time is not meant to be "norms" but extreme cases so if they are hit daily thats an indication the the culture in the industry is rotten more then anything else.
Sure, an edge case. But inflexible rules lead to more edge cases.
And yeah, adding flexibility is very difficult, simple rules are better as such.
And of course, if they add an exception for drivers to get home, I'm sure the companies would exploit that in their route planning.
Not easy either way.
Or alternately a normal working day is 8 hours, and a 10 hour daily limit allows a supremely flexible 2 hours of overtime :)
More pay is the answer here, as usual.
If he wants to get home, he can move closer or find another route. Or park the truck and drive his personal vehicle.
As mentioned his counterpoint is that he'd sleep better at home, so the next day he'd be more rested than he currently gets when he has to sleep in his cab. So in effect it's trading less safe driving today vs less safe driving tomorrow.
Anyway, I'm not at all against regulations in this field. Drivers have been overworked hard and a tired driver on the road, regardless of occupation, is dangerous.
The "unsafety" of driving was non-zero all along, and the longer he goes without a rest break make it climb ever so higher. Saying that this factor was safe when it was 0.9000 but as soon as it rolled over to 0.9001 it was unsafe is asinine.
Likely, enforcing such a rest stop could make it more unsafe... if after the rest he was in a hurry to head home, or groggy from an impromptu nap, or even if driving or lighting conditions had changed.
> If he wants to get home, he can move closer or find another route.
Neither of these are practical, in the "completely unachievable in the real world by real people" meaning of the word.
Perhaps it is like refueling: it is normally done before the engine stops because there is 0 fuel left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
If there's meant to be a hard limit of N hours, the point of starting to look for a stopping point should be more like N-1.
If N is meant to be the soft limit of starting to look for a stopping point, the hard limit should be more like N+1.
Either way, the "start to look for a stopping point" soft limit and the "stop immediately" hard limit should be separated by however much time it reasonably takes to find a good stopping point.
It sounds to me like you're saying that we need hard limits because permissiveness will always be abused.
That's why police and jails exist.
That doesn't mean the hard limits are align with what I would consider a "healthy" system composed by people.
The current trucking business ( at least in the US ) is insane from an individuals perspective, paper or non-existent logs will not solve anything.
And that's one of the issues, everyone wants to "solve" their own problems and screw the rest ( it's their problem not mine ). Over time that means the drivers were the ones who got screwed the most.
Being able to shutdown where I can get a parking space at a place with a bathroom, a shower, and a hot meal is better than on the side of the interstate, the next best place is a rest area on the side of the highway.
Particularly in the case as a parallel commenters noted of a driver who runs out of hours 20 min from home.
> Organizations are ambiguous, often intentionally, about the relationship between production targets, efficient use of resources, economy and costs of operations, and acceptable risks of low and high consequence accidents. All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system. After an accident, practitioner actions may be regarded as ‘errors’ or ‘violations’ but these evaluations are heavily biased by hindsight and ignore the other driving forces, especially production pressure.
(taps the sign)
Always remember: people generally show up to work with the intention of doing a good job. If someone causes an accident by doing something that is "obviously" unsafe in hindsight, step back and ask yourself why the person thought their "obviously unsafe" action was reasonable in the moment.
Did the ups driver fling my package over fence because he hates me, or because my long driveway interferes with his 3 minute per package metric.
Measurements kill sensibility.
The most egregious examples are the Chinatown busses, which routinely operate with material safety flaws.
To understand safety data, you have to study the cohorts of carriers that comply with regulations. The Feds and state authorities working with them statistically approach compliance inspection, but the smaller, dirtier carriers tend to be fly by night. If you see a crazy trucker speeding at night in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, you’re probably seeing one of those trucks, schlepping stuff between distribution centers outside of federal enforcement scope.
The skilled drivers are right - it’s bullshit. But you need to infantalize the 30 year Walmart driver who has 20 million miles and no accidents, because there’s a 22 year old driving a truck that’s overweight with bad brakes trying to meet a schedule he can’t keep.
Also, many of the violations are a consequence on how this god forsaken industry is structured and that includes our Karen who wants that pink outfit NOW! Because they have tickets to see the Barbie movie tomorrow and the pink T-shirt is an essential part.
In this example with ELDs I’d propose a small wearable device that would monitor time when congressman or congresswoman came to work, time they spent eating and using the bathroom and sleeping. And speed they are driving, certainly. Our goal is safety, right?
Oh, and to not make it too privacy invading, only their constituents should have real time access to this data, they are their employers after all, right?
And make this mandatory legislative testing phase (MLTP) at least one year.
We would be amazed at privacy protecting laws rivaled by none.
It’s not really part of the narrative of the book but fatigue was only a contributing factor for ~13% of crashes historically so the maximum positive impact couldn’t be that large. Meanwhile there’s been a long term trend of significantly increased fatalities. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/trends-...
The comments on studies looking back 1 year while the transition happened 5 years ago looks like cherry picking data to fit a narrative. Yes the year after it was introduced was a 30 year high, so was the year after that, and the year after that…
ELDs brought accountability and made it harder to game.
They didn't create the metric, they just reduced the gaming.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the culture around the labor market is different as the European regulators tend to be a bit more of an aggressive stance on companies creating pressures on employees and then try to shift all blame when those pressure's lead to rule breaking and accidents.
Fun fact: it was helpful for a hitchhiker to ask the driver for one of the blank paper discs for the tachograph. Later, when standing beside the road and waiting for another lift, you could hold that up whenever a truck approached, and truck drivers would take it as a sign that you were relatively trustworthy.
In which case, the passenger might sue the driver, and the driver might not want that, so the driver chooses to not pick up hitchhikers. One might say this is a consequence of not having taxpayer funded healthcare for everyone, since exorbitant healthcare costs + needing to find someone to milk mean everyone ends up looking out for their own ass.
Another scenario is the passenger steals the truck or its contents , in which case the insurer would say not our problem. You were covered for random acts of weather/other drivers/machine failure/thieves breaking and entering. But not if you willingly let them into the truck. Seems like a reasonable caveat.
This does not just affect truckers - as "driver monitoring" becomes an anti-feature in many new cars (especially EVs or "self-driving" cars), there will be more and more cases of people (quite reasonably) bristling at Big Brother looking over their shoulder and into their eyeballs every moment they are in their own car.
As for me, I'm leaning heavily towards a life goal to never again buy a car with a screen in the dashboard.
Looking ahead to electric crate motors and open source infotainment:
https://electricvehicleforums.com/articles/electric-crate-mo...
If cars were then invented, would the populace entertain the notion of giving everyone complete control to a 2,000lb+ machine capable of moving at 100mph+?
Is our acceptance of the risks of giving everyone complete control of these machines based on the cost:benefit analysis at the time of their advent, but not necessarily a cost:benefit analysis in the current?
Before the pandemic.