This story is difficult to read as an industry outsider. Unless I’ve misread something, it reads like the driver management company is able to edit the logs in the software to alter driver history, allowing them to exceed drive time safety limits.
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.
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.
So a bunch of wrong incentives put pressure on drivers to commit fraud and make the roads more dangerous for all the other adults and children on the roads.
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.
I have driven while probably more buzzed than I should have been (a stupid decision I will not repeat), and I have driven in the middle of the night, exhausted and more fatigued than I realized. I'd say fatigue is the worse option frankly, because it will creep up on you unaware. All it takes is a tiny, tiny lapse in judgement at high speed to create a big problem.
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 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.
Newer vehicles with adaptive cruise control and lane keeping can get you into trouble w/ dozing off (the vehicle can keep going for a while before veering off the side of the road). My '21 F-150 complains if I take my hands off the wheel while in cruise - which is annoying when I'm just trying to hold the wheel loosely on a long trip. It also politely suggests I take a break after X hours of uninterrupted driving.
I feel you. I've had the same thing happen except it was dawn on I95 in one of the Carolinas. Scared the crap out of me and like you, stopped at the next rest stop for a nap.
Then "Someone Else" would need to take a break at some point, so the driver would have to log back in (or call and have a "Another Someone Else" logged in)
If the truck is pulled over for whatever reason the listed driver needs to be in the driver's seat. Thus the change has to be done in the past. Why do I suspect the database has no audit records?
Yep. Every time a truck is parked, that trucker is away from home and also not making money. They almost universally hate the limits. Of course it's also in the collective best interest to not have massive trucks with tens of thousands of lbs of cargo driven by exhausted drivers.
I agree there have to be restrictions, the idea of speed popping truckers driving for days without sleep is not good for anyone. My guess though, call me cynical, is that bigger companies pushed for these rules. They help push our smaller players who are more burdened by paperwork and compliance. The source of most industry regulation like this is a desired barrier to entry.
Depends but in general yes. I have a relative who owns his own truck and finds his own loads. He gets paid when he delivers his load, so he's still incentivesed to go as fast as possible. Thankfully he's not as tech savvy to cheat the ELD
They aren't paid when waiting for loads though, and that eats into hours. So you can be stuck at a terminal burning drive hours while technically not driving.
They're not burning drive hours, they're burning on-duty hours which are also limited. You are limited to 14 hours of on-duty time. You are also limited to 11 hours of actual driving time out of those 14 hours. So, I guess if you are delayed more than 3 hours (minus breaks) you are kinda eating into drive hours because of the on-duty limit of 14.
Sounds like as well as mandating limited on-duty time government needs to mandate pay for waiting time is same as pay for driving. This would reduce the incentive for drivers to drive more hours.
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.
I was just reading Arriving Today[0] which mentioned that people have studied pay-per-mile for US truckers and come up with pretty clear payment rates that are needed to support safe driving behaviors. I think it was about 60c/mile was majority safe speed and length of drive, but the average is 30c/mile and for individual truckers contracting out, it pushes down towards about 20c/mile.
And it drives them up the wall that they can't get to the shipper/receiver, clock out and then load/unload, drive 10-30min to where they can park and then turn the truck off for the night.
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.
It seems to me the dynamics of the failures are different - cab drivers drive smaller vehicles at slower speeds in more engaging traffic. When a semi truck crashes it makes a highly visible spectacle, and if there are other people involved, with fatalities. If a cab driver takes a micronap in rush hour traffic they bounce off someone's bumper.
Note parent also mentioned bus driver. 20 tonnes does not merely "bounce off someone's bumper"; 20 tonnes plus 70 passengers even less so, and all that's assuming it's only a 40-foot bus. Articulated buses are 60' here, with some articulated trolley-buses having such outrageous torque they had to be de-tuned to avoid destroying themselves.
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.
That does change the math, but again, the buses aren't usually going that fast (I'm sure their average speed is far closer to zero than to 60), and like I said, they are much more engaged, constantly stopping or changing lanes. There's much less chance of the bus driver nodding off on a quiet stretch of highway.
You mean the buses where you don't have to wear a seatbelt or even have a seat?
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
It does seem like a small but noticeable improvement would be made if shipping/receiving locations were incentivized to allow trucks to park there overnight. Walmart was an example that stuck out to me - it's a decision by each store as to whether trucks can stay in the parking lot overnight. I can't see why anyone benefits from allowing a Walmart to say truck drivers can't stay in their massive parking lot before the planned 5am delivery.
Exactly, saying truckers often want to drive longer than they’re legally allowed is technically correct but not the whole truth. Interestingly the trucker situation seems to exist quite universally.
Drivers always want to drive as much as they physically can as they are on mileage-based contracts and/or get paid for successful deliveries. So that incentivises more successful deliveries made. Back in the analog days they could use a magnet to stop the road tracker so it recorded a break when in reality they kept driving.
Greed overrides safety in many industries, sadly.
I've actually seen interviews with truckers where they state that they dislike the drive time limits, so that the driver would know about the bypass may actually be what some of them want
The current drive time limits are just kind of stupid.
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.
If you allow truck drivers to split shifts like that they will push it and do things like take multiple 2 hour naps instead of getting actual sleep.
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.
That’s not how it worked. This is all iirc as it was quite a while ago when they changed the rules but accurate enough.
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.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has introduced an Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate, to create Hours Of Service (HOS) records.
The ELD itself is a physical device that gets installed in the OBD-II port in the truck or vehicle. It records information about when the truck is operational. The hours that the truck is operational need to be accounted for, which is (usually) done by a driver using a mobile 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.
The ELD does tons of stuff. It tracks location, speed, doors, shifting (to teach better strategies to the driver), logs, fuel levels, and anything the engine can spit out thru that jbus (like obd-ii which some do use). We used to upsell tracking things and having parts on hand at the correct depots for fixing things before they became an issue on the side of the road. HoS is just one part of what those things do. But even the simplest of them usually hook into the data bus at some point to detect 'drive'. You can buy ones that are just apps and do only HoS. But not sure if those are considered legal anymore (been a few years since I messed with it). When you have 1 truck HoS is a big part of why you want them. When you have a fleet of 2000+ trucks your metrics are different in what costs more.
It's not a new idea, Tachographs have been around in trucking for many decades. Just a paper disk that gets inserted behind (usually the RPM indicator I think) the instrument cluster. The driver writes name/date on one, puts it in and it logs the speed, braking for the driven hours. Sort of like an old-school seismometer scratching out the lines.
Yes, its an app. There isn't a single generic ELD hardware device. Every trucking company decides what device is best for their needs. My company uses Samsung Galaxy tablets. These devices do much more than just track ELD.
Everyone here is jumping to technical solutions... it's far easier to fix this on the business side: Drivers are paid per mile. There's an incentive to break the law. So... maybe start by outlawing a practice that incentivizes breaking the law and we wouldn't have these issues.
The interesting thing is that a technical solution already exists as has been in use in Europe for decades.
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!
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.
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.
In practice, there are a lot of devices around for which tampering would be profitable. Making these devices resist tampering is a practice with a long history of good (though imperfect) results. Your electric meter is a great example, or the odometer in your car.
Yes, grandparent said tamper-proof instead of tamper-resistant or tamper-evident. So? It's obvious what they meant.
How would you incentivize truck drivers without encouraging law-breaking? Per mile and per hour both encourage driving more. And per load does too, because you can get in more loads if you drive more hours (and faster!).
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.
You could also require the per-mile payments to match what the electronic logs show, so that driving off the clock means that they’re driving for free.
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.
this would also fix the issue of treating truckers as free storage by making them wait (unpaid) excessively long amounts of time to drop their load off
I feel like this is a situation where the issues are both technical and political. If the system were technically designed correctly, they would need to put down verifiable details for who the other driver who allegedly drove the truck. This would be easily detectable, as a driver can't be in two places at once etc. The other solution as one of the other commenters mentioned is essentially a physical tamper evident key that gets inserted into the recorder. Without a second key, there would be no way to operate the truck.
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.
The cynic in me sees this turning out kind of like precision scheduled railroading, where truckers will either be on call 24/7 for doing the last mile of driving or they'll be in the truck but not getting paid while the AI is driving and will have to take over at the last mile and only get paid for that segment.
As a former truck driver, I just can't see the government or insurance companies allowing self-driving 80,000lb trucks on a highway that also contains passenger-carrying automobiles. The liability is tremendous and it will take a decade or more of safe operation before those rules are relaxed. I'd anything, a trucker will end up leading a self-driving convoy of another unit on the interstate, but I'd imagine it's simply easier to add additional trailers like we've done in Ontario.
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.
The TL;DR of that acronym soup is a story as old as the paper log books drivers used to use: log books are being faked, only instead of paper the software vendor apparently will fake your software log book for you.
It all depends on the vendor. The software that our company uses is totally locked down and it would be very difficult or impossible to run a ghost driver on it (I'm a local city driver, BTW, and Hours of Service rules apply to me also). Our software is tied to the time clock so when we physically punch in, the clock starts regardless on if we are logged in to the ELD tablet or not. It's still keeping track though.
Seems like WORM drives, and EU/gov-operated cloud logging services should be a good mechanism for this. If you get audited, they check your vehicle against cloud logs - if they aren't present, they request your WORM drive backup (a 3TB drive would last beyond the lifetime of a vehicle). If you can't produce the backup log, your employer is fined.
The lack of accidents given widespread book-cooking here implies that the true level of safety is not where the current laws have been placed. Of course, one must account for additional violation if one were to put the safety limits closer to true safety limits, but perhaps the answer is that we're lying to ourselves about what the safety limits should be.
Trucks make up ~4% of vehicles on the road, 6-7% of vehicle miles driven in the US, and 10% of vehicles involved in fatal accidents. The deaths in those accidents are almost always the occupants of the other vehicle. So it's not at all clear that we are being too restrictive on safety limits here.
Trucks weigh a lot. The penalty for fucking around them is stiff. No surprise their involvement leads to more deaths.
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.
Their argument was not that we can't regulate accidents away, but that it doesn't matter if truck drivers ignore regulations because they aren't having enough accidents to worry about. That's not true.
The audit logs can never show who was actually behind the wheel.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't know much about the American trucking industry but it seems like this problem is similar in the UK. Except often times, particularly in the South of England the businesses often don't have room for waiting trucks so expect drivers to turn up exactly on schedule with little leeway before and even less after their scheduled deliver slot. This can result in trucks effectively driving in circles to try to arrive at the correct time.
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.
Yeah, it's really really bad for truckers everywhere. Basically just-in-time wouldn't work without them, and they have the least amount of power in the situation so they get screwed. No wonder they can't get people to do it.
> 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 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.
Can you imagine if software engineers were only paid for coding, and any other time we used to prepare for that task or deploy the code was unpaid? There would be buildings on fire in SF! For truckers, though, if you're not driving you're not being paid. So dumb.
Can you imagine if there was some web forum where upper management types were talking about software developers the way we're talking about truckers in here?
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.
To catch the majority of truckers who are flouting the rules, you need to spot check each trucker perhaps 10x in a career.
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...
> To catch the majority of truckers who are flouting the rules, you need to spot check each trucker perhaps 10x in a career.
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.
> 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.
They already have these inspections, though I don't know that they bother checking ELD stuff. Truck weigh stations are on almost every interstate near state lines where they check trucks coming into the state for compliance with weight/lighting/legal cargo/licensing/etc.
If you get inspected at a weigh station, they for sure are looking at that ELD records. Its probably the first thing they do. They don't automatically inspect you, only if you're overweight or if they see other problems such as vehicle safety issues, placards, etc. Once you are in the inspection process its a certainty that your hours will be looked at as well as every little safety and regulatory requirement.
Last time I got pulled in for a level 1 inspection the officer checked my brakes, (presumably) did a visual inspection underneath and just glanced at the summary page of my logs to make sure I had hours.
It really depends on how they feel about you how detailed they get.
> The audit logs can never show who was actually behind the wheel.
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 industry and drivers love ELDs because most cops can't be bothered. Before they could just say "show me your log" and they read down the page; now they have to fuss with memory cards or figuring out the UI of the control unit and they cannot be bothered.
The laziness of the American policeman knows no bounds except when they think someone has drugs or cash on them.
When I was making these things in the late 90s that is exactly why the drivers loved them. And my software had an audit trail anyway (as required by the big green book).
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).
European ELDs have an integrated printer. It is the driver's responsibility to ensure they have a supply of printer paper, and are able to create a printout on demand.
Can't supply a freshly-made printout? Guess you're getting a fine!
Yeah that sort of presumption of guilt doesn't fly in the US unless there's a huge moral panic. You might be able to screw a small industry into having laws like that with just a small moral panic. But trucking is to big, you'd need a big one.
In case it isn't obvious, most US regulations are purposefully designed with loopholes big enough to (ahem) drive a truck through because someone was paid off by a lobbyist to weaken the legislation.
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'm not aware of any banned firearm that suddenly becomes legal when you change the cosmetic aspects of the grip and shorten the barrel. Usually barrels are already about as short as they can be without reaching NFA territory where things become logistically, if not always financially, expensive to get your hands on.
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.
Also people seem to be assuming the trucker is an employee of a trucking company.
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.
It sounds like the issue is that the software vendors are the ones doing this tampering. They are allowed to self-certify their products and presumably the DOT will treat whatever it shows on their system as valid. The article mentions that the FMCSA is investigating the companies and could eventually remove their certification from the program, making their software unusable.
>companies and could eventually remove their certification from the program, making their software unusable.
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.
It also seems like it would come to light as soon as one of the trucks was involved in an accident. Checking the logs against who was operating the vehicle has to be one of the first things done during an investigation, if not by the regulator then by one of the involved insurance companies.
During the paper logs era that was the first thing they asked for because if they could prove the truck wasn’t able to be there legally their client wouldn’t have been able to slam in the back of it because they were texting.
There's a great book that came out recently covering in detail the various ways that truckers and trucking companies bypass the pervasive surveillance and regulation: Data Driven
> …had no drive time left on his clock and only 12 hours remaining on his 70-hour cycle before he was required by federal law to take a 34-hour reset.
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.
Why are people messing with truckers? Truckers have it very rough right now, they want to drive, just let them work. Without truckers, America grinds to a halt.
If by 'mess with' you mean 'regulate', is a kinetic energy based approach to safety a good enough of a reason? My worldview: The average truck in America is perhaps 32 times as heavy as the average automobile. That means they carry 32 times as much energy at the same speeds, and deserve 32 times as much scrutiny for their behavior on public roads. Much the same way I believe car drivers deserve 6-7 times as much scrutiny as bicyclists, and again bicyclists perhaps twice as much scrutiny as pedestrians.
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.
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.