Opinion: Safety Compliance Enters the 21st Century

By Bill GravesPresident and CEO
American Trucking Associations

This Opinion piece appears in the May 21 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

We live in an age of electronic information. Computers, the Internet, iPhones, iPads, GPS . . . all these technological wonders work to make our lives easier, reduce paperwork and give us all more time to do other things.

At the same time, curiously, we have yet to bring our technological prowess to bear on an important safety issue in our industry — logging and monitoring how many hours our nation’s truck drivers are spending behind the wheel.

While many forward-thinking, safety-conscious motor carriers and drivers have embraced electronic logging devices (ELDs) or electronic onboard recorders (EOBRs) to track their hours of service, there is still a strong strain within our industry that continues to argue against bringing our recordkeeping into the 21st century.

These individuals — and a few groups — argue against electronic logging using mostly half-truths and fear mongering to distort and dissemble, so allow me to set the record straight.

First, these devices are not nearly as costly as some would have people believe — particularly when weighed against the costs of noncompliance with hours-of-service rules.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration puts the cost of an ELD at between $500 and $800 a year, which may sound like a lot — until you compare it to the thousands upon thousands of dollars that are on the line if a fleet violates the hours rules or, God forbid, has a crash.

That risk of a crash brings me to my second point: Compliance with the hours of service clearly is related to crash risk. Despite its numerous flaws, FMCSA’s initial evaluation of its Compliance, Safety, Accountability program demonstrated that compliance with the hours-of-service rules is statistically related to carrier crash risk.

The American Transportation Research Institute’s updated 2011 “Crash Predictor” study also found that drivers with various types of hours-of-service violations are more likely to be involved in a future crash.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this also speaks to the effectiveness of the current set of HOS rules in place since 2005, but that is an argument for another day.

Carriers that have converted to electronic logging have noted over and over that their compliance rates improve. If the industry adopts the technology broadly, it is the logical conclusion that the overall compliance rate would also go up, and truck safety would improve even further.

Often, we see complaints about the potential for an ELD mandate from individual drivers, citing such objections as loss of personal freedom and other issues they claim not only will hurt morale, but also make it harder for the industry to retain drivers.

Fortunately, the American Transportation Research Institute also looked at this issue in the recent past. ATRI found that 76% of carrier and driver respondents said the use of an ELD improved driver morale, and while just 19% said it helped with retention, no one commented that it hurt in retaining drivers.

While we agree there are issues that will need to be addressed in a final rule — concerns like data ownership, ensuring positive driver identification, providing significant relief from other recordkeeping requirements and the need for uniform technical device specifications — these issues are minor when compared with the compliance and safety benefits these devices can provide.

If you look at the collection of groups advocating for this technology — the National Transportation Safety Board, ATA, the Teamsters, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance and a coalition of advocacy groups headed by the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety — it is clear this has broad support from groups that, to put it mildly, do not often see eye to eye on things.

Now, opponents of this technology can say it is too costly. They can say it is intrusive. They can say it is unreasonable. But what they cannot bring themselves to say it is that it’s the right thing to do, not just for trucking but for our highways.

As a resident of Virginia, I often see the signs posted on highways reminding drivers that radar detectors are prohibited in motor vehicles.

This prohibition is in place because possessing one is an implicit admission that the driver intends to break the law — in this case, the speed limit.

In a similar vein, what opponents of this technology are implicitly arguing for is the continued opportunity to break the law. If you follow the hours-of-service rules, what does it matter how you record your hours? With ELDs on all large trucks, we ensure fair, honest, unambiguous enforcement of the hours-of-service rules for all carriers, large and small. This enforcement will lead to improved compliance and improved safety for all motorists, not just truck drivers. In addition, by bringing this technology to trucking, this industry also takes away one of our critics’ longstanding arguments — that there is rampant cheating on logbooks.

In this age of modern technology, we owe it to ourselves and to our fellow motorists to continue to improve on our already impressive and record-setting safety performance, and to use the cost-beneficial tools at our disposal to ensure that safety rules are followed.

American Trucking Associations, the largest national trade federation for the trucking industry, has headquarters in Arlington, Va., and affiliated associations in every state. ATA owns Transport Topics Publishing Group.