EOBR Makers Expect Change in FMCSA’s Specifications

Federal regulators are likely to prescribe changes to electronic onboard recorder specifications when they issue a new rule mandating the devices for all carriers, in order to prevent driver harassment, according to companies that make EOBRs.

A federal appeals court last year said a previous EOBR mandate for certain worrisome carriers did not protect drivers from harassment and threw it out; the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration then said it would propose an EOBR mandate that ensures the devices are not used to harass drivers (2-13, p. 3).

In voiding the rule FMCSA had set for carriers with the worst hours-of-service violations, the court did not define harassment, but rather said the agency must study how it could occur and be prevented (9-5, p. 1). EOBR makers told Transport Topics that changes to the technical specifications are a likely route the agency could take to prevent harassment.

Alexis Capelle, program manager for EOBRs and telematics at Continental Corp., said FMCSA is likely to remove a previous requirement that EOBRs be in nearly constant communication with the carrier’s back office.

“The link with the driver harassment is that it will happen when there is wireless real-time communication between the onboard unit and the back office,” Capelle told TT. Continental, which is based in Allentown, Pa., makes the VDO RoadLog EOBR.

FMCSA put the communication requirement in its previous rule to allow carriers to monitor drivers’ duty status. The agency could avoid the harassment issue if it removes the provision in its new rule, which it has said it will propose late this year or in early 2013, Capelle said.

He said that a dispatcher could harass an employee if he sees that the employee is not driving, but that would be difficult without near-constant updates of the driver’s status.

“The regulations should really require the minimum technology that is needed to enforce the hours of service and not mandate technology that . . . is not required for enforcing the hours of service,” Capelle said. Communication can be used for fleet management purposes, such as sending messages to drivers, but it is not necessary for tracking the hours drivers work, he said.

However, Jim Angel, product manager at PeopleNet, Minnetonka, Minn., suggested that the agency should require EOBRs to keep a record of fleet dispatchers’ communications with the driver.“So if a driver reports a record of harassment,” law enforcement or auditors would be able to prove whether it happened or not, he said.

“FMCSA should say that that information should be available for at least ‘x’ amount of time,” Angel said, proposing a six-month time frame, which is the same period for which carriers must keep hours-of-service records.

In that way, EOBRs can help drivers by protecting them against harassment, Angel said.

“There’s ways to hold people accountable, but not without any information,” he said, adding that an “electronic data trail” would help to prove a driver has been harassed.

Owen Smith, senior vice president of sales for Cadec Global Inc. of Manchester, N.H., said FMCSA might require that a driver be able to turn off the EOBR’s notifications when he is on break.

The driver ought to be able to “turn the screen brightness black and the speakers off,” he said. That would allow the driver to sleep without disturbances from the device’s light or sound, such as those from communications or notifications.

“Other than a possible flicker of brightness or audible tone of a text message, I can’t think of any intrusion or ‘harassment,’ ” he said.

Tom Cuthbertson, vice president of development for Xata Corp.’s XataNet unit, said he doubted that there is a technological solution to harassment.

“We don’t feel that the driver harassment issue is a technology discussion,” he said. He added that Xata, which is based in Eden Prairie, Minn., doesn’t think “there is a technical change that can address the harassment issue.”

An FMCSA spokeswoman said the agency does not comment on rules under development, while EOBR makers Qualcomm Inc. and Rand McNally declined to comment for this story.

Harassment can take a variety of forms, said Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which brought the lawsuit that led to the August ruling.

“We’re talking about using technology to pressure drivers, to push drivers, to coerce certain types of behavior desired by the carriers,” he said.

It could be a dispatcher asking a fatigued driver to keep driving, or annoying a driver, Spencer said. But it almost always negatively affects the person’s ability to drive.

Spencer offered little in the way of potential fixes, saying that OOIDA does not believe an EOBR mandate “makes sense.”

But if FMCSA does mandate them, “clearly it ought to have an on-off switch,” he said.