Fixing the EOBR Rule

We were disappointed to see the federal appellate court’s ruling overturning the requirement that some motor carriers install electronic recording devices to monitor drivers’ compliance with the hours-of-service rule.

There can be little doubt that electronic logging devices encourage safer operations on our nation’s highways, which is something that all highway users — fleets, drivers and the motoring public — desire.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the rule, as written by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, could allow fleets to “harass” their drivers, and has to be rewritten. The court agreed with the driver petitioners that their employers might make them stay on the road, even if they were tired, if the devices showed that they were still eligible to drive.

There is more than a little irony in the ruling, since electronic logging is seen in most quarters as a method for ensuring that drivers don’t stay on the road longer than is allowed by law, since most of them are paid by the mile, and not by the hour.

Whatever the case, the ruling seems sure to delay the unstoppable move toward electronic logging devices in all commercial vehicle cabs.

For now, it will stop the requirement that 5,700 fleets that have had HOS violations in the past install devices in their trucks by the middle of 2012.

And the ruling seems certain to delay FMCSA’s proposal to eventually require the almost 500,000 fleets that ply our nation’s roads to install similar devices within the next few years.

That is a shame, since FMCSA’s data clearly shows that compliance with the HOS rule is strongly associated with a reduced crash risk. And, as American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves said, the federation continues to support FMCSA’s efforts in this regard, since “electronic logging devices are an important and effective means to” ensure that fleets and drivers abide by the HOS rule.

The primary motivation behind the trucking industry’s desire to install electronic devices is to improve safety, not to harass drivers.

We urge FMCSA to modify the onboard recorder rules they’ve been working on, to both ensure that HOS compliance is universal and to protect the rights of drivers the appeals court felt were at risk.