Many Commenters Back ELD Rule, But Recommend Technical Changes

By Jonathan S. Reiskin, Associate News Editor

This story appears in the June 30 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was bombarded with more than 1,600 comments on its electronic logging device proposed rule as of June 25 — the day before the comment period officially closed.

Many fleets, especially larger ones, endorsed the call to make automated logging of driver hours mandatory, while smaller companies and owner- operators tended to oppose the proposal. There also were numerous suggestions as to how the rule should be altered.

In March, FMCSA proposed mandatory usage of the devices two years after a rule becomes final. If enacted approximately as written, the rule would bring to an end the use of paper logs to record hours of service by commercial vehicle drivers.

The proposal also upgrades the standards for what such a device must do and forbids trucking companies from using them to intimidate drivers.

North America’s two largest trucking companies, UPS Inc. and FedEx Corp., had some variance in their comments.

James Ferguson, a FedEx vice president, said the company backs the mandate but also offered technical suggestions for improvement.

He said a shorthaul exemption to the rule is a good idea in theory, but enforcing it on the road would prove difficult. Therefore, the company recommends that all drivers for Classes 7-8 vehicles, those with commercial driver licenses, should have to use ELDs.

Ferguson also said that requiring repair of a broken ELD within eight days is “unrealistic,” so the period should be extended to 30 days.

UPS Vice President Thomas Jensen said his company’s parcel and less-than-truckload divisions operate 40,000 trucks, and 11,800 of them have ELDs. Making all trucks fully compliant would cost UPS $25.5 million, he said.

“Although UPS questions the need for an ELD mandate for compliant motor carriers, it does not oppose FMCSA’s proposal so long as a degree of flexibility is included to avoid imposing unnecessary expense on carriers,” Jensen wrote.

American Trucking Associations has been a strong and consistent proponent of an ELD rule.

But in its comments, it expressed some concern about the keeping of support documents and offered some tweaks for technical reasons.

FMCSA should consider “further reducing the supporting documents requirements to mandate that carriers keep two documents per driver each day — the one nearest the

beginning of a driver’s workday and the one nearest the end,” ATA said.

Knight Transportation Vice President Brett Sant said his truckload carrier has been fully outfitted with ELDs since 2010 and endorses a universal mandate, but he also was worried about the document issue.

“Based on our research, only three documents — drug-testing control and custody forms, fuel receipts and roadside-inspection reports — provide the requisite data elements to be useful in systematically verifying on-duty not driving activity for truckload carriers,” he said. Even those documents, while useful, do not tell everything about on-duty but not driving time.

“The supporting document rules are an unnecessary and costly burden that will provide no benefit to safety,” Sant said.

Daimler Trucks North America said the mandate is reasonable, but it offered a technical warning.

“The proposed rule does not address a serious concern: the lack of a technical specification for communication between electronic onboard recorders and networked vehicle systems. This may impact vehicle performance and cause potential vehicle defects due to data bus faults, negatively affecting networked vehicle systems.”

Without a nationwide technical specification, DTNA said, the following unintended consequences may result: vehicle start failures, diagnostic tools become inoperable, speedometer inaccuracy, cruise control malfunction, instrument-cluster resets causing temporary loss of instrument functionality, and engine and transmission performance degradation.

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, a group of law enforcement agencies that would enforce the rule on the roads of the United States, Canada and Mexico, also endorsed the proposal but asked for as few exceptions as possible.

“Exceptions to the rule would lead to confusion for enforcement officials as well as reducing its positive impact on commercial motor vehicle safety,” CVSA Executive Director Stephen Keppler said.

Many people offering comment were staunchly opposed.

“As a trucker with over 30 years’ experience, I can say I do not believe ELDs will benefit anyone except the manufacturers. The whole hours-of-service regulation needs to be more flexible for individuals. I feel the regulators have forgotten that everyone is not the same, and to try to make everyone the same could be dangerous,” wrote Jack Williams of Wingdale, New York.

“We will not submit to putting an EOBR in any of my trucks!!! I will close the doors first,” exclaimed Anna Brown of Elizabethton, Tennessee. “The money isn’t there, no matter how you look at it. The freight rates are as low as we’ve seen in years, especially when paying almost $4 a gallon for fuel,” Brown said.