On January 31, 2011 the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued a regulatory proposal that would require interstate commercial truck and bus companies to install electronic on-board recorders (EOBRs) to monitor their drivers' hours-of-service (HOS) compliance. The rule would apply to all companies that are currently required to use logbooks to record compliance under federal hours-of-service regulations, (about 500,000 carriers). The agency said it expected to have a final rule in place by June 2012 and then carriers will be given three years from the effective date of the final rule to comply. The proposed rule would also relieve interstate motor carriers from retaining certain HOS supporting documents, such as delivery and toll receipts, which are currently used to verify the total number of hours drivers spend operating the vehicle. Carriers that violate this EOBR requirement would face civil penalties of up to $11,000 for each offense. Noncompliance would also negatively impact a carrier's safety fitness rating and DOT operating authority.
"We cannot protect our roadways when commercial truck and bus companies exceed hours-of-service rules," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. "This proposal would make our roads safer by ensuring that carriers traveling across state lines are using EOBRs to track the hours their drivers spend behind the wheel." FMCSA Administrator Anne S. Ferro said that "This proposal is an important step in our efforts to raise the safety bar for commercial carriers and drivers. We believe broader use of EOBRs would give carriers and drivers an effective tool to strengthen their HOS compliance."
The proposal has the support of most large trucking companies who have already implemented EOBRs to ease the administrative burden of log audits as well as to reduce the risk that they have unsafe drivers on the road.
Opposing the proposal is the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Assn. (OOIDA) who said the proposal will hurt small business truckers and increase costs and leveled harsh criticism at FMCSA. "EOBRs are nothing more than over-priced record keepers," said Todd Spencer, executive vice president of OOIDA. "This proposal is actually another example of the administration's determination to wipe out small businesses by continuing to crank out overly burdensome regulations that simply run up costs." According to the Association, EOBRs cannot accurately and automatically record a driver's hours of service and duty status. They can only track the movement and location of a truck and require human interaction to record any change of duty status. Loading and unloading time should typically be logged as "on-duty, not driving" in order to accurately reflect the hours a driver has worked, but it is up to the driver to accurately record that status.
Owner Operators complain that the units cost too much when bought one at a time, rather than by the hundreds or thousands as larger carriers buy them. FMCSA estimates the cost of an EOBR for trucking companies without fleet management systems to be between $525 and $785 per truck. However, the agency estimates it will cost only $92 per truck for companies with existing fleet management systems. In September 2010, J. J. Keller & Associates introduced a product called $6 E-Logs, a low-cost electronic hours-of-service solution that costs $199 per truck for the EOBR and $6 per truck per month for the service. I am not endorsing this product, just pointing it out as a product on the market today at a reasonably low price.
While I am generally opposed to new government regulations, and while it is indisputable that the trucking industry has done a phenomenal job of reducing the accident rate even without EOBRs, and even though an EOBR does not eliminate log falsification, I think this is a reasonable imposition of technology in the name of safety. After all, we would not have airbags in all of our cars if we left it up to the auto industry to do it on their own without a government mandate.
FMCSA will take public comments on the proposal for 60 days from the date it published the rule in the Federal Register, which was February 1. I encourage you to post your comments beginning February 4 at Regulation Room. Note that Regulation Room is not an official DOT website, and so participating in discussion on that site is not the same as commenting in the rulemaking docket. To read the full submission and find instructions on official commenting click here. One way to comment officially is through the Regulations.gov web site.