It's funny, truck drivers seem an ideal fit for unionization, but tend to skew politically anti-union (in the South and Midwest at least). Agreed that drivers

It's funny, truck drivers seem an ideal fit for unionization, but tend to skew politically anti-union (in the South and Midwest at least). Agreed that drivers have responsibility for a load they pick up, but my understanding is that with the new eLog systems there's less opportunity for "flex time". So if you arrive at a yard and need to get a container swapped to a new trailer or have them pull a different trailer then you're still on the clock. Which gets dicey when the yard knows this and says "Sure, we'll get you a new trailer. It'll just take a couple hours. We're really busy right now..." The ideal would be the unionized situation you outlined, where there's a strong, independent driver's advocate to mediate disputes. And agreed that there's a hard cliff where no one should be allowed to drive. But if it's 11 hours in the seat max, then what if you sat in traffic at a port for 5 of those? Is that driver as tired as someone doing 11 hours of interstate miles? Paper logs afforded both drivers and regulators a judge-like discretion that I think lubricated the wheels with reasonableness while still dissuading repeated patterns of risky behavior. eLog (assuming they fix all the loopholes in the terribly implemented first gen systems) doesn't provide that flexibility. Which, in general, is a problem I think we're going to have to deal with more and more. You can't take partially enforced laws that worked, implement technical measures to absolutely enforce them, and expect everything to be the same as it was before. (E.g. if police departments started sueing for Google Maps tracking data and handing out tickets whenever a speed limit was exceeded)