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This story is difficult to read as an industry outsider. Unless I’ve misread something, it reads like the driver management company is able to edit the logs in

This story is difficult to read as an industry outsider. Unless I’ve misread something, it reads like the driver management company is able to edit the logs in the software to alter driver history, allowing them to exceed drive time safety limits. I can’t see any way this could happen without clear intent to break the laws. It’s also strange that it’s being done in a way that is plainly obvious to the trucker.

gonehome 4y ago
I think the truckers often want to drive longer than they’re legally allowed.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Yep. Every time a truck is parked, that trucker is away from home and also not making money. They almost universally hate the limits. Of course it's also in the collective best interest to not have massive trucks with tens of thousands of lbs of cargo driven by exhausted drivers.
  - gonehome 4y ago
    Yeah, the restrictions make sense for society but the truckers (annd trucking companies) aren’t the ones that want them.
    - version_five 4y ago
      I agree there have to be restrictions, the idea of speed popping truckers driving for days without sleep is not good for anyone. My guess though, call me cynical, is that bigger companies pushed for these rules. They help push our smaller players who are more burdened by paperwork and compliance. The source of most industry regulation like this is a desired barrier to entry.
- markstos 4y ago
  Aren’t truckers often paid by the mile and not the hour, incentivizing minimal rest?
  - weinzierl 4y ago
    Exactly, saying truckers often want to drive longer than they’re legally allowed is technically correct but not the whole truth. Interestingly the trucker situation seems to exist quite universally.
  - post_break 4y ago
    They aren't paid when waiting for loads though, and that eats into hours. So you can be stuck at a terminal burning drive hours while technically not driving.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      And it drives them up the wall that they can't get to the shipper/receiver, clock out and then load/unload, drive 10-30min to where they can park and then turn the truck off for the night. Meanwhile some CDL bus driver or day cab driver clocks out at the end of his shift, commutes an hour home, has dinner, gets woken up for 10min at 3am by his infant and then clocks back into work at 4am and the government is fine with it. Same number of waking hours. Same number of driving hours. But the white collar bureaucrats give the latter a pass. Back in the day they just cooked the books but now with ELD they can't anymore.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        It seems to me the dynamics of the failures are different - cab drivers drive smaller vehicles at slower speeds in more engaging traffic. When a semi truck crashes it makes a highly visible spectacle, and if there are other people involved, with fatalities. If a cab driver takes a micronap in rush hour traffic they bounce off someone's bumper.
        29083011397778 4y ago
kevviiinn 4y ago
I've actually seen interviews with truckers where they state that they dislike the drive time limits, so that the driver would know about the bypass may actually be what some of them want
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  The current drive time limits are just kind of stupid. Back in the day I’d drive a few hours, stop and take a nap and/or mess around for a while then go back to driving until I was ready to shut it down. Never, ever, had to drive in rush hour because I’d just wait it out. Nowadays you basically have to drive 8-10 hours straight because once your clock starts you have 14 hours. It is possible to split it up but not like the old days and, like all things gov’t, it’s super complicated. They also claimed when they changed the law they’d make sure we had plenty of parking so everyone could run legal but, of course, that never happened so drivers have to make their own parking spots which is why you see them parking wherever the hell they want — which encompasses two of my many pet peeves.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    If you allow truck drivers to split shifts like that they will push it and do things like take multiple 2 hour naps instead of getting actual sleep. You HAVE to have very very clear limits like this. Truckers are an adversary in the process. They would try driving 24/7 if they physically could keep their eyes open. They ALWAYS think they are one of the safe ones while pushing their mental health.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      That’s not how it worked. This is all iirc as it was quite a while ago when they changed the rules but accurate enough. You needed an 8 (or 10, we’ll assume 10) hour break for every 10 hours driving so you could drive 5 hours, take a 4 hour break, drive 5 hours, take a 6 hour break, drive 5 hours, &etc… until you reached your destination or ran out of your 70 hours. You can still do splits but they are 3 hours maximum or 7 hours minimum…need a degree in mathematics to fully understand the hours of service rules and don’t ask the logs department because they will just put you on the “watch list” instead of telling you why the computer thinks you’re in violation. No, not bitter. In practice nobody could do splits like that for very long because you’d get stuck at a shipper or receiver (or both) and end up getting in a full break. Now you basically have to drive your whole day at once which is very tiring. Driving 8 - 9 hours straight sucks. I almost always drive at night but sometimes have to drive during the day when I’m usually sleeping which also sucks, is more dangerous and, ironically, is the reason they changed the rules so tired drivers weren’t, umm… driving. If you know the signs of being tired and can stop and take a break there’s no real problem but the current system forces you to drive tired because once that 14 hour clock starts you pretty much have to deal with it. It can be paused once, during the first half of a split, but usually isn’t very practical to do that. Today’s a perfect example, I got into town this morning but don’t load until tonight so am taking a (probably, would have to look) 8 hour break before driving to the shipper to get (at least, these people don’t get in any sort of hurry) another 2 hour break before driving all night. I’d have rather driven down here just in time to get loaded but then I’d wouldn’t make the delivery on time because of the way the hours would work out so now I get to drive all night on 5 hours of real sleep. Perfectly safe.
crote 4y ago
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has introduced an Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate, to create Hours Of Service (HOS) records. And it seems in the USA that is... just an app?
- mistermegabyte 4y ago
  Yes, its an app. There isn't a single generic ELD hardware device. Every trucking company decides what device is best for their needs. My company uses Samsung Galaxy tablets. These devices do much more than just track ELD.
- mattas 4y ago
  The ELD itself is a physical device that gets installed in the OBD-II port in the truck or vehicle. It records information about when the truck is operational. The hours that the truck is operational need to be accounted for, which is (usually) done by a driver using a mobile app. If a truck driver gets pulled over, they need to prove to the officer that they are operating within their hours. In the past, this was done with a physical log book.
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    The ELD does tons of stuff. It tracks location, speed, doors, shifting (to teach better strategies to the driver), logs, fuel levels, and anything the engine can spit out thru that jbus (like obd-ii which some do use). We used to upsell tracking things and having parts on hand at the correct depots for fixing things before they became an issue on the side of the road. HoS is just one part of what those things do. But even the simplest of them usually hook into the data bus at some point to detect 'drive'. You can buy ones that are just apps and do only HoS. But not sure if those are considered legal anymore (been a few years since I messed with it). When you have 1 truck HoS is a big part of why you want them. When you have a fleet of 2000+ trucks your metrics are different in what costs more.
- lsllc 4y ago
  It's not a new idea, Tachographs have been around in trucking for many decades. Just a paper disk that gets inserted behind (usually the RPM indicator I think) the instrument cluster. The driver writes name/date on one, puts it in and it logs the speed, braking for the driven hours. Sort of like an old-school seismometer scratching out the lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachograph
kotaKat 4y ago
In short: JimBob, the driver in the story, is about to hit the end of his Hours of Service where he'd have to park the truck and go take a federally mandated break. JimBob calls the e-logging vendor, who logs him out of his e-log system, creates a fake driver profile, attaches it to the truck, and assigns all his driving over to the fake ghost driver. To the DOT, all they can see at this point is that Someone Else was driving the truck this last week. Someone Else doesn't have to be in the truck at all, when JimBob gets stopped for a truck inspection, he can merely say "Oh, Someone Else was dropped off at the Loves five miles back and I took over this truck from him" as a bullshit lie as to why he has a fresh log on the road. The ELD vendor and JimBob in this story are both quite flagrantly guilty of abusing the e-log.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Why even have any registered drivers then? Seems like all trucks could be driven by 'Someone Else', all the time.
  - banana_giraffe 4y ago
    Then "Someone Else" would need to take a break at some point, so the driver would have to log back in (or call and have a "Another Someone Else" logged in)
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    If the truck is pulled over for whatever reason the listed driver needs to be in the driver's seat. Thus the change has to be done in the past. Why do I suspect the database has no audit records?
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  So a bunch of wrong incentives put pressure on drivers to commit fraud and make the roads more dangerous for all the other adults and children on the roads. My understanding is that in many regions, driving when exhausted is treated as being just about the same as driving drunk. So they're basically cheating their exhaustion breathalyzer. I imagine a lot of financial pressure is placed on them through the usual methods: giving unreasonable quotas or paying them by the job/mile so they're indirectly incentivized to cut corners.
ricardobayes 4y ago
Drivers always want to drive as much as they physically can as they are on mileage-based contracts and/or get paid for successful deliveries. So that incentivises more successful deliveries made. Back in the analog days they could use a magnet to stop the road tracker so it recorded a break when in reality they kept driving. Greed overrides safety in many industries, sadly.

gonehome 4y ago

I think the truckers often want to drive longer than they’re legally allowed.

mikeyouse 4y ago
Yep. Every time a truck is parked, that trucker is away from home and also not making money. They almost universally hate the limits. Of course it's also in the collective best interest to not have massive trucks with tens of thousands of lbs of cargo driven by exhausted drivers.
- gonehome 4y ago
  Yeah, the restrictions make sense for society but the truckers (annd trucking companies) aren’t the ones that want them.
  - version_five 4y ago
    I agree there have to be restrictions, the idea of speed popping truckers driving for days without sleep is not good for anyone. My guess though, call me cynical, is that bigger companies pushed for these rules. They help push our smaller players who are more burdened by paperwork and compliance. The source of most industry regulation like this is a desired barrier to entry.
markstos 4y ago
Aren’t truckers often paid by the mile and not the hour, incentivizing minimal rest?
- weinzierl 4y ago
  Exactly, saying truckers often want to drive longer than they’re legally allowed is technically correct but not the whole truth. Interestingly the trucker situation seems to exist quite universally.
- post_break 4y ago
  They aren't paid when waiting for loads though, and that eats into hours. So you can be stuck at a terminal burning drive hours while technically not driving.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    And it drives them up the wall that they can't get to the shipper/receiver, clock out and then load/unload, drive 10-30min to where they can park and then turn the truck off for the night. Meanwhile some CDL bus driver or day cab driver clocks out at the end of his shift, commutes an hour home, has dinner, gets woken up for 10min at 3am by his infant and then clocks back into work at 4am and the government is fine with it. Same number of waking hours. Same number of driving hours. But the white collar bureaucrats give the latter a pass. Back in the day they just cooked the books but now with ELD they can't anymore.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      It seems to me the dynamics of the failures are different - cab drivers drive smaller vehicles at slower speeds in more engaging traffic. When a semi truck crashes it makes a highly visible spectacle, and if there are other people involved, with fatalities. If a cab driver takes a micronap in rush hour traffic they bounce off someone's bumper.
      - 29083011397778 4y ago

kevviiinn 4y ago

I've actually seen interviews with truckers where they state that they dislike the drive time limits, so that the driver would know about the bypass may actually be what some of them want

UncleEntity 4y ago
The current drive time limits are just kind of stupid. Back in the day I’d drive a few hours, stop and take a nap and/or mess around for a while then go back to driving until I was ready to shut it down. Never, ever, had to drive in rush hour because I’d just wait it out. Nowadays you basically have to drive 8-10 hours straight because once your clock starts you have 14 hours. It is possible to split it up but not like the old days and, like all things gov’t, it’s super complicated. They also claimed when they changed the law they’d make sure we had plenty of parking so everyone could run legal but, of course, that never happened so drivers have to make their own parking spots which is why you see them parking wherever the hell they want — which encompasses two of my many pet peeves.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  If you allow truck drivers to split shifts like that they will push it and do things like take multiple 2 hour naps instead of getting actual sleep. You HAVE to have very very clear limits like this. Truckers are an adversary in the process. They would try driving 24/7 if they physically could keep their eyes open. They ALWAYS think they are one of the safe ones while pushing their mental health.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    That’s not how it worked. This is all iirc as it was quite a while ago when they changed the rules but accurate enough. You needed an 8 (or 10, we’ll assume 10) hour break for every 10 hours driving so you could drive 5 hours, take a 4 hour break, drive 5 hours, take a 6 hour break, drive 5 hours, &etc… until you reached your destination or ran out of your 70 hours. You can still do splits but they are 3 hours maximum or 7 hours minimum…need a degree in mathematics to fully understand the hours of service rules and don’t ask the logs department because they will just put you on the “watch list” instead of telling you why the computer thinks you’re in violation. No, not bitter. In practice nobody could do splits like that for very long because you’d get stuck at a shipper or receiver (or both) and end up getting in a full break. Now you basically have to drive your whole day at once which is very tiring. Driving 8 - 9 hours straight sucks. I almost always drive at night but sometimes have to drive during the day when I’m usually sleeping which also sucks, is more dangerous and, ironically, is the reason they changed the rules so tired drivers weren’t, umm… driving. If you know the signs of being tired and can stop and take a break there’s no real problem but the current system forces you to drive tired because once that 14 hour clock starts you pretty much have to deal with it. It can be paused once, during the first half of a split, but usually isn’t very practical to do that. Today’s a perfect example, I got into town this morning but don’t load until tonight so am taking a (probably, would have to look) 8 hour break before driving to the shipper to get (at least, these people don’t get in any sort of hurry) another 2 hour break before driving all night. I’d have rather driven down here just in time to get loaded but then I’d wouldn’t make the delivery on time because of the way the hours would work out so now I get to drive all night on 5 hours of real sleep. Perfectly safe.

crote 4y ago

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has introduced an Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate, to create Hours Of Service (HOS) records. And it seems in the USA that is... just an app?

mistermegabyte 4y ago
Yes, its an app. There isn't a single generic ELD hardware device. Every trucking company decides what device is best for their needs. My company uses Samsung Galaxy tablets. These devices do much more than just track ELD.
mattas 4y ago
The ELD itself is a physical device that gets installed in the OBD-II port in the truck or vehicle. It records information about when the truck is operational. The hours that the truck is operational need to be accounted for, which is (usually) done by a driver using a mobile app. If a truck driver gets pulled over, they need to prove to the officer that they are operating within their hours. In the past, this was done with a physical log book.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  The ELD does tons of stuff. It tracks location, speed, doors, shifting (to teach better strategies to the driver), logs, fuel levels, and anything the engine can spit out thru that jbus (like obd-ii which some do use). We used to upsell tracking things and having parts on hand at the correct depots for fixing things before they became an issue on the side of the road. HoS is just one part of what those things do. But even the simplest of them usually hook into the data bus at some point to detect 'drive'. You can buy ones that are just apps and do only HoS. But not sure if those are considered legal anymore (been a few years since I messed with it). When you have 1 truck HoS is a big part of why you want them. When you have a fleet of 2000+ trucks your metrics are different in what costs more.
lsllc 4y ago
It's not a new idea, Tachographs have been around in trucking for many decades. Just a paper disk that gets inserted behind (usually the RPM indicator I think) the instrument cluster. The driver writes name/date on one, puts it in and it logs the speed, braking for the driven hours. Sort of like an old-school seismometer scratching out the lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachograph

kotaKat 4y ago

In short: JimBob, the driver in the story, is about to hit the end of his Hours of Service where he'd have to park the truck and go take a federally mandated break. JimBob calls the e-logging vendor, who logs him out of his e-log system, creates a fake driver profile, attaches it to the truck, and assigns all his driving over to the fake ghost driver. To the DOT, all they can see at this point is that Someone Else was driving the truck this last week. Someone Else doesn't have to be in the truck at all, when JimBob gets stopped for a truck inspection, he can merely say "Oh, Someone Else was dropped off at the Loves five miles back and I took over this truck from him" as a bullshit lie as to why he has a fresh log on the road. The ELD vendor and JimBob in this story are both quite flagrantly guilty of abusing the e-log.

latchkey 4y ago
Why even have any registered drivers then? Seems like all trucks could be driven by 'Someone Else', all the time.
- banana_giraffe 4y ago
  Then "Someone Else" would need to take a break at some point, so the driver would have to log back in (or call and have a "Another Someone Else" logged in)
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  If the truck is pulled over for whatever reason the listed driver needs to be in the driver's seat. Thus the change has to be done in the past. Why do I suspect the database has no audit records?
Waterluvian 4y ago
So a bunch of wrong incentives put pressure on drivers to commit fraud and make the roads more dangerous for all the other adults and children on the roads. My understanding is that in many regions, driving when exhausted is treated as being just about the same as driving drunk. So they're basically cheating their exhaustion breathalyzer. I imagine a lot of financial pressure is placed on them through the usual methods: giving unreasonable quotas or paying them by the job/mile so they're indirectly incentivized to cut corners.

ricardobayes 4y ago

Drivers always want to drive as much as they physically can as they are on mileage-based contracts and/or get paid for successful deliveries. So that incentivises more successful deliveries made. Back in the analog days they could use a magnet to stop the road tracker so it recorded a break when in reality they kept driving. Greed overrides safety in many industries, sadly.