A harsh reality for the smallest fleets has emerged when it comes to hours of service enforcement, based on new analysis of Compliance, Safety, Accountability data by Overdrive sister company RigDig Business Intelligence.
As more large carriers turn to e-logs, fleets of one to four trucks, most of which use paper logs, are being exposed to far more risk when it comes to inspections. And in an ominous potential development, with on-site investigations expected to replace the current compliance-review auditing system and an ELD mandate on the way, the wealth of available operational data could become smoking guns for moving violations long after the occurrences.
As shown in the chart below, the smallest carriers among the for-hire population nationwide received a largely disproportionate share of the 2015 hours violations. At the other end of the scale, the largest carriers have the lowest violation rates.
To put the numbers above in perspective, carriers with fewer than 20 trucks, while accounting for just around a third of all active trucks on the road for-hire, received 60 percent of all hours of service violations. Use of electronic logging devices, which have proliferated among larger carriers, appears to play a key role in these compliance stats.
That’s widely assumed, at least, because e-log/ELD systems leave no obvious way other than back-office manipulation to cheat drive time. Likewise, watchers have noted that when a carrier implements electronic logs, its hours violation rate drops as form and manner violations, the most common type of log violation, virtually disappear. In Overdrive research this spring, only one in 10 independents with carrier authority reported using e-logs.
Among drivers using e-logs, many have seen a certain “wave-through” effect in which officers give only scant attention to their e-log during inspections. The phenomenon has been so prevalent that a participant at a 2012 ATHS show in Tennessee was observed with a “powered by e-log” message painted on the driver-side door. But the operator was not using e-logs.
