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Stop draggin’ this theoretical ELD report around

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Large Marge 2017 10 04 17 39It’s October, I guess I should expect to see the dead rise and shamble about, but I really thought it would be later in the month before a decaying corpse flailed around on my desk three different times.

This particular deceased isn’t “dearly departed,” and hasn’t been “missed for eternity,” by anyone except the people who paid Large Marge bucks to have it assembled, much like Frankenstein and his monster.

As much as I hate to desiccate a grave and speak unkindly of the dead, I guess I’m going to have to, since people have begun to lob this poor thing around again.

“Evaluating the Potential Safety Benefits of Electronic HOS” is a document that has been passed around more than the collection plate lately. Dated April 2014, the 82-page report actually contains and uses data from as far back as 2009, and offers the theory that “EHSR-equipped trucks had a significantly lower total crash rate (11.7 percent reduction) and a significantly lower preventable crash rate (5.1 percent reduction) than trucks not equipped with an EHSR.”
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Ya’ don’t say, now? How’s that?

Well, actually they don’t say that. They theorized it. In a lab at Virginia Tech, for a healthy sum of green American dollars. And they tell you this in the first sentence of the abstract on the Technical Data Report page — “Data were obtained through a third-party vendor that compiled previously-generated compliance data regarding participating motor carriers.” Vendor is the magic word. They tell you right up front this data was paid for.

But wait, it gets better.

“Although the final data sets included data from 11 carriers representing small, medium, and large carriers (including a total of 82,943 crashes, 970 HOS violations, and 224,034 truck-years that drove a total of 15.6 billion miles), the data set in the current study was skewed toward larger, for-hire carriers and may not represent the overall U.S. trucking population.”

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