After some time on ELDs, Buchs doesn’t exactly sing the praises of the devices, but he does maintain that utilizing ELDs for hours of service recording has allowed him a measure of security in knowing beyond much shadow of a doubt he’s legal on hours, freeing him in some ways to better dispatch himself and focus on profitable loads and operation generally.
“The ELD frees you up to focus on other things,” says Buchs, if it doesn’t really give you back much time directly in terms of the amount of time spent interacting with it versus pushing a pencil over the pages of a paper logbook. “It frees up to you to choose what you focus on” in that it “takes over what is a mundane task,” largely.
He’s not alone in his thinking among Overdrive readers with some experience utilizing electronic logs to date.
Results of a reader survey conducted in May showed that, among those running electronic logs today, 43 percent of e-log users agreed with Buchs’ sentiment. An nearly equal number, however, saw no benefit whatsoever, viewing e-logs as just a computerized form of the standard paper logbook.
At once, the mundane task of hours recording is an important one, particularly given it’s a perennial area of focus for inspectors the nation over. This past year, however, saw total hours violations fall during the first full year back under the pre-2013 restart regulations. Other violation categories saw the totals fall last year, too, however, as fewer inspections and violations all around the nation were the norm. The share of total violations for hours of service nationally, however, barely budged from its 2014 high of 10 percent.
