The following letter came in from Karen Martin of DKM Enterprises West, one of several recent letters in response to Max Heine’s July-issue “Pulse” column on underlying issues with the hours of service rule itself that drive the issues behind opposition to electronic logging devices for many. Heine offered thoughts on the future of hours of service, including the potential to allow flexibility with greater levels of proven safe experience and the like. Read his piece via this link.
Our one-truck (owner operator) trucking company survives, and is successful, because of our concern for safety, skillfulness in avoiding wasted time and energy, and respect for the customers’ products we haul. With the ELD mandate, time and energy will no longer be in our control. Safety, the claim [that is made] for the ELD mandate’s existence, is, was, and ever shall be the responsibility of the driver. A device to monitor the engine hours of operation will not make the truck or the trucking industry more safe. It will make the five largest trucking companies in the U.S. more wealthy than they already are, though. (I couldn’t help myself with that last sentence.)
The efficiency of our truck company is a result of 39 years of driving and maintaining trucks, and our health. Your suggestion — “Build on that move toward greater flexibility and authority to determine your schedule, and you get the graduated CDL idea. The current rule could remain, but as drivers accumulate experience and maintain a certain level of safety, they would be granted more freedom to set their own hours” — is on the right track.
I have a letter from the FMSCA that comments on our safe driving, and no violations in the 7 years we have been owner-operators. With that in mind, I would like to add to the flexibility and authority to determine the schedule idea you introduced. Why couldn’t owner-operators, such as ourselves, be granted an extension/exemption, due to our safe driving record and skill at time management? Fact is, we are already close to retiring, but wanted to keep this up for at least two more years. We have some great customers that depend on us. Otherwise, the ELD mandate will put us out of business. —Karen Martin, DKM Enterprises West, Fennville, Mich.
More commentary under Heine’s piece on what one reader dubbed “the real problem” at the root of ELD issues, hours. Not everyone agreed, some seeing rates/money as the more bedrock issue in all the back-and-forth over ELDs and hours:
Maddmc: I have no problem with ELDs except they are totally unnecessary. The original intent of wanting them in every truck to keep drivers from falsifying their logs has since been eclipsed by traffic cams, CCTV at both shippers and receivers, LPRs (license plate readers), PrePass, Ipass and smartphone tracking. Anyone falsifying their logs today better hope they never get in an accident with a fatality and they’re at fault! One example was on I-55 in Illinois — several women were killed. According to the driver’s logbook he was “legal,” [but] according to several of the above-mentioned technologies … he wasn’t! He’s now in prison for I believe manslaughter. We don’t need ELDs, but now that they’re here, put the HOS rules back to what they were originally. You know, the ones that worked without a problem for literally decades and let us get back to doing what at one time most of us loved doing — safely moving this great nation’s freight!
