Truckers Take on Trump Over Electronic Surveillance Rules

This is like a episode on King of the Hill :)
Some truckers are unhappy about new rules requiring they use electronic devices to record their time on the road—and they're blasting President Trump over the issue.

Most years, country music and diesel engines make the most noise at the Mid-American Trucking Show. However, in the week since the freight industry’s largest annual event ended, top stories from trucking news sites were about a small Q&A session where a convoy of keyed-up truckers took turns griping at Ray Martinez, the man President Trump just put in charge of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the federal government’s trucking regulator.

“It’s amazing to me how many experts there are in trucking that have never set their butt in a truck,” said one irate driver, quoted in Transport Topics, a trade pub that covered the session. That speaker, and many others, were fed up over a new law requiring every driver digitally track the hours they spend on the road, so regulators can better ensure they’re not spending a minute longer behind the wheel than allowed.

This isn’t just hollering about the surveillance state: The contentious electronic logging device rule has become a focal sore for independent truckers irritated by a rash of related regulations. Chiefly, that the government controls when truckers can, and can’t, be on the road. Supporters of the law say this kind of rhetoric comes from midnight mavericks hoping to snag lucrative, but illegal, overtime hauling. Notably, American Trucking Associations, a trade group representing mostly big trucking conglomerates, supports the law. But some drivers are so fed up over the new ELD rule—which law officers began enforcing this week—they’re threatening to climb out of the cab and throw away the keys.

Big Rig Brother
For all the controversy, an electronic logging device, or ELD, is a fairly bland chunk of tech. Essentially, it’s a flash drive that plugs into a truck engine’s control module to track things like whether the engine is running, the odometer, GPS location, and so on. To inspect a trucker’s logs, a smokey just plugs into the ELD unit. Any trucker found in violation of their Hours of Service gets curbed for 10 hours—a serious penalty in a business where running late is bad news.

The core premise behind the ELD rule is that sleepy drivers cause accidents. Since 1934, the feds have used Hours of Service laws to limit time spent driving between rest periods. Current rules hold drivers to 14 on-duty hours (only 11 of which can be spent behind the wheel), followed by 10 hours off the clock. Before this week, drivers could keep their Hours of Service logs with pen and paper—a system that many liked because it gave them some wiggle room when the realities of the road made it hard to stay within the rules. Now, with the digital monitor in charge, that's gone.


"We did cheat our logbooks. Because the Hours of Service rule doesn’t work."

What the truckers call wiggle room, regulators call cheating. “What’s happened throughout the whole industry for several decades is drivers falsifying their record of duty logbooks,” says Collin Mooney, executive director of the Commercial Vehicles Safety Alliance, a nonprofit that coordinates truck inspections across North America. Mooney says most of the complaints truckers have against ELDs are motivated by a desire to return to some sort of cowboy heyday of regulation-free trucking. “It really comes down to owner operators looking for anything to get this rule violated,” he says. “They’ll complain about cost, noncompliant devices, Big Brother, you name it.”

To which some truckers reply: yup. “We did cheat our logbooks,” says John Grosvenor, founder of Truckers United for Freedom, a group that argues for better conditions for drivers. “But that’s because the Hours of Service rule doesn’t work.”

Truckers, you see, have very little control over their schedules. Bad weather might force them off the road. Unexpected traffic jams can snarl carefully planned routes. Shippers and recipients often keep trucks idling for hours. Then there’s parking. “If you aren’t parked by 4 pm in New England, you’re not going to find a spot,” says Grosvenor, who lives in New Hampshire. Such scarcity means truckers often cut their work days short just to make sure they have a place to throttle down for the night. “You can’t pause the clock,” says Grosvenor. Which, he says, removes his ability to make reasoned calls about a variety of situations, including those above. “If there was a five mile backup traffic jam, and I see a rest area, why shouldn’t I be able to just pull in there and rest until road clear?”

Truckers also have valid complaints about the ELDs themselves. Norita Taylor, spokesperson for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, says the government offers little quality assurance for devices on the market. “The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has allowed manufacturers to self-certify their devices,” she says. The agency published a functional spec for what these devices were supposed to do, and authorized a few hundred manufacturers to build the things. Predictably, a lot of them suck.

“When this mandate originally started rolling out back in December, there were a lot of technical problems,” says Taylor. Devices wouldn’t work with certain trucks, or with a police officer’s reader device. These, and other, issues led to the trucking enforcement community opting to push back ELD enforcement from December 18, 2017, to this month.

Critics of the ELDs would prefer if that deadline fell off a cliff. They contest the safety argument, noting that crashes involving trucks have increased since 2003, when the rules were updated to the current 14-hour on duty clock. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has filed two lawsuits against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which claimed ELDs violate a number of federal laws, notably the 4th and 5th amendments. Last summer, the Supreme Court declined to hear the second of those cases, after a lower court upheld the ELD mandate.

Honk If You're Angry
Outside the courts, ELD protesters aimed their ire at the president, who came to Washington promising to slash regulation. Last October, protesters gathered in front of the Department of Transportation. They blew air horns outside the White House to get Trump’s attention. A few months later, they began tweeting at the chief executive using the #ELDorMe hashtag—indicating they would quit trucking over the law. (Grosvenor says he knows many truckers who have followed through with that threat.)

“We were extremely hopeful for Trump,” says Grosvenor. “He was talking about removing regulations.” Grosvenor felt his hopes collapse when he saw Trump climb behind the wheel of a big rig on South Lawn. Those trucks were brought to the White House on behalf of the American Trucking Associations. The industry’s largest trade group supports the ELD rule (and did not reply to a request for comment). “I saw that and I thought, ‘Well, okay, I guess they just got Trump in their back pocket,’” Grosvenor says.

Even now that the ELD rule has gone into effect, Grosvenor hopes he can get the devices ejected from cabs. He plans to appeal to Elaine Chao, Trump’s transporation secretary, who could have the power to repeal the mandate. He has also reached out to Senator Ted Cruz, who he says seemed sympathetic to the small time trucker cause. In the interim, he and others are still working to get FMCSA head Ray Martinez to see their side of the issue.

Grosvenor didn’t approve of how things went down at the Mid-American Trucking Show, however. “Having a blowout like that defeats the purpose of the dialogues we’ve started,” he says, noting that since last October’s protests in Washington, FMCSA spokespeople have promised a meeting. However, last month’s confrontation may have forced some progress on the issue. A few days after the event, FMCSA administrator Martinez faced a different audience of truckers, and indicated that he might be open to changing some of the Hours of Service rules.

ELDs, however, are here to stay. “From where I sit, I can’t make law,” said Martinez. Drivers who can’t keep on truckin’ with that might just hang up their keys for good.