Cinderella’s big break came when her carriage — previously a pumpkin, transformed to her benefit by a fairy godmother — returned to its original state precisely at the stroke of midnight. Cinderella got the handsome prince as a consequence. Some North American truck drivers may not fare so well when the clock runs out on them, however.

Time management proved to be critical in that fairy tale, and in real life it could become an even more delicate issue, when electronic on-board recorders (EOBRs) are introduced in North America.

That day could be fast approaching. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Admini­stration (FMCSA) in Washington is expected to publish a proposed rule on EOBRs sometime soon and Transport Canada has been studying the technology with an eye toward drawing up a made-in-Canada version to complement the forthcoming American regulation.

FMCSA has been working on an EOBR rule since a U.S. court sided with a coalition of special-interest groups in throwing out the FMCSA’s rewritten hours-of-service (HOS) rules that came into affect in 2004. The court instructed the agency to rewrite parts of the regulation (which it did and released last year), but also to consider more seriously an EOBR reg, which was not included in the 2004 HOS rule. Unless further delayed, truckers should soon get a glimpse of the sort of gadgets Big Brother has in mind to track their allowable driving hours.

What technology — and how exactly it would be used at roadside or audit enforcement — hasn’t been fully established yet. And there’s no guarantee this upcoming proposed rule will offer any clearer picture. But if discussion papers based on comments from carriers, owner-ops, enforcement, and suppliers are any indication, the comment period is sure to produce heated debate.

FMCSA has allowed the voluntary use of EOBRs to track drivers’ HOS since 1988. Werner Enterprises of Omaha, Neb., was the first U.S. carrier to go officially paperless when FMCSA granted the carrier an exemption in September 2004. Many other fleets already monitor driver hours for their own purposes through existing on-board or satellite/cellular-based tracking systems.

In Canada, the Canadian Truck­ing Alliance (CTA) has been calling for some sort of EOBR regulation for several years. CTA CEO David Bradley, who stresses his members are in favor of EOBRs “with conditions”, says electronic logs would level the playing field between ­carriers that comply with current hours-of-service regs and those that think they can get an edge by breaking them.

“Competition should be based on service and price where price includes the cost of compliance,” he says. “The way to monitor compliance would be through technology. The inspector on the side of the road is, in our view, not an efficient way of monitoring compliance.”

Even more direct is current CTA Chairman Claude Robert of Robert Transport: “Paper logs are a joke,” says the always outspoken Robert. “[EOBRs] will harmonize the operations for everybody because it will make it harder to cheat than paper logs. A driver who must take eight hours of rest will not have the choice but to stop because the movement of the vehicle is recorded.”

But sometimes “cheating” — at least the way a hard-wired time-management device might automatically define the term — isn’t done to get a backdoor advantage, but a way to cautiously massage the grey areas that common sense suggests should exist in all rules of life. What’s a driver to do when the EOBR forces him to shut ‘er down a few klicks away from the wife and kids?

“We’re not talking about cheating to get more work done, we’re dealing with the driver’s home life,” says one southwestern Ontario-based general-freight carrier. “I can’t see drivers being at all ­tolerant of being forced to lay over an hour from home, and we’re certainly not going to set up a taxi service to bring them in when they run out of hours.”

In a recent HOS survey conducted by this magazine’s sister publication, highwaySTAR, nearly 77.7 percent of respondents admitted they adjusted their logbooks to compensate for wasted and unproductive hours by an average of 10.8 hours per week — nearly a full day’s work by U.S. HOS standards.

That suggests that drivers would see a reduction in driving hours if the time limits were enforced by the minute, as could be the case with an EOBR.
As Wayne Kowalyshyn, director of operations at Saskatoon’s Ridsdale Transport, points out, black boxes — as EOBRs are otherwise nicknamed — will have an impact on his drivers.

“While I don’t condone the practice of using more than one logbook, I do think this will push the thumb down on drivers even further,” he says. “Drivers will soon be questioning why they bother coming to work. They’ll say, ‘here’s one more thing I’ve got to deal with. I’m not making any money now, and if I make a small mistake, that permanent record will ensure that I face prosecution.'”

On the other hand, Wayne Lamontagne, president of Cobra Trucking in Duncan, B.C., sees an upside to that permanent record. “It will solve all the false accusations we now face. They’ll prove we’re running legal. It’ll remove the black cloud that’s been hanging over this industry for years,” says Lamontagne, who believes EOBRs will help get rates back to where they should be by making it difficult for fly-by-night carriers to promise unrealistic service.

The opinions of owner-ops and drivers, like so many other issues, vary widely. A recent study conducted by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) seems to contradict non-user perceptions that EOBRs would negatively impact driver morale and retention. A surprising 76 percent of users said EOBRs improved driver morale, and 19 percent said they improved driver retention.

Joanne Ritchie of OBAC (the Owner-Operator’s Business Association of Canada) is taking a “wait and see approach” to the technology. Before she’ll support EOBRs, she wants assurances from carriers that driver earnings aren’t going to suffer.

“In many cases, drivers are paid along a distance line. If they’re limited by a time line, something has to give,” she says. “Take the example of a driver crossing the Ambassador Bridge [at the Windsor-Detroit border] at a bad time. It’s not unusual to spend two to three hours inching along in traffic. A mileage-based driver might earn $1.50 for a couple of hours of work, and since the EOBR would log that time as driving, there’d be a corresponding reduction in driving hours that day, possibly compromising a delivery appointment. Who is going to eat that loss?

“I want to see rates increased and safety improved too,” she continues. “But tighter monitoring of a broken system by any means — whether paper or electronic — is ludicrous. Why not just work harder to fix the system?”

But helping to “fix the system” — where it needs fixing — is precisely what EOBR technology will help achieve, says CTA’s Bradley.

A Clear Signal: Paper logs are a joke, says
outspoken CTA chairman Claude Robert

“The (HOS) regulation is not perfect, clearly. But we won’t really know how many flaws are in the rule until it’s truly enforced and then, only then, can we go back to government and explain what needs [correcting],” he says. “We can say ‘we’re all complying and it’s not working. Look at what it’s done to productivity.’ This is how you make the regulations more realistic … because [currently] freight is being delivered anyway.”

Dick Reiser, executive vice-president and general counsel for Werner Enterprises, told Today’s Trucking that they’ve had the system in place since 1998, and when the company flipped the switch in 2004 — going exclusively and legally paperless — they had already made all the necessary adjustments to how they operated.

“Sure, we had to make changes in the operation,” he notes. “But our productivity has improved through the use of better communication and scheduling. We can capture and manage information that allows us to reroute trucks, schedule switches, etc. Whatever it takes to make the fleet run more smoothly.”

Bradley says EOBRs could be the catalyst that forces a change in shippers’ attitudes about truck delays and extending delivery windows, and on the other side, assist carriers themselves in being more responsible in scheduling.

“I often wonder if some of the schedules shippers set are because they really need to do it that way or just because they can since the industry will still jump to do [the work] and then sit hours to unload the freight,” he says. “If EOBRs bring more discipline all around, then that’s a good thing.”

A FINE LINE

Carriers that already use some form of electronic data tracking system to manage such things as fuel purchasing and IFTA reporting, routing, maintenance scheduling, etc., say they’re miles ahead in terms of accuracy and labor costs over their paper-based days. Many also monitor HOS with the systems, but still rely on paper logs for compliance purposes.

With the pending rule change — possibly mandating EOBRs for HOS compliance — carriers are concerned about integrating their current systems into FMCSA’s HOS reporting requirements.

“We’ve made an investment up front and think we have as good as it gets in terms of technology,” says Danny Vettoretti, national fleet manager of Frito Lay Canada, whose U.S. parent was one of the first fleets to adopt GPS-based on-board communications technology to monitor operations, including HOS. “We would definitely have questions if the rule didn’t allow for maintaining that device to be used as part of any HOS monitoring.”

At the other end of the spectrum, most small operations would have little use for a system as complex as Frito Lay’s. The recent ATRI study confirmed that many carriers — depending on their operations — would have a tough time finding any ROI in such devices, considering the capital costs, training, and ongoing maintenance associated with any system more complex than a basic electronic “black box” or digital tachograph device as is used in Europe.

Although it seems unfair to force small carriers into purchasing technology they don’t need, carriers who’ve proactively invested in on-board devices make a strong argument when they insist their current systems should act as the base technology for any EOBR requirement — save for a few hardware and software additions for compliance.

“I would hope that they just spell out what data they need, and simply require it in an electronic format. Then, how you go and do that is up to you,” says Vettoretti. “It lets the market decide and the creativity of suppliers and users come into play ­versus mandating what we all need to use.”

The idea of using separate solutions for different sized carriers has been floated, but enforcement has its own set of concerns there. That community is calling for uniformity in basic aspects of the technology, such as how data is collected, ­displayed, and downloaded. Inspectors worry about drivers using multiple IDs, or logging on to several different devices — as in a slip-seat operation. And they’re concerned about the challenges of training inspectors to use and read multiple data recording platforms.

However FMCSA and Transport Canada settle those issues, it’s likely an EOBR mandate will further divide the industry.

David Bradley has been vocal in the past about a tug-of-war in trucking. But it’s not between big and small carriers — nor rich and poor ones — he says. “It’s an economic issue, not political. There’s a lot of small companies that are technologically advanced and realize that technology is the only way we’re going to be able to improve productivity. There’s no other way.”

Still, there’s a whole class of truckers that aren’t necessarily pulling on either end of the rope. They say they’re honest businessmen that play by the rules, but know they’ve survived this long by making adjustments when the market dictates.

Says one carrier, whose HOS compliance is between 95 and 98 percent without EOBR technology: “We audit logs closely, but you sometimes need that little bit of flexibility. That’s part of doing business,” he says. “You can’t tell me a driver automatically becomes unsafe by going 30 minutes over just to make it home.”

Automatically unsafe, no. But getting stuck on the side of the highway with a pumpkin on wheels could become an uncomfortably common occurrence.