Senators recharge mandatory EOBR bill

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A senatorial duo in the U.S. is reintroducing legislation to mandate "tamper-resistant" electronic onboard recorders on trucks.

Senators Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) are trying again to pass the Commercial Driver Compliance Improvement Act, which expired at the end of the congressional session last November.

"The trucking industry faces the constant balancing act of keeping fatigued drivers off the road while ensuring stores are full of merchandise," Pryor said in a press release. “After several meetings with the trucking industry and Senate hearings on highway safety, I believe the most effective solution is to require the use of electronic on-board recorders."

Under the legislation The DOT will be responsible for issuing regulations within 18 months of the bill’s enactment, as well as setting design and performance standards for the devices.

"The tamper-resistant devices must be capable of communicating with the engine’s control module, identifying the individual operating the vehicle, recording driving time, providing real-time recording of a vehicle’s location and enabling law enforcement to access the information contained in the device during roadside inspections," Pryor states.

The bill is a parallel track of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s two-phase rule to require EOBRs.

The first part of the FMCSA bill, which affects truckers who violate hours of service rules 10 percent of the time, will be implemented in June 2012. A ‘broader mandate" which covers most trucks in the industry is projected to take effect around 2015 (although there’s talk that "large" carriers might have to make the move first).

Proponents of the Senate version say this bill should expedite compliance, shore up loopholes and better define technical specifications as well as establish a consistent interface for enforcement personnel.

Jerry Gabbard, a VP at Continental Automotive, whose Commercial Vehicle and Aftermarket group is a major electronic logbook and digital tachograph supplier, says the FMCSA proposal does not address "some of the outstanding technical concerns or functional concerns."

Gabbard is concerned with the lack of a standardized interface — specifically how enforcement officers will be expected to uniformly handle and read a range of data from a variety of devices, wirelessly or not.

And the regulation needs to allow cost-effective options for carriers, such as small fleets and owner-ops that don’t need wireless communication and full-fledged fleet management systems, he says.

As well, "the tamper proofness of the data and making it as bulletproof as possible is critical," he says.

Some big fleets welcomed the announcement of a new Pryor-Alexander bill.

"EOBRs will improve safety on our nation’s highways by applying technology to document driver compliance to the Hours-of-Service rules. Early analysis of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) data suggests that carriers with higher levels of Hours-of-Service compliance have lower crash involvement," says Craig Harper, COO of J.B. Hunt Transport.

Not surprisingly, though, the effort was criticized by the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), which has been a vocal opponent of mandatory EOBRs.

“With all due respect to Senator Pryor, EOBRs will not improve highway safety. However, they sure will cost small-business truckers their hard-earned money and their privacy," said Todd Spencer, executive VP of OOIDA. “EOBRs are nothing more than over-priced record keepers lobbied by big business trucking companies to wipe out small business competition."

Spencer reiterated that EOBRs cannot accurately and automatically record a driver’s hours of service and duty status — they can only track the movement and location of a truck, and they require human interaction to record any change of duty status.


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