WASHINGTON — Three out of four drivers admit to have violated the U.S. hours of service regulations — and 55 percent say they’ll continue to deliberately break the rules — an online survey shows.

The survey, conducted by trucking educational group Ol’ Blue USA on its web site (www.OlBlueUSA.org), was confidential and intended to obtain information on commercial drivers’ familiarity with the HOS regulations.

Six days a month was how many days truckers in the survey said
they were operating in violation of the HOS rules

The information gathered from the survey will be used to help Ol’ Blue, USA plan its future education programs and to make certain these programs provide the information and training that drivers want — and need — the most.

Of the 1,094 qualified respondents, 65 percent were company drivers, while 26 percent were leased owner-operators. Another 8 percent were independent owner-operators with their own authority, and 1 percent were involved in other occupations that require a CDL. The results were tabulated by Crump & Associates, a market research company specializing in the transportation industry.

The survey revealed that the majority of drivers believe they understand the HOS regulations for the most part, but have questions. The “alarming, but not surprising” revelation was that 77 percent of the respondents admitted to deliberately violating the HOS regulations in the past, and that 55 percent said they were still breaking the rules.

Drivers perceive that the most common violation is logging time as off-duty when actually on-duty (78 percent). Other common violations included using more than one logbook (21 percent), logging violations correctly in hopes that they will not be noticed (17 percent), and indicating that a team driver is operating the vehicle when they really are not (11 percent).

When asked how many days per month driver’s thought they were operating intentionally in violation of the HOS rules, the average answer was six days. When asked how many days per month they might be operating in violation of the regulations unintentionally, either by accident, oversight or honest mistake, the average answer drivers gave was five days.

A recent highwaySTAR survey showed over 8 in 10
drivers fudge their logbooks in one way or another

Nearly 17 percent of the respondents felt it necessary to violate the HOS rules in order to earn a reasonable income, while 38 percent strongly disagreed with that assumption. Thirty-eight percent said that their company expects them to violate the regulations as part of their job. Some 68 percent (31 percent somewhat and 37 percent strongly agree) thought that law enforcement officers do not know how to relate to commercial motor vehicle drivers.

Most drivers (60 percent) believe strongly that it is important to obey the rules, but 62 percent of those don’t know where to go to get answers to their questions about the HOS regulations. In the end, almost 70 percent of the respondents felt that the HOS regulations are difficult to understand and easy to violate accidentally.

Today’s Trucking’s sister publication highwaySTAR conducted a similar survey recently (click link below to read that complete article). In that report, nearly 84 percent of respondents admitted to “adjusting” their logbook to make some wasted time appear as sleeper or off-duty time in order to extend available driving hours.

Among those drivers, 11.2 hours was the average estimate given for the reduction in driving hours over seven days if logbooks couldn’t be “adjusted.”

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is reportedly putting the finishing touches on a federal rule that requires, in some capacity, electronic on-board recorders — or “black boxes” — on trucks.

The agency was instructed by a federal court in 2004 to seriously consider including EOBRs in a new HOS rewrite. FMCSA did not incorporate an EOBR mandate when it published its revised regulations in 2005, saying it would write a separate rule for the devices.

— with files from Truckinginfo.com