Let’s go back a few years. It was 2000, I think, the May 24th long weekend. I got a call from a driver who’d been pinched in an MTO logbook blitz at the eastbound scale on Highway 401 near Tilbury.

That’s less than half an hour’s drive from the Ambassador Bridge. He, and legions of other drivers, were on their way home for the first long weekend of the summer. Cottages scheduled to be opened, boats ready for the waves, campsites booked, and kids — lots of kids — expecting daddy home for the fun.

Problem was, daddy was sitting in the scale compound at Tilbury.

Predictably, MTO was watching logbooks pretty closely that weekend. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Drivers heading home for the weekend; log books tuned up for the occasion. But the savvy inspectors just dug their way through fuel receipts, toll receipts, and other bits of evidence to uncover the ugly truth: drivers were cheating on the logs in order to get home for the weekend.

So, as a responsible editor, I wrote back to the driver, explaining that I thought MTO was in the right –I even wrote a column in highwaySTAR, (Today’s Trucking’s sister magazine, aimed at drivers) about the incident.

They have a duty to keep the roads safe for all users, and that turning a blind eye to HOS compliance wasn’t a good idea at anytime, even if a lot of holiday plans hung in the balance.

That was the official response. Of course my true feelings rested with the driver and his mighty unhappy offspring. I’ve been there too, and truthfully, would be reluctant to let something like a logbook stand in the way of my vacation plans.

When you’re under pressure — whether it’s The Man, the boss, or the kids — most of us will weigh the likelihood of getting caught against wrath yet to be incurred for failing to deliver.

It’s not enough to simply say to a driver — and by extension, his family, “you lose,” when something out of the ordinary threatens to wreck long-made plans.

A one-hour delay can compromise an entire week’s work, what with missed appointments, altered schedules, limited windows of opportunity, etc. A driver who makes minor but necessary adjustments to his or her logbook isn’t the biggest problem here. It’s rules that are written for some hard-wired interpretation that enforcement people can use, and later, lawyers can use against us.

We all know that this emphasis on compliance has less to do with real safety than it does with liability. HOS violations aren’t always about gaining some competitive advantage — though I’ll admit those guys are out there. It’s about positioning, scheduling, and doing the best you can under the circumstances to keep everybody in the equation happy, including customers, dispatchers, enforcement — and the family. A few stolen minutes here and there don’t make a driver a threat to society.

And neither do the administrative violations. A driver who greases the truck on his day off, but fails to log it on-duty, is not a safety risk. Yet in MTO’s eyes, he’s in violation. Period. With violations, of course, come CVOR points — six of them for an HOS violation. Insurance companies and lawyers don’t like CVOR points.

The problem with HOS is there’s no legal grey area, and there really needs to be some neutral ground there.

I fear that with the advent of electronic on-board recorders (EOBR), the gaps that paper can accommodate will completely disappear. Has anyone ever questioned the apparent huge number of HOS violations recorded against the relatively tiny number of fatigue-related incidents? I don’t believe for a minute that the history of violations is any predictor of the likelihood of a fatigue-related accident — especially for the backyard, Saturday afternoon mechanic, or for the driver that neglects to fill in the licence number on his log sheet. Yet these all wind up on the same rap sheet.

I can see where an electronic on-board recorder could make a driver’s life considerably better, given its ability to accurately track wasted time. I’m sure a better case could be made for billing that time to the offending party, but who do you bill for a border delay or a traffic jam? We know who gets the bill for a forfeited houseboat rental.

If it can be shown that EOBRs will improve the lives of drivers and their families, I’m all for them. If they’ll put more money a driver’s pocket by ensuring he or she is paid for all the work they do, I say bring ’em on.

If EOBRs are about improving safety, please show me the numbers that prove the assertion. But if EOBRs are nothing more than a tool to limit liability, I suggest there are less intrusive ways of doing that. I’m open to persuasion.