Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/904267
PULSE November 2017 | Overdrive | 5 and Blue, said more than 2,000 owner-operators rallied at the state capitol in Sacramento, a few hundred at City Council in Fres- no, and around 1,500 in Bakersfield. On the final Friday of the demonstrations, as 30 trucks staged on Con- stitution Avenue behind the White House, 357 power units rolled from a Sikh temple in Yuba City, California, headed south toward Sacramento and beyond. Numbers grew to more than 500, Atwal says, and some drivers formed a slow, rolling roadblock. As many as 80 operators were ticketed for "driving with flashers on, having stickers on their wind- shield" and other minor infractions. "To be quite honest, I think that was fair," he says. "Organizers at Yuba City didn't get the proper permits." Eufala, Oklahoma- based driver Linda Stock- ton, who works for a three- truck owner-operator, was close to tears Wednesday of that week near DOT headquarters. "We're just trying to sur- vive, like everybody else," she said. Stockton feels that the weight of everything from rising prices and added costs — ELDs soon to be another — is leading her away from being able to make a living in trucking. "Without driving, without the lifestyle, I'm not the same person," she said. "I don't feel like I'm serving my country" in the way she was meant to. Until very recently, the Federal Motor Carri- er Safety Administration has largely ignored fatigue monitoring technology, and therefore any potential it has for a significant revision of the hours of service. Instead, regulators for decades have tinkered with the hours of service as if it was a magic template to solve the fatigue problem for every individual in every trucking application. Any- one familiar with trucking's diverse operations and its infinite disrupters knows this to be a pipe dream. In the meantime, fleets, motivated by good results and potentially lower insurance premi- ums, are beginning to integrate fatigue moni- toring tech, as our "Fatigue's fast track" series has reported. Most notably, they're adopting road-facing dashcams, which can be used for detecting unsafe driving possibly caused by fatigue. Now some dashcam vendors are pushing driver-facing cams that are increasingly able to detect potential fatigue and/or distraction in the driver. Other monitoring tech, having succeeded in other industries, is also beginning to penetrate trucking. For owner-operators, this is a mixed bag: • Driver-facing cams are abhorrent to many drivers, for obvious reasons. Even if eventual legal challenges regarding such use of the cams fail, some fleet owners will respect drivers enough to avoid the practice anyway. After all, a fleet owner who wants to monitor for fatigue can choose other technologies. As for the fleets that insist on the cams, they will notice if enough drivers choose to work for fleets that don't. • Other than road-facing cams, relatively limited in their fatigue detection capabilities, most other monitoring systems involve a wear- able device. That, too, is considered by some to be a personal intrusion. Does the benefit outweigh that concern? Many would say yes. Fatigue is widely consid- ered to be a direct or contributing cause for thousands of four-wheeler and trucker deaths annually. • It's hard to fathom the managerial chaos that could result from abandoning a clock- based HOS and instead relying on technology that rules wheth- er any driver is fit to start driv- ing or continue driving. Likely it would require a very gradual integration of fatigue monitor- ing. From a driver perspective, less subjugation to a highly flawed HOS, and therefore also to electronic logging devices, could be a big silver lining. • As fleets try out moni- toring systems, certain ones and certain combinations of them with other data streams will prove to work better than others. FMCSA would have to weigh this experience, as well as continue its own testing, before even proposing a radical HOS change. Many of today's drivers will be retired or enjoying an eternal subterranean 10-hour break before that day comes, but it is coming. Off the clock mheine@randallreilly.com By Max Heine Editorial director SmartDrive last month announced its SmartSense system, which uses data from two cameras, the engine computer and other sourc- es to identify driver distraction and fatigue.