Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/933951
February 2018 | Overdrive | 29 Massachusetts' truck-enforcement unit held "hope" for common sense to pre- vail at roadside. "There is going to be a learning curve for drivers and officers," he says. As for Santoianni, he takes special affront to this aspect of mandated ELDs. "Drivers go through different states every day — how can you keep [enforce- ment] uniform?" he asks. "If it's not, then that puts the stress on the driver" wondering whether the hours violation his ELD recorded days ago while he was looking for parking is going to net him a citation down the line. "You go to the truck stops, and they're jam-packed after 5 o'clock at night," Santoianni says. "It's bad enough that common sense isn't so common today, but this is making it all that much worse. … Guys like us who've been trucking a long time and still take pride in what we do — we feel like they're trying to chase us out." Rather than deal with such head- aches, a lot of his friends in trucking, he adds, have been looking around for local opportunities where logs aren't an issue — or just going out to find something else to do altogether. He's lucky, he says, with the exempt truck and his shipper/receiver custom- ers that are familiar day in and day out, many offering opportunities to park on their premises if timing goes haywire. "A lot of guys don't have that," he adds. With the rules the way they are, it feels to them like regulators are "chasing truckers out of trucking to make room for the guys who don't know any better." Owner-operator Rudy Yakym Jr. agrees. Based in the Midwest, he runs a one-ton dually hotshot with a 53-foot step deck hauling travel trailers and other lighter commodities. He's expe- rienced no small amount of frustration with the addition of an ELD in recent weeks. "I missed a drop by 10 minutes, and it cost me an overnight stay on the West Coast," Yakym says, before he could reach the unload location. He says he's "had several situations where having the 14 and 10 as rigid as it is" has cost him. In addition, scheduling pressures as supply chain participants adjust to rigid enforcement have been such that "I've found myself driving when I shouldn't," Yakym says. "I am frustrated. I think we're going to lose a lot of drivers." None of Wyoming-headquartered small tanker fleet owner-operator Mintu Pandher's nine late-model Peterbilt 389s are yet outfitted with ELDs, he reported in the early going after the mandate deadline. A few are exempt gliders, but most are not. His drivers run six states around his home base in Laramie, and he said at the time that no tickets (cita- tions) had been written to any as yet for not having an ELD. Pandher, who participated in protests in Washington, D.C., in October, isn't sure what he'll do in the coming weeks. In the meantime, some measure of soft enforcement is likely in most if not all states, at least through April Fool's Day. Kentucky, among states saying they'll delay no-ELD ticket writing through that date, showed some evi- dence of a little tough love on offer as "encouragement" in the interim. At the scale house counter on I-65 near Franklin on the day the mandate went into effect, an inspector could be heard asking a driver if he was using an ELD — he wasn't. The reality: He hadn't bothered to plug it in yet, given expectation of soft enforcement and no actual training from his fleet. As he exited to get into his truck and pull it into the scale's inspection barn, the officer noted he had better plug the ELD in before he pulled the truck around. Shaking his head later out by his truck and powering up a tablet he'd been given to pair with the ECM's plug-in device, the driver, who declined to be named for this report, said simply, "I'd better roll down there. I think he's mad at me." Gary Buchs weighed in on the shift to the ELD mandate in an Overdrive Radio pod- cast that saw the light of day during the mandate's fi rst week. Buchs urged those with control of their own load selection and negotiation to take advantage of positive rate effects while the iron is hot with cold calculation. "We want to get emotional and say, 'You know, truck driv- ing died on Dec. 18.' But you know what? It didn't die, it just changed, and with every change, there's opportunity. We in this industry that do this job — we've tended to pride ourselves on working more for less, but we need to not work more for less." Listen via OverdriveOn- line.com/OverdriveRadio, or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, Google Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher or another podcast- ing app. LISTEN: 'WITH EVERY CHANGE, THERE'S OPPORTUNITY' Gary Buchs was named 2017 Owner-Operator of the Year by the Truckload Carriers Association and Overdrive.