The Electronic Logging Device Mandate: What it means for Alaskan truckers.

• Author: Friedman, Sam
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

Tt's been looming on the horizon for years, and how it's here: the federal mandate for long-haul truck drivers to use equipment called Electronic Logging Devices (ELD) to track the number of hours they work.

The mandate comes from a major federal transportation funding bill passed in 2012. Its intent was to reduce truck accidents by holding drivers to restrictions on the number of hours they drive, which in Alaska is a maximum of fifteen driving hours per day and twenty working hours. The new rule has been described as both a major cultural transformation in the trucking industry and as a relatively minor change in record keeping. It's a big transformation because many truck drivers pride themselves on their independence. Truck drivers in the 49th State have to be especially independent because of the size and remoteness of the state, and truck drivers here have special driving-hour rules that allow them to drive longer days than truckers in the rest of the country. With the mandate, drivers are always being observed and can have their decisions to rest or continue driving second-guessed because they must carry a device that connects to the truck engine and determines if the truck is in motion.

But the mandate can also be seen as a small adjustment because It doesn't change the underlying rules behind the driving hours, which remain the same as paper logbook days.

As the mandate has gone from concept to law, driver attitudes in Alaska have generally moved from suspicion to acceptance and even to appreciation for the new hour-logging machines, says Aves Thompson, executive director of the Alaska Trucking Association, an organization that's always supported the new ELD rules.

"Most of the drivers initially were skeptical, but now after using them for a while, you can't take them away from them if you wanted to. They've become accustomed to it and they like it." Thompson says.

A big reason the devices have become popular with drivers is that the automatic system protects them from having their safety records dinged for paperwork errors. In the paper log days, half the violations were this type of "form and manner" violations, Thompson says.

"That could mean, instead of putting 'Anchorage, Alaska,' you only wrote 'Anchorage.' That was a violation," Thompson says. "With the electronic log books, half the Hours of Service violations are gone."

Enforcement

The federal deadline to stop using paper logs and start using ELDs or an AOBRD, an older...