Last week, the always-excellent Todd Dills, Senior Editor with CCJ’s sister magazine, Overdrive, published a survey on driver response to the proposed 2016 Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate proposed last month by FMCSA.
Todd’s story, which you can read here
But before everyone starts clutching their pearls and mopping their foreheads over these findings, consider this: The very same survey revealed that 26 percent of responding owner-operators are already using ELDs for their business, and another 25 percent of responding fleet drivers said they’d simply get an ELD and go on about their business if a law was passed.
If you take those numbers at face value, there’s good reason to panic. There’s also good reason to think an ELD mandate won’t be a big deal at all.
What exactly, is going on here?
First off, let’s note that polling can be notoriously tricky to get right, as Fox News discovered on Election Night back in 2012. Which is why I don’t believe for one minute that 71 percent of all the owner-operators on the road today are going to say, “Screw it!” and quit if an ELD mandate becomes law. It’s one thing to answer a few questions on a survey and say you’ll quit. It’s another thing to think about feeding your family, making the rent and keeping the lights on when push comes to shove. And besides, in case you haven’t heard, jobs are still hard to come by in this economy.
That’s not to suggest we won’t see some attrition if the ELD rule is enacted. Every time a new trucking regulation comes into play, I think the industry loses drivers — particularly on the owner-operator side of the equation. Some of these are “unsafe” operators who don’t want to play by a rulebook that is getting increasingly harder to ignore. Others are simply independent-minded Americans who love the romance of the Open Road and resent any sort of oversight or “interference” in their daily activities.
