FMCSA asks for responses to potential ELD guidelines modifications
Dive Temporary:
- The FMCSA is looking for public touch upon potential modifications to guidelines round digital logging units, that are required in industrial vehicles to trace drivers’ hours of service.
- The company mentioned it’s trying to “enhance the readability of present laws” and handle “considerations concerning the technical specs raised by business stakeholders,” in response to an advance discover of proposed rulemaking posted Friday. The general public remark interval ends Nov. 15.
- The FMCSA is asking for feedback on 5 particular areas: applicability to pre-2000 engines, addressing ELD malfunctions, the method for eradicating ELD merchandise from its listing of licensed units, technical specs, and ELD certification.
Dive Perception:
The FMCSA is contemplating updates to its ELD guidelines almost 5 years after implementing the necessities.
Greater than 400 responses have been posted to the Federal Register because the discover was posted Friday. Lots of the feedback submitted by drivers and owner-operators as of this week balked on the notion of requiring the tech in older mannequin vehicles, specifically, after the company initially exempted them. A couple of driver steered company officers spend time behind the wheel of a truck for a greater understanding of the challenges drivers face.
CM Jenkins, a self-identified owner-operator of a 1987 379 tractor, mentioned pre-2000 exemptions ought to proceed as a result of extreme price and unreliability of models out there for handbook engine vehicles.
“That is an unreasonable [and] pricey difficulty that can put many small corporations [and] proprietor operators out of enterprise on this day [and] time that is likely one of the hardest occasions ever seen within the trucking business,” Jenkins wrote in a remark.
The Small Enterprise in Transportation Coalition wrote in a letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sept. 18 that ELDs “haven’t stopped the issue of falsification of logs as FMCSA and Congress [led] the general public to imagine” would occur.
The business’s two foremost advocacy teams are break up on the problem of ELDs typically. The Proprietor-Operator Impartial Drivers Affiliation, which lobbied in opposition to the 2017 mandate, mentioned that among the proposed modifications might deliver advantages.
“The brand new discover opens the door to bettering some features of the ELD mandate which have triggered operational and compliance issues for 1000’s of drivers however we oppose any efforts to finish the exemption on older vehicles,” Jay Grimes, OOIDA director of federal affairs, mentioned in an emailed assertion. “This is also an opportunity for FMCSA to lastly set up a official ELD certification course of so motor carriers should not have to take a position additional capital continually changing defective ELDs.”
The American Trucking Associations helps ELD mandates. HOS-tracking tech is extra correct, simpler to entry and harder to falsify than paper logs, Invoice Sullivan, ATA’s govt vice chairman of advocacy, wrote in a July letter to the FMCSA.
“Arguments in opposition to the ELD mandate are arguments in favor of violating the hours-of-service guidelines,” Sullivan wrote.
