The only thing an electronic log can tighten is behaviour that was against the rules to begin with.
And electronic logs aren't just about hours of service. They also address the problem of drivers keeping two sets of logbooks.
There's no way - short of tracking bracelets or the like - to mandate that a driver actually rests in a rest period. The best we can do is mandate that they not be on duty.
I know the Ontario hours of service rules better than the US rules. Here, you can extend your driving and on-duty time by up to 2 hours if you encounter "adverse driving conditions" that weren't known when the driver started their trip. Don't you have something like this in the US?
If you don't have this, I fully support tweaking the hours of service rules to include an exception like that. Apart from that, what you're really talking about is poor trip planning.
And I'm a transportation engineer who works in road safety. Consider the possibility that I know what I'm talking about on the safety side of the picture.
Actually Ontario I find is quite similar to the US with some exceptions and yes there is a 2-hour provision for extenuating circumstances same here in the United States, but logging such a provision also needs to be backed up and generally discouraged overall as logging it that way can create more problems than it solves.
The problem with people who make these kind of rules rarely if at all includes actual truck drivers in the decision-making process. I would say most of these rules are politically driven in nature , are poorly thought up and implemented by people who have no idea what they're talkin about when it comes to what's on paper and what actually it is like in the real world.
The trucking industry is chosen because the industry is a lucrative cash cow and deregulation of the trucking companies themselves.
As a result things always goes back on the driver himself or herself and rarely if at all on the shippers and the companies where risk and consequence is low for lack of compliance. There have been steps to rectify it because in the US we have what they call a DAC score that reflects on both the driver and the company with real-world penalties.
One of the biggest problems was that hours-of-service actually was working and had statistically improved driver fatigue incidences prior to the last changes which consequently the latter changes made it far worse and forces drivers to pull over when they are not tired and forces drivers to drive when they are tired due to shipping and delivery schedules which are very irregular in the industry.
I blame the political climate primarily because there was working viable systems well prior to the ELD mandates, but that just wasn't good enough for them, they just had to have even more regulation to appease what is in my opinion artificially generated fear mongering for political and monetary gain.
If you were driving a truck yourself you'd swear you're living in a police state we have to go through law enforcement checkpoints every few hundred miles.
I'm sure Canadians truckers are just so sick of it as US Truckers given that not so far back every trucker parked on every weigh station that I passed during my travels through the GTA and left the trucks sitting there and left the MOT eating crow. God I wish truckers had done that in the states. Still I'll take this strike in April any day of the week. It's been long overdue for proper slow-moving convoys to make the scene and a strong statement that's something needs to be done about it.
