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All American truckers will soon transmit a swarm of data on
their performance. Proponents claim it will make the roads safer
but some wonder what else the data could be used for. |
As
reported by The Atlantic: Because his truck is fitted with a refrigerator unit,
Dick Pingel often hauls food: usually sausage or cheese, products long
associated with his home state, Wisconsin. He’s been a professional trucker for
30 years, covered over three and a half million miles, and never had a single
chargeable accident.
“One of the reasons that most of us came out here, myself
included,” he explains, “was because of the independence. After the Vietnam War,
a lot of vets came out here. It was probably because they didn't want somebody
peering over their shoulder all the time.”
But Pingel, along with more than three million of his
fellow truckers in the United States, is facing a regulatory upheaval which will
cost his industry an estimated $2 billion and fundamentally change the way he
does his job. Over the next few years, it will become mandatory, by law, for all
American truckers to carry a tracking device, an electronic on-board recorder
(EOBR), in their vehicle. And Pingel isn't happy about it.
Truckers are on the forefront of workplace surveillance.
With the availability of cheap sensors and hyper-competitive companies seeking to
maximize their profits, any human action done on the clock may become subject to
increased scrutiny and what will probably be called
optimization. If you want to see the future of work,
take a look at IBM’s efforts around
call
center workers or the
battle
over electronic armbands at Tesco in Ireland. It’s not that
data hasn't always been used in corporate decision-making, it’s that it’s
possible to capture so much more now. With more data,
comes more control.
There are hundreds of different types of
EOBR (or ELD), and
they vary greatly in terms of cost and capability. In order to comply with the
incoming federal mandate, however, they all have to track when a truck’s engine
is running, record its duty status and ensure that drivers aren't working for
more than 14 consecutive hours, including a maximum of 11 actual driving hours
within that window.
The idea is to make “Hours of Service” log-keeping, which
drivers are already required to do manually, more accurate. It’s also an attempt
to reduce crashes. A 2006 government survey suggested that
around
13% of accidents are fatigue-related and there’s no doubt that
road haulage is a dangerous industry. In fact, it’s one of the most dangerous in
America.
For Pingel, though, the EOBR won’t provide any obvious
benefits. “They’re forcing me to put something in that’s not gonna help me any,”
he says. “And they keep saying, ‘Well, it saves you time…’ You know, I can do a
lot. I can write up a log book in the same amount of time that it takes me to
program what I’m doing into the EOBR.”
He’s been testing one model in preparation for the
mandate coming into force. For one thing, he says the graphical display, which
gradually turns from green to red as he uses up his allowed time on the road,
creates an unnecessary sense of urgency that makes the last hour of his run feel
more stressful than it did before.
Pingel has specifically chosen his EOBR for its
simplicity and low cost to try and minimize its impact on him. However, there
are many competing devices on the market which can gather much more detailed
information on speed, engine revving, hard-braking and fuel
efficiency.
This data is often centrally monitored by carrier control
rooms in real time. With the prospect of a mandate on the horizon, many other tech firms have seized
on the opportunity to profit.
It’s not an entirely new concept. Rather, it’s a
21st Century version of devices like the 1911 Jones
Recorder. An early example of
a
tachograph designed for use in road vehicles, the Jones
Recorder was heavily marketed across Europe and America in newspaper and
magazine advertisements. These claimed that business owners who relied on a
fleet of delivery vehicles would, for the first time, be able to accurately
track the number of stops drivers made, check what speed they had traveled at
and know how many miles they covered. It was, boasted the tagline, “A constant
check on the driver.”
Among truckers, EOBRs are sometimes derided as “baby
sitters” and there is some resentment towards the growing emphasis on
data-informed hiring practices within the industry. Many are aware that a record
which shows a trucker is slightly harder on fuel thanks to the way he revs,
idles, and brakes could mean that he won’t get a job in an increasingly
competitive market. The nominal rationale may be to increase safety, but as
Pingel puts it, “it’s all turned into bottom line.”
Fears that trucking companies could misuse their expanded
awareness of where their drivers are and what they are doing have already been
expressed in court. In 2011, the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association
(OOIDA), of which Pingel is a long-term member, launched a lawsuit against the
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the authority responsible
for drafting the rule.
OOIDA complained that there was a risk of driver
harassment, in which carriers, cognizant that a trucker is running out of time
to complete his delivery, might goad him or her into getting back on the road
when it’s not safe to do so. Fatigue, inclement weather, or traffic problems
could all be ignored for the sake of the time sheet.
For Todd Spencer, Executive Vice President of OOIDA, it
was a clear threat to driver safety. “These are the kinds of decisions that
experienced, professional drivers have to make every day,” he comments. “These
are safety decisions. Technology can’t take the place of sound
judgement.”
With a strong legal case and testimonies from truckers
who claimed that this had already happened to them, OOIDA won their suit and the
mandate was vacated for redrafting. The latest version still hasn't been
authorized and published, though it’s expected before the end of the year. Most
observers believe the final rule will be enforceable on American highways by
2015. Truckers who haven’t yet implemented an EOBR are therefore living in the
twilight of an era when driving without one can be described as
legal.
But in many areas, the road haulage industry has already
been modernizing itself through such technology. Danny Knapp of Illinois has had
a commercial driver’s license since 1998. Over the years he’s hauled livestock,
liquid commodities like fertilizer and produce such as corn. He says that
trucking has never had an especially positive public image but that truckers,
once portrayed as cowboys in the 1978 Sam Peckinpah film
Convoy, have long been trying to clean up their image.
“Most drivers want to be safe,” he explains. “The outlaw
types used to be cool, even heroes, but now we kind of alienate them.” He
recalls hearing stories about “truckers’ tooth-picks” – tooth-picks dipped in
liquid speed and chewed.
But could truckers regain their edginess by evolving into
a new breed of hacker? Traditionally, log book “fudging”, where duty records
were falsified in some way, was understood to be common. It was at least
prevalent enough to be romanticized in popular songs like Dave Dudley’s
“
Six Days on
the Road,” which cheerfully references several other
stereotypical trucking misdemeanors.
 |
| A hacked EOBR system playing solitaire. |
Some old habits die hard, according to
Karen Levy, a PhD
candidate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton. Levy has been researching
the impact of EOBRs in the trucking industry and says that many drivers are
already experimenting with hacks and methods of tampering.
“Truckers are a particularly savvy and motivated bunch,”
she says. “Some drivers have figured out how to temporarily disconnect certain
EOBR models from the truck, or to otherwise block their signals so they can't
record data. Another approach is to drive using multiple driver ID numbers which
are sometimes called ‘ghost logs.’”
There’s even a YouTube video showing how an
EOBR can be hacked to
play games, and Danny Knapp, although he’s not tried it
himself, says he can imagine a future where shady individuals at truck stops
offer to tamper with on-board recorders for a small fee, just like they offer to
remove speed limiters and increase horsepower today.
Companies, too, might have an incentive to
surreptitiously add “extra” hours to a driver’s electronic log so they can
complete a delivery without running out of time. Dick Pingel says he’s heard
stories like this already from drivers he’s met on the job.
Nevertheless, the trucking industry is gradually falling
into line with the idea of mandated electronic recorders. Many of the bigger
carriers have made a vigorous effort to adapt early and absorb the cost of
implementing EOBRs across their fleet as soon as possible. Thomas Scollard, Vice
President of Dedicated Contract Carriage Services for Penske Logistics confirms
that the devices have improved planning and saved on huge amounts of paperwork.
As many might suspect, Penske’s stature has not been
irrelevant here. “We’re fortunate that, the size we are, we can look at
something like this, put some resources against it and say, OK, how do we make
this work for us in a positive way?” explains Scollard.
But there are plenty of independents who see new
technology as an opportunity too. Cliff Downing, of Iowa, is one of them. Like
Dick Pingel, he’s been on the road for three decades, but unlike Pingel, he’s
embraced the EOBR with gusto, and even claims that it’s benefited him
financially.
“My gross revenues have been up year over year each year
since using electronic logs,” he says. “Now is it due to electronic logs? Not
the machine itself, it’s the efficiency that’s been forced onto us by the
machine.”
A trucker who, by his own account has, “pulled just about
everything there is to pull,” Downing provides several arguments about making
the most of the technology at his disposal. For example, he carefully modified
his brand new truck with a tuned-up, slightly older engine, to guarantee that it
would run at almost two gallons more to the mile than the industry average,
saving him thousands of dollars in fuel each year.
Like his vehicle, Downing has streamlined his business
over the years. He likes to operate within a specific 5-600 mile radius and
relies on a list of reliable customers who ship loads such as bulk oatmeal and
coiled steel for use in manufacturing.
He says people who complain about the EOBR mandate are
simply expressing an innate but unhelpful resistance to change. After all, in
Europe, simpler electronic tachographs have been mandatory since the 1970s. And
for him, the digital recorder has been a boon. “If I need a log for an officer
alongside the road, it’s kind of like… how do ya want it? Do you want me to fax
it to you? Here, I can show you on my smartphone! Oh hey, I can open up my
Macbook Air, you can look at it on my laptop,” he explains. “You take your pick
Mr Cop, I’ll show you any way you want.”
Downing, who has degrees in Mathematics and Computer
Science from the University of Alaska, perhaps gets some of his resilience from
the military, being a veteran who saw action in Korea and the evacuation of
Vietnam.
Later, he quit working for the government because he
longed for greater independence. “I worked better in a ‘nobody-hassling-me’ kind
of environment,” he says, before describing his subsequent life as an “ice road
trucker” in Alaska, where existence was “frontiersy” and where planning for
harsh conditions and break-down was something your life depended on.
The same strategic planning now manifests itself in
Downing’s adoption of the EOBR. “I modified my operation to make it work,” he
says. “As much as the libertarian in me says no to mandates, they’re coming. You
might as well just wake up, face it, and deal with it.”
Trucking is a very big industry, with a diverse range of
people in it. Some of them distrust the rise of electronic logging while others
have seized upon it. None of the truckers I interviewed discounted the
importance of autonomy, however. When I asked Danny Knapp why he liked the job
he said this: “It’s just a unique feeling to get on the interstate, riding on
top of this 80,000 pound machine and driving 65 miles an hour. When I do it I
feel calm and I feel free. I can’t explain it any further than
that.
“Maybe it’s something about leaving. You know, we’re
always leaving some place. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s a very free
feeling to me.”
Technology might disrupt that, but then again it might
not. Knapp, for one, is not opposed to the mandate. Trucking, as well as being
big, is also a competitive industry and businesses are constantly looking for
ways of understanding their operations in more
detail.
Today, OOIDA says it is not currently
planning any further legal challenges against the FMCSA, whose rule-making is
nearly complete. Everything now falls to the truckers. As technology encroaches
they seem determined, one way or another, to retain their professional
independence, the spirit of the open road.
