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Guess What? Trip Recorders Are Already on Board
Tom Berg
Have you seen the news about the feds wanting trucks to have trip recorders? This is supposedly part of the new Hours of Service regulations now under review (see page 7). Talk about mandatory trip recorders has been buzzing around D.C. for several years, and most people in the industry are against it, partly because they think it will be costly.
There are also privacy issues. Motor carrier executives wonder who will be allowed to look at trip data stored on the truck, and under what circumstances. Can a police officer look at it and, if he finds that a driver's been speeding or driving too many hours, can he write a ticket? If the truck has been in a collision, will the trip data work for or against the driver, especially if the other vehicle has none?
Is this Big Brother in the making? One of the appeals of truck driving is the freedom from the boss looking over your shoulder. Certainly that freedom will disappear with trip recorders. Or will it?
Back in the early 1960s, I drove newspaper delivery trucks equipped with tachographs that recorded speed and engine revs on paper graphs. The "tachs" were there to keep us young part-timers under control.
Interstate highways were rare, and Wisconsin's speed limit for commercial trucks was 45 mph. The company's limit was 50 mph, but managers allowed us to cruise at 52. That's where we'd keep the speedo needle glued, and the lines on any tach graph showed it. The bosses seldom looked at the graphs, but we knew they could, and that slowed us down.
Once in a great while, a tach would break and we'd be free. This happened to me only twice in the four years I drove for the Milwaukee Journal. The first was on a small 1-ton panel truck assigned to a route not far out of the city. When I saw its speedometer was broken, I thought, "Now I can make time!" I did, driving 55 to 65 mph wherever I could.
But not for long. It was snowing lightly in the wee hours, and I spun out while trying to negotiate a sharp turn on a curvy back road. Undaunted, I got going and swooped into another sharp curve, again too fast. The truck spun 180 degrees, and suddenly I was sliding backwards, toward a utility pole. I pumped the brakes and stopped the truck, though my heart was still beating well above 100 mph.
That was it. I forgot about "making time" and drove sanely. Because of the worsening snow, I seldom even got to the company speed limit.
The second time I had a broken tach I chose not to take advantage of it. It was my very last run, in July 1965, just before I went into the Army. I could have ignored the speed limit. What were they gonna do, fire me? But I didn't want to go out on that note, whether or not anyone later looked at the tach chart. I appreciated the job so I could work my way through college.
The other day I called the company (now the Journal Sentinel) to see if it still used tachs. "No," said Matt Quinn, the transportation manager and a former part-time driver as well. "We stopped using them in the early '90s. We can get that information anytime we want from the electronics on the truck."
Come to think of it, so can almost any other fleet manager. If your truck has an electronically controlled diesel (and it probably does if it was built in the last five or so years), a diagnostic tool can be plugged into the electronic control module, and out will come a history of engine and road speeds, among many other things.
Gee, an enterprising highway patrol officer could carry one of these tools and conceivably find out electronically what you've been up to.
Would he need a court order to do so? Maybe. Under the rumored regs, maybe he could any time he wanted. Would you like it? Not if the guy were badge-heavy, or you feel strongly about your "privacy." But if you were doing your job safely and legally (which your boss would want, given the new official scrutiny), then what would you have to hide?
Anyway, looking back at my days driving for the Journal, it was probably the best job I ever had, in spite of the tachs.
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