It will always be possible for someone to claim to be driving, while someone else was actually driving.
The only fix is to have police on the highway randomly pulling over trucks, and checking that the driving license of the actual driver matches who the computer thinks is the driver.
Anyone who is 'accidentally logged in as someone else' gets a warning... And if they are caught again, a lifetime commercial trucking ban.
This is super, super common. Interestingly enough, if your federal scores (FMCSA ratings) drop too low, the police are obliged to stop the truck. Needless to say, this is not conducive to a prosperous future in trucking.
More generally, this will keep happening until drivers start getting paid for their time at pickup/dropoff. Right now, the suppliers can basically just ignore the driver for as long as they want, as it doesn't cost them anything. The driver, however, is capped at 10 hours driving or 14 hours total, so they have to lie and pretend to sleep when at a destination.
Truckers are basically where instant delivery meets the cold, hard realities of physical existence.
Federal licensing, lifetime industry ban for your second bug violation, video monitoring and keycard access, etc, etc. Imagine if the stuff that's being floated in here for truckers was instead being floated for us. It'd be like forcing your average CRUD developer to work in a SCIF. There would be an uproar.
I hope nobody wonders why educated white collar professionals historically don't do too well at the hands of the lower classes when regimes change.
If I was a owner of a trucking company I would be livid at the waste of employee, expensive capital asset (the truck), and fuel. I would definitely be tracking this behaviour from clients and factor that into quotes and contracts.
> I would definitely be tracking this behaviour from clients and factor that into quotes and contracts.
Yeah, I think they'd like to, but that basically means you'll go out of business as the suppliers have a lot more pricing power than the trucking companies.
Yeah, I thought of that. The ideal would be to price it at a level which makes it attractive but draw up the contract such that excessive messing around on the part of the client results in penalties or extra charges.
From what I've seen the CEO and upper management probably aren't aware of how much the yard manager is messing drivers about. For every truck load incoming there are probably 10 people throughout the business desperate for what's on that load.
There are 3.5 million truckers in the USA, with typical career lengths of perhaps 30 years. So you need to inspect 3200 trucks/day.
If an inspector takes 15 minutes to do an inspection (checking name, as well as visual roadworthiness checks), you need 100 inspectors. Or about 2 per state.
As soon as word gets out that flouting these rules is career-ending, then the industry will probably mostly regulate itself. Seems pretty easy to solve this problem...
This has already happened, there's a reason most trucking companies last less than 18 months.
Or just check 100% of audit logs against payroll/taxes. Ghost drivers would show up as not being paid. The real drivers would have fewer hours logged than they’re getting paid for.
No stops required.
It really depends on how they feel about you how detailed they get.
Crimes as a business is just not policed anymore.
You would compare the audit logs to the payroll logs.
If someone is getting paid for hours that aren’t in the logs, it’s a clear violation.
> The only fix is to have police on the highway randomly pulling over trucks, and checking that the driving license of the actual driver matches who the computer thinks is the driver.
That wouldn’t even address the problem. The historical logs are being altered, not the current driver. If you pulled them over then the computer would have them shown as the driver.
Definitely not that hard. Just audit payroll and driver logs to see if they match. The truck drivers aren’t driving extra hours for free.