Demand for team service has increased, but it is not a particularly popular panacea. “Due to the restrictions, more and more clients are requesting teams,” McKenzie says, “but the problem is you can’t get a team to sit around in California or Arizona for a day and a half waiting to load. They just won’t do it; they want to load quickly and get back on the road.”
Other solutions are more regional and include short hauls with strategically placed distribution hubs. For local deliveries and trucks driving less than 100 miles, ELDs are not required. And if it seems ELDs favor large shippers over smaller outfits, that’s not a coincidence, and there is reasonable speculation throughout the industry that it will bolster the already-growing trend towards consolidation.
“These rules will absolutely impact consolidation,” asserts Rubini. “The only way to get service hours back to the drivers is to put it on the shippers or the consignee through consolidation or quicker loading. This will give drivers more driving hours, therefore getting goods to their destinations sooner.”
A Race Against Time
Regardless of what the future benefits may be, the dawn of the ELD era represents a huge investment of time, effort, and expense across the board, for both big and small carriers.
“There’s so much to get a handle on,” admits Tim Cohran, operations manager for Gregory Family Express, Inc., an asset-based trucking firm in Atlanta.
After selecting an ELD model, there were costs of adoption, implementation, and training, Cohran relates. This also included hardware, software, training, and “pages and pages of new regulations to review,” he adds, as well as for companies “to be aware of all the exceptions and exemptions in case a truck gets inspected.”
A familiar refrain: hours of service
“On top of all that,” Cohran emphasizes, “you have this 14-hour clock staring you in the face, so it turns into a real race against time—particularly with what we’re hauling most of the time.
“Produce haulers are already under significantly more pressure to deliver on time because of the nature of the product,” he notes, and “hours of service restrictions are making an existing problem even bigger.”
With hours of service at the heart of most ELD discussions, the impact of FMCSA’s recent clarifications on pickup or delivery points and driving allowances for safe parking remain to be seen as the industry adjusts to full compliance. Nevertheless, as DeMatteis points out, there are still plenty of complications for anyone involved in transporting and delivering perishables. “Delays at shippers and receivers, personal conveyance rules, traffic, road closures, just to name a few. These were already big problems before the ELD rules went into effect, and they haven’t made them any easier.”
