Terry Button is a fifth-generation farmer from upstate New York who also works as a long-distance trucker, hauling hay and produce up and down the East Coast.
When I'm away from home, this is my home. Does somebody come in your front door and decide, 'I want to plug into your computer and see where you've been today'?
He's proud of his truck and likes it just the way it is. Inside, the cab is homey and low-tech, with a bed behind the two seats and a CB radio. There's no cruise control and no GPS telling him where to go.
"Canada is that way, Boston is that way, California is that way, Florida is that way," Button jokes. "I can figure out how to get there. I don't need a little box on the dash, telling me, 'Turn left, turn right.' "
But if a new rule proposed by the Department of Transportation goes through, Button will be required to have a high-tech little box on his dashboard — one that's hooked up to his engine — to automatically record how many hours he drives.
"I can't think of anything good that would come from this. If I could, I would tell you honestly, and I can't," says Button. He cares a lot about safety but thinks the proposed new rule would be a mistake.
The device would be a new way to track how well truckers stick to the federal limits on driving hours that exist to keep dangerously tired truckers off the road. Such driving restrictions have been around since the 1930s, and truck drivers document all of their working hours in daily log books. Currently, they are supposed to work for no more than a 14-hour stretch, and only 11 of those hours can be driving hours.
But safety advocates have long argued that these handwritten logs are so easy to fake that they're a joke, noting that they're sometimes referred to in CB slang as "comic books," and that drivers can just lie on the logs and work far more hours.
"Tired truckers are a major, major safety problem," says Jackie Gillan of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety in Washington, D.C. Her group has been urging the government to require electronic onboard recorders for more than 15 years. "Paper log books are easily manipulated. They are easily falsified."
