Recently many governments have framed a series of road safety mandates to increase safety and awareness for all the commercial motor vehicles. In order for them to remain compliant, the government has imposed the use of ELDs to track hours of service(HOS) wherein some limits have been defined pertaining to driving hours, speed limits etc. Under this rule, a driver for any commercial motor vehicle will only be allowed to driver for certain hours and needs to use the sleeper birth for certain duration, to rest breaks etc. Let's dive into detail to know more.
Hours Of Service
The Hours of Service were published with reference to tracking working hours of your fleet drivers in US or Canada only for Commercial motor vehicles which is used to transport commercial goods only. This mandate was formulated to prevent road accident caused by driver fatigue etc by specifying the number of hours for which a driver can be driving continuously on road. This mandate also ensures the use of Electronic Logging Device to track HOS which are basically connected to vehicle's engine and records the driving logs to collect HOS reports. This has also saved the driver from the trouble of keeping and maintaining the paper logs. The HOS violations are considered as a criminal offense and can have a huge impact on the driver's future career.
Driving Limit Rules
According to the HOS mandate, in USA the drivers can only drive maximum of 14 consecutive hours and then are required to take a break of 0.5 hour. However, in Canada, the driving hours are just limited to 11. However, the off duty hours are fixed as 10 for both countries. These driving hours are automatically recorded through ELD. Non-compliance to the mandate can lead to HOS violations and the fleet can face criminal charges for the same.