Itchavi

I have been working on an hours of service piece, this post is pretty good but here are some of the gritty details behind the current Hours of Service rules. Summer of 1934, Minneapolis. Teamsters Local 574 struck twice, in May and again from July into August. Shorter hours and consistent pay were staples to the strike. This strike would turn bloody as drivers and police officers would lose their lives in a clash. This would lead the industry to the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 putting interstate trucking under the ICC. When the ICC sat down to write hours limits, it said it had "no statistical or other information" on how long a driver could safely work. So it went with: "a man cannot work efficiently or be a safe driver if he does not have an opportunity for approximately 8 hours sleep in 24." National Safety Council data showed trucks were 1 in 8 registered vehicles, but 1 in 3 of the drivers in fall-asleep crashes. A 1936 Bureau of Public Roads check of about 7,000 for-hire drivers found 25.7% working more than 12 hours a trip. 4.2% went past 20. On April 25, 1938, the ICC asked the Public Health Service to study it. They tested 889 drivers. Rested, 9% scored low. After 12+ hours behind the wheel, 42% did. No crashes were measured. The safety link was "inferred." And the report came out in 1941, after the 1939 rules were already on the books. The order came Dec 29, 1937. It got stayed and rewritten, and for trucks it didn't take effect until March 1, 1939: 60 hours a week on duty, 10 hours of driving, then 8 off. Prior to the study being completed. Before that, the 1938 rules with "no statistical information" was the law. That same 1941 federal fatigue study looked back on the industry's early "legendary drivers ... who gloried in exerting themselves at the wheel close to the limits of human endurance." A direct quote. Today it's 11 hours driving inside a 14-hour window, a 30-minute break after 8 behind the wheel, and 60/70. The last big rewrite took effect in September 2020. At the 2025 International Roadcheck, false logs were 10% of driver out-of-service violations. CVSA says some electronic records are completely altered with no sign they were ever edited. Every falsified log is a load hauled cheaper than an honest driver legally could, puts everybody else on the highway at risk, and gives an unfair advantage to the ones breaking the laws. From personal experience, the carriers running edited logs are often the same ones stacking up English-proficiency violations and utilizing non-domicile loopholes to hire unfit drivers.