U.S. Supreme Court won’t review OOIDA’s ELD appeal

However, Jim Johnston, chief executive officer of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, said the association will continue to lobby against the electronic logging device mandate on the congressional side.    The U.S. Supreme Court will not review the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s (OOIDA) appeal on electronic logging devices (ELDs), OOIDA said in a statement Monday.
   The appeal was filed with the Supreme Court in April, following the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruling against OOIDA in October 2016.
   OOIDA had asked the Supreme Court to determine whether the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ELD rule violated the Fourth Amendment by failing to establish a regulatory structure at the state and federal levels that serves as a substitute for a warrant.
   The ELD rule, which was mandated by Congress in the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Enhancement Act of 2012 and finalized in December 2015, requires that ELDs be installed on all interstate commercial vehicles model year 2000 and newer by Dec. 18, 2017.
   Back in 2015 when the rule was adopted, the FMCSA said that requiring the use of ELDs would:
     • Result in an annual net benefit of more than $1 billion, largely by reducing the amount of required industry paperwork;
     • Increase the efficiency of roadside law enforcement personnel in reviewing driver records;
     • And, on an annual basis, will save an estimated 26 lives and prevent 562 injuries resulting from crashes involving large commercial motor vehicles.
   However, OOIDA argued Monday that although the FMCSA’s mandate requires that truck drivers use ELDS to track their driving and non-driving activities, these devices can only track the movement of a vehicle. Requiring ELDs on commercial vehicles does not improve safety, since they are no more reliable than paper logbooks for recording compliance with hours-of-service regulations, OOIDA said.
   The association said that mandating ELDs “is the equivalent of warrantless surveillance of truckers and that the government’s weak excuses for doing so fail to justify violating their Fourth Amendment rights.”
   In addition, OOIDA said there are still many questions about the technical specifications and enforcement aspects of the ELD mandate.
   “Until the government is able to answer many fundamental and basic questions about the mandate, they should at least delay its implementation,” OOIDA CEO Jim Johnston said.
   Looking ahead, Johnston said the association will continue to pursue the issue on the congressional side as part of its “Knock Out Bad Regs” campaign.