When the electronic logging device mandate was finalized in December 2015, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration estimated that the rule would save 26 lives and prevent 562 injuries on an annual basis.
Today, nearly five years since the mandate took effect for much of trucking in December 2017, truck-involved crashes resulting in injuries and fatalities have steadily gone up.
A recent analysis by Overdrive and sister business unit RigDig looked at crash and fatality/injury numbers in the four years prior to the ELD mandate (2014-'17) and the four years following initial implementation (2018-2021).
Crashes and fatalities/injuries numbers in the aggregate were generally flat from 2014 through 2017, rising and falling in small increments. Since the ELD mandate took effect in late 2017, however, crashes and injuries/fatalities have risen each year since but for 2020, when COVID-19-related shutdowns forced many passenger vehicle drivers to work from home and not commute, reducing highway congestion dramatically for much of the year.
Utilizing crash data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Motor Carrier Management and Information System (MCMIS), as well as authorized carriers' reported power-unit and miles estimates in FMCSA's system for each individual year, in the aggregate pre-and post-mandate, here's what the trend looks like comparing four years prior to and post-ELD mandate.
Given most crash-related trends point their way uphill post-ELD mandate, there is an obvious correlation between rising crashes, injuries and fatalities and the onset of the mandate.
