Considering hours of service enforcement since late-2017, when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration mandated electronic logging devices, hours of service violations in the aggregate have clearly trended downward, as shown in the graph above.
Looked at another way, though, the intensity of focus on hours has increased in many jurisdictions, perhaps as inspectors get used to using available tools for e-log analysis to ferret out errors and omissions and find those violations within ELD output data.
Several states at the top of Overdrive's rankings this year actually posted an increase in the percentage of hours of service violations issued over the course of the 2020 calendar-year. That trend held nationally, too, even as COVID-19 put a damper on inspection totals in all but two states around the nation.
The phenomenon is particularly concentrated across the Western half of the country, where top-20 states in enforcement prioritization rankings are over-represented, covering a wide area. Among the 11 states highlighted red in the infographic below, 8 posted increased shares of hours violations in calendar year 2020. Counting down from the top of the list, those states include hours leader Colorado as well as Wyoming, Kansas, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Washington and Montana. What's more, all posted hours violation rates well above the 8.3% national average for 2020.
Distances are approximate on the lanes highlighted.
