Truckers don't want to crash either! But in an industry Mike Belzer has called "Sweatshops on Wheels", where real earnings have actually *fallen* over the last decades, the financial sustainability and safety incentives can be at odds - more so, the less flexibility drivers have

Paul's really careful empirical work is a very important contribution to this discussion: it shows the huge unintended consequences when an intervention designed to improve safety fails to consider the broader set of pressures and incentives workers are under.

That is: by fully constraining one margin (hours) in the context of very strong financial pressures on truckers, the ELD mandate "inadvertently heightened the payoff for other unsafe driving practices, such as speeding during unsafe weather".

Comparing small firms (who mostly didn't have ELDs before the mandate) with big firms (who mostly did), and comparing icy and non-icy days, Paul and Sika find an 8% increase in the ice-crash relationship.

First, note that 38% of truck crashes happen on icy days - despite them only being 3.8% of driving days.

My coauthor Paul Stainier has just released fantastic empirical work which validates this channel. Studying over 1.4 million truck crashes, he finds that the introduction of ELDs substantially increased the ice-crash relationship.

An OOIDA rep “[Truckers] feel controlled by that circle-thing on the dash, and they know they can’t be a minute late. I’ve talked to thirty-year drivers, and they say they know that they shouldn’t be driving that fast, but they are so worried they’re going to run out of time.”

The combination of this financial pressure, plus the pressure to drive not one minute over time, meant truckers felt they had less flexibility to respond to changing road circumstances - like slowing down in icy weather...

Did it make trucking safer? A key concern Karen found was that they "addressed the wrong problem. Truckers weren’t tired because they were able to falsify logbooks; they were tired because the industry's pay structure was set up in ways that necessitated them breaking the rules"

They also, more fundamentally, were experienced as an affront to privacy, dignity, and independence. This was one of the most autonomous professions there was - hitting the road alone, cross-country. Many felt "the new rules treated them like criminals, cheaters, or children."

@karenlevy.bsky.social's superb book Data Driven showed that ELDs were hugely unpopular among truckers. They worried the inflexibility would constrain their ability to do their job properly (“ELD leaves no room for dealing with crowded truck stops, making it nearly impossible to preplan.")

Truck crashes result in 160,000 nonfatal injuries and 6,000 fatalities every year in the US. Hour tracking devices - ELDs - were mandated in 2012, aiming to make trucking safer by stopping truckers driving long hours (by stopping falsification of paper records). Did they?

Thank you Jacob!