The number of hours of service violations in Kansas, calculated as a percentage of total violations issued, had been declining for years until rising slightly last year. The long decline reflects national trends, as shown on the graph below. Many watchers see such as inevitable in light of the uptake of electronic logging devices by so many carriers.
Nonetheless, for those running paper logs or ELDs, but particularly the former, according to Kansas Highway Patrol Capt. Christopher Turner, the state has something of a secret weapon for its Level 3 driver inspections. Those inspections, taking place primarily at rest stops, Turner says, are performed by a “small group of retired troopers.” They’re experts in all matters of commercial enforcement, Turner adds, most of them with a “grasp of hours of service that will be exponentially better than a roadside guy’s.”
That secret weapon has allowed Kansas to maintain a top 10 ranking in Overdrive’s CSA’s Data Trail tally of states in the hours violation category. Kansas’ issuance of hours infractions for the first quarter of 2018, however, knocked the state out of the rankings as violations under the ELD mandate early in the year vaulted other states ahead of it.
That reflects what Turner had to say about the character of many of the issued hours of service violations: “Sixteen percent of our total violations are just ‘attention to detail,’ ” he says, or non-serious form-and-manner infractions. The number in 2017 was in fact less than 16 percent of all Kansas-issued violations but accounted for more than a third of total hours violations.
And form-and-manner infractions are certainly declining there, as they are nationally. The catch-all 395.8 code for them fell nationwide by 8 percent between 2014 and 2017. Yet in Kansas, the fall was 23 percent over the same period. Form-and-manner violations in 2017 made up a greater percentage of total hours of service violations than in earlier years, suggesting either generally less enforcement of hours in Kansas or, perhaps more likely, more strict compliance with more serious hours limitations as truckers turned to ELDs.
