With Roadcheck under way and spot rates hitting unheard-of new highs, and cut-rate carriers either chased out of the industry or simply shy around inspectors, Overdrive asked New Hampshire State Police the question likely on lots of truckers' minds: Why not do Roadcheck every week?
That got a chuckle, at least.
NHSP's Lieutenant Thomas Conlon, leader of Troop G of the truck enforcement branch, said "we're out here every day, every week" but that Roadcheck "is when we try to really clear the schedules to make sure we have an increased presence."
This year, Roadcheck's focused on two things: Load securement and hours of service violations. The latter of which comes against a backdrop of widespread, turbocharged ELD cheating.
[Related: Prime Route Transport, a Super Ego chameleon fleet, accused of ELD cheating with video evidence]
On April 1, a new out-of-service code took effect that differentiated between old-school false logs (like using personal conveyance to advance a load) to new-school entire fabrications, like calling an overseas office to hack the backend and produce spotless logs.
While Overdrive Chief Editor Todd Dills found inspectors in Tennessee and Wisconsin sharing a veritable how-to on ways to spot this new generation of cheats, inspectors in New England were a little less in-the-know, or maybe just a little more humble.
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration chief Derek Barrs "did a fantastic job" addressing ELD cheating on CBS News' viral 60 Minutes story, said NHSP Sergeant Anthony Cattabriga. "But enforcement folks, we're behind the curve on this."
"Just like everything else with tech," he added, industry gets it first, then enforcement figures it out later.
Basically, Cattabriga admitted that hacked logs aren't easy to spot roadside.
"It takes detective work for us to follow through and figure out is this an actual factual or some sort of chameleon log," he said, referring to the revolving door self-certified ELDs, which might simply rebrand after getting shut out of FMCSA's registry. 
While nowhere near so hot a topic, load securement was certainly a focus in Lebanon, New Hampshire, this Roadcheck. This straight-truck operator passed inspection pretty quickly.
FMCSA said it's solved the problem of self-certified ELDs for now, and has been well on the way toward an ELD-registry clean-up. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance also has new in-depth guidance on how to catch the new generation of ELD cheats, but many rank-and-file troopers for now are still learning.
[Related: How inspectors are catching remote ELD cheats: Roadcheck in Tennessee]
At a weigh station in Vermont, inspectors mostly agreed, saying it's difficult, if not impossible, for inspectors to catch false logs like that.
Cattabriga said he'd seen hotshots running two ELD apps and caught them before, but he didn't have an answer for how exactly to catch full-on ELD fabricators.
One inspector outside of New Hampshire explained that the one edge officers have roadside is that since ELD cheating with fabricated logs isn't a criminal offense, just a ticket, the burden of proof is somewhat lower.
Rather than "probable cause," an inspector writing a violation for HOS fabrication only needs "reasonable suspicion."
Imagine a driver showing up to the scales with bloodshot eyes and a still-cold half-empty energy drink in the cupholder. This driver's logs show he's got nearly a full set of hours and just emerged from the sleeper berth.
Officers would know to double check. If digging through the cab, officers found a fuel receipt showing that driver had been in New Haven, Connecticut, four hours prior, and they were now in Lebanon, New Hampshire, a violation under 395.8 e(2) could be in order. That's reasonable suspicion.
This kind of ELD manipulation had resulted in thousands of violations with just a couple weeks' of data in Overdrive's sister company RigDig's internal accounting, current as of roughly mid-April.
Over the first weeks of last month, the following states were making the biggest dent, with California, Washington, Ohio and South Dakota just behind them recording violation numbers in the double digits.
Those aren't big numbers by any means. With just more than six weeks in the book as an OOS condition, enforcement will likely only get tougher from here.
What's new at Roadcheck?
This also represented the first Roadcheck in a decade with English Language Proficiency violations generating a mandatory OOS order, and the first under FMCSA's "aggressive" new administrator.
Conlon said ELP violations in New Hampshire were "not an everyday occurrence," but certainly something that happened. Overdrive's RigDig analysis shows New Hampshire recorded just 14 ELP OOS violations in 2026 through mid-April.
As for those OOS orders resulting in drivers actually taken off the road, Conlon said New Hampshire simply documents the order, and doesn't babysit the driver, as is often the case.
[Related: Why state police are letting drivers placed OOS for English violations go free]
Tucked away in a sparsely populated corner of the country, the state doesn't really see a lot of non-domiciled CDLs or non-English speakers. New Hampshire is one of just seven states that never opted-in to issuing non-domiciled CDLs.
FMCSA has put a new emphasis on documentation. Inspectors now have been asked to document more and more about their interactions with carriers, in an effort to create the kind of paper trail the agency can use to shut down chameleon carriers and some of those "scofflaws" who might not even have rolled this week, according to another inspector.
Overall, inspectors in New England on this rainy day at Roadcheck had almost entirely positive things to say about local carriers, whom Conlon referred to as "partners."
"I would say the vast majority of truckers and carriers we interact with are trying to do the right thing to keep the highway safe," he said, "but there's always certain elements that skip steps on purpose, or try to make as quick a buck as possible. But for the most part, this is a very safety-oriented industry."
