NEW TACHOS OLD PROBLEM
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ike Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, our old friend Joe Soap Haulier lies tossing and turning in bed. In his nightmare world, tamper-proof digital tachographs alert the police every time his drivers exceed their hours or attempt to hot-wire the mechanism. He wakes just as the judge says: "Based on irrefutable evidence gathered on your tachographs, this court sentences you to five years..." It was all a dream— or was it? Thanks to the collective efforts of European Union transport ministers, electronic tachographs will be with us by the year 2000. Fortunately for Joe, and the rest of the industry, they won't be the panacea to the industry's ills that some people seem to expect. The EU official who declared "the enforcement of driving time rules will be much easier and cowboy operations much more difficult" clearly hasn't spent enough time in the real world. You could fit a truck with an aircraft black box and it still wouldn't stop some hauliers breaking the law. One effective deterrent—some would say the only effective deterrent—is the fear of being caught. And right now there's not enough fear to keep certain operators from deliberately breaking any law, never mind drivers' hours. UK Transport Minister Gavin Strang does appear to have some understanding of the problem, judging by his demand for more security tests on the proposed equipment "by experts familiar with up-to-date tampering tech
niques". By "experts" he presumably means any one of those dri vers or operators who successful
ly fiddle the existing tachograph. High-tech recorders are all very
well, but the best weapon
against tacho-cheats is stricter monitoring out on the road. For
"stricter" read "more than once a year", otherwise by the time you stop them the crime has already
been committed. Without tougher monitoring bent hauliers will treat digital recorders the same as their existing tachographs— with contempt.