In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?
Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.
If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.
They do, in all western countries I know of. But that log can't check hours of sleep by the driver. On the other hand, this might be a whole new business segment for Fitbit and the like.
I only know about this 'cause I know some of their sysadmins. but there's a whole industry of automated truck-tracking and truck-activity logging out there.
Most of it, I think, is focused on reducing liability/reducing insurance costs, I think; I don't think most of it is legally mandated.
Note, I've also heard from other people who's pagers go off when certain devices can't resolve GPS signals that a common cause of their pager going off is a trucker driving by with a GPS jammer that was being used to defeat one of these automatic truck logging deals.
So... yeah, it's not legally mandated or anything, but automatic logging of truck activity and speed is pretty common.
It is legally mandated now, and the fleets have till 2018 to implement automated truck-tracking. I work at an enterprise hardware company and we get lots of inbound customer inquiries from logistics companies in the trucking space.
