TORONTO — Not wanting to get caught up in another all-encompassing regulation aimed at long-distance carriers, construction companies want to be excluded from a proposed electronic on-board recorder (EOBR) rule.

According to a report by Daily Commercial News, the Ontario Road Builders’ Association (ORBA) and the Canadian Construction Association (CCA) want to ensure that transport regulators don’t plan the EOBR rule strictly around the weight requirements of all trucks.

In the past, ORBA and other groups representing vocational firms have fought for similar exclusions on laws designed mostly to deal with long haul carriers, such as hours-of-service rules.

Because many truckers who stay within a 160-kilometre radius of where they report to work are already exempt from logbook requirements, a mandatory EOBR rule shouldn’t apply to short-haul, road construction trucks either, says ORBA.

“We would suggest that if they’re considering EOBR requirements, then they should apply only to trucks currently required to keep paper log books,” Karen Renkema, director of government relations with ORBA, told the magazine.

The organization says that over time EOBRs will likely be standard equipment on all trucks, so they should be phased in naturally – at least as far as construction equipment goes — by the manufacturer.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in the U.S. has published an interim rule requiring truckers with a 10-percent or greater HOS violation rate during a single compliance review to install EOBRs on all their vehicles, regardless of the model year, for a two-year period.

The initial proposal clearly has several blemishes, however. The agency says it has plans to draft an even "broader mandate" later this year.

Canadian regulators are following suit, but the Canadian Trucking Alliance is lobbying for a rule that includes all commercial trucks right away.