❝ A Rotterdam haulier learned about its drivers' infringements from an inspector, who read 56 days of one driver's card in a few minutes, even though the office's own weekly report had flagged the short rests and long days a fortnight earlier. The setting is a 35-truck international haulier with 45 drivers and a two-person transport office that receives 45 infringement reports a week and has time to read few of them. Modelled over 90 days, the fleet's files hold 412 infringements, and a check against the office's own records finds nine regular weekly rests that started and ended at a truck park with no accommodation on file. The design below reads every file each morning, sends each driver a note in his own language, gives the planner a list of who is near a limit before tomorrow is planned, and chases missing card downloads from day 21. It costs about €210 a month to run.
The inspector needed one driver card and a few minutes to read 56 days of Piotr's record. The haulier had the same 56 days in its own files, and had not read them.
On a Sunday morning in September, inspectors from the ILT, the Dutch transport inspectorate, walked a truck park near Moerdijk. They knocked on Piotr's cab. He drives for a haulier in Rotterdam, he was 30 hours into a regular weekly rest, due because the week before had been a reduced one, and he had slept in the cab since Saturday. Then they read his card.
It showed four reduced daily rests between two weekly rests, where three are allowed; three ten-hour driving days in one week, where two are allowed; and three mornings with unrecorded time before he took over the truck, when loading at a customer's dock should have been entered by hand. Piotr was fined for the missing manual entries. The regular weekly rest in the cab, the short rests and the long days went in a report to his employer.
The short rests and the long days had been flagged in the haulier's weekly report a fortnight earlier. Nobody had opened it. Three weeks after the check, a letter from the ILT asked for every driver card and vehicle file for every driver, for the previous quarter.
The haulier, Piotr, Marieke and Joost are a composite, built from the patterns we see in hauliers of this size, and the figures attached to them are design projections. The regulations, the fines, the enforcement figures and the software capabilities are real, and linked to their sources.
The business
A road haulier in Rotterdam with 35 tractor units and 45 drivers, including relief drivers. Most of the work is international: containers and palletised freight out of the port to Germany, Belgium, northern France and Poland, with drivers out for a week or two at a time. Several drivers are Polish and Romanian; the office works in Dutch and English.
The transport office is two people. Joost plans: which driver takes which load tomorrow, and the day after. Marieke does everything else, including compliance. Every truck has remote tachograph download through the fleet's telematics, which pulls the vehicle unit every week and the driver cards every day. On Monday mornings an infringement report per driver arrives as a PDF. That is 45 PDFs, every week, for one person who also does the invoicing.
What is actually going wrong
The downloads were on time. What went wrong was the order in which people found out.
The office has the data and reads it last. The EU rules on driving time make the haulier responsible for more than holding files. Article 10 of Regulation (EC) 561/2006 says a transport undertaking "shall properly instruct the driver and shall make regular checks", and that it "shall be liable for infringements committed by drivers of the undertaking, even if the infringement was committed on the territory of another Member State". Member States may make that liability conditional on the haulier's own failings, which is exactly why the regular checks matter. A weekly PDF becomes a check only when somebody reads it.
The inspector can look a long way back. Since 31 December 2024 a driver must be able to produce records for "the current day and the preceding 56 days", up from 28, under the change made by Regulation (EU) 2020/1054. The ILT says that with a control card its inspectors can read the last 365 days from the truck's own tachograph. One check opens two months of one driver's record, and up to a year of the truck's.
The inspector does not need to stop a truck at all. The ILT runs digital inspections: a letter asks the haulier to upload card and vehicle files for all drivers and vehicles for a stated period, and the ILT replies with the deviations it found. Across the EU, checks at company premises find more: 3.81 offences per 100 working days checked, against 2.11 at the roadside, according to the most recent European Commission implementation report we could find, covering 2021 and 2022. The same report records the Netherlands checking 185% more working days than in 2019 and 2020, a comparison that includes the pandemic years.
The rules that catch people need two weeks of memory. The simple limits are easy: nine hours' driving a day, ten on no more than two days a week, 56 hours a week, a 45-minute break after four and a half hours. The ones that catch drivers span weeks: 90 hours across any two consecutive weeks, reduced weekly rests that must be paid back in a block, and the Mobility Package rules that a regular weekly rest "shall not be taken in a vehicle" and that the haulier must organise work so each driver can get home within every four consecutive weeks, and document how it does so. None of those can be checked by looking at one day.
Some of it is not in the files at all. A tachograph records rest. It does not record whether the driver rested in a hotel or in his cab. A smart tachograph does record the truck's position at the start and end of each daily working period, so the office can see when a weekly rest began and ended at the same truck park. Whether anyone booked a room for it is in the office's own records, if anywhere. Returning home is the same: a duty the office must organise and document, checked against its own log.
The planner never sees any of it. Joost plans tomorrow from the order book and the drivers' availability. The fact that a driver has seven hours of weekly driving left, or a regular weekly rest due on Saturday somewhere in Germany, lives in a PDF Joost never opens. So the plan creates the infringement, and the report records it a week later.
What it costs
Run the last 90 days of the fleet's card and vehicle files through a commercial analysis engine and, in this design, it models 412 infringements across the 45 drivers, about three per driver per month. Most are minor: a break split the wrong way round, a daily rest 40 minutes short. Some are not:
23 driving days beyond the ten-hour allowance or the 56-hour week.
14 reduced weekly rests not paid back in time.
11 "driving without a card" events recorded by the trucks themselves.
7 driver cards not downloaded inside 28 days, all of them relief drivers whose cards only reached the system when they were in a truck.
Then there are the two things no engine reports, found by checking the files against the office's own records: 9 regular weekly rests that started and ended at a truck park with no accommodation on file, and 2 drivers past four weeks with no return home in the office's log.
The Dutch fine schedule, the 2026 enforcement policy published in the Staatscourant, sets a base fine of €1,300 to the employer for each driver card not downloaded within 28 days, €1,300 for a regular weekly rest taken in the vehicle, €1,300 for not giving a driver the chance to go home within four weeks, and €450 to the driver for a missing manual entry. We are not going to add those up. The policy applies multipliers from 0.5 to 2.0, limits how many fines of one type a single decision can impose, and caps the total, so the bill is never a simple sum. The point is narrower: on the day the letter arrives, the haulier would be reading its own files for the first time, and the inspectorate would already have read them.
The cost the haulier pays every week is time. Marieke spends about five hours a week opening reports, chasing relief drivers' cards and answering Joost's questions about who can drive what, around 22 hours a month. At the CBS average of €45 of wage cost per hour worked in 2024, that is about €975 a month, spent mostly on reading after the fact.
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