Businesses that previously employed truck drivers with long working hours showed particularly significant improvements in accordance with labor hour regulations.
On September 25, Hacobu announced the results of a joint study with Hitotsubashi University on the impact of the "2024 problem" in logistics on drivers' working styles, based on operational data from its fleet management service "MOVO Fleet".
<Hacobu and Hitotsubashi University>
The regulation limiting overtime hours for drivers (960 hours per year), which came into effect in April 2024, aims to improve drivers' work-life balance, but it also raises concerns about a decline in transportation capacity.
Against this backdrop of challenges, this project aimed to capture daily operational realities at the driver level, rather than relying on surveys at the company level. It was realized after Hacobu received a request for cooperation from the Graduate School of Social Data Science at Hitotsubashi University.
In this joint research project, Hacobu will provide data recorded on "MOVO Fleet," a system capable of acquiring and analyzing vehicle location data.
By utilizing a total of 20 operational data points from 2022 to 2024, we conducted detailed analyses at the driver and business establishment levels, identifying changes in working hours and long-hour operations before and after the regulations were implemented.
The results showed that businesses that had a lot of long operating hours before the regulations were implemented showed the most significant improvements. A reduction of up to approximately 4 hours in operating time was confirmed in 2023 and up to approximately 1 hour in 2024, indicating that improvements were progressing in response to the regulations.
It was also found that the reduction in operating hours was greater during the same period in 2023 than immediately after the regulations came into effect in April 2024. Since the application of the regulations had been decided five years prior, it appears that operators had begun working to reduce working hours by utilizing the grace period.
Analysis of individual drivers revealed that drivers who previously worked long hours tended to reduce their long-hour shifts annually. As a result, it was observed that the workload among drivers was distributed more evenly, and working hours became more uniform.
Hacobu and Hitotsubashi University state that while these results do not conclude a direct causal effect of the regulations, they were able to visualize continuous behavioral changes at the business and driver levels that could not be captured by conventional statistics.
Hacobu also stated that it would like to use this opportunity to further strengthen industry-academia-government collaboration and work on improving drivers' working conditions and increasing the efficiency of logistics.
■Research overview
Research period: Analysis was conducted using data from 2022 to 2024.
Target data: Approximately 20 operational data points recorded in the fleet management service "MOVO Fleet".
Analysis targets: Operation records at the business unit level, driver level, and daily level.
Analysis method: A fixed-effects model was used to examine changes in operating hours and long-duration operations before and after the regulations.
Points of focus: Trends in operating hours, the proportion of long-hour operations (over 13 hours per day), and changes before and after regulations (particularly comparing 2023 and 2024).
