new truck duty time rule overturned in court

[edbenton]

I have to agree with high iron on both of his posts. I drove 4 and a half years before my body said no more and I devopled epilepsy. More than once I had to go 1200 miles over night or lose 2 days getting loaded in Salinas Ca and the reciver would not pu***he deelivery back so I could run it legal. Lets just say you can go from salianas Ca to st. louis in 42 hrs solo but forget about sleep except one nap of 4-5 hrs then you DIE when you get to the yard so a fresh driver can relay and get it to the reciver aka Wal-mart DC in Kentucky so someone can have fresh produce. Then after doing that to keep the customer getting yelled at by your saftey man because yoiu ran to hard and risked the company liabilaty if you had wrecked had to do it 3 times in under 2 months

[Anonymous]

MP57313

Very good question. Lets see here. I will provide a scenario that is taught to every person who elects to go to school to train to drive a 18 wheeler.

Logbooks are issued by the company you work for. They must be filled in correctly every change of duty status. They must be turned in with every load delivery papers via overnight messenger service (Fed ex is one example) The logs must be submitted within 12 days (I may be wrong but my logs usually went out 2-3 days) The company is required to match the logs with the truck's data and invoice papers. They are kept 6 months and discarded.

Any Law Enforcement Officer may demand on sight of a driver his or her logs. Therefore the law says the logs must be in your possession at all times.

Now. The driver takes care of the logs because his or her handwriting must be on the actual documents since they are considered "Legal Documents" and is binding to the driver. The company MAY preprint home addresses etc to save repititous rewriting of the same information by hand.

That is what is taught to the student driver in school. Now I give you the "Real world"

I used to take care of 3 logs. One in a notebook that is not legal document whatsoever in form of mileages, times and locations in the form of notes. This looks like a journal of a trip with directions for shippers and recievers etc to anyone. The 2nd is a log book that I keep nice and clean with some "wear" rubbed in and maybe a coffee ring in the front somewhere this is the book that is shown to Law Enforcement and turned into the company. The third book is sometimes a running log with only the last 7 days. Since this only costs 50 cents it is easy to get these. Used as a form of "Practice" logging.

Now All 48 states had varying levels of inspections and so forth. A few states such as VA, CA, Md, PA, and others you MUST without fail be up to date and right on with your paperwork, they check and will fine you, your company and even enforce it by shutting down, arrest and or heavy losses in time by other forms of inspection which can be hours at a time.

Some states such as Arkansas have clusters of scales such as near Memphis. Once you get into Arkansas past these scales going west you are good to go until you get out of the western scales into Oklahoma and Texas. There are signs and pavement areas that are signed "Truck weight, inspecion area" but I say maybe 3 days of any given year they will actually be opened for surprise inspections the rest of the time they are convient parking spaces.

Other states support a "Safe haven" program such as Ky you are invited to sleep at the Truck Scale station under protection of police with facilities for bathroom etc. This is nice but old drivers like me will not sleep in a "Scale house" because of a habit in some areas of the country police can inspect you before you had your morning coffee especially if you only stayed 6 hours instead of the required 8 hours off.

In most cases, as long your weight is across your wheels and you are somewhat decent and the rig is clean (With usualy road dust) and you are not driving bad then they will let you go by free and clear. They look for signs of trucks out of place, dirty, broken etc.

In Knoxville TN there is a scale house on I-40 Both sides of the freeway has one. I-40 is a strategic highway linking all points VA and north to all points Texas to CA. There are thousands of trucks an hour thru there. The scale house may hold about 6 officers. Alot will be weighed as they drive thru non stop by computer. Some will be chosen at random. The rest will be permitted to bypass using "Transponders" that communicate to the scalehouse computers (Networked to ALL I mean ALL other scales in the USA so equipped) from beginning to end of the encounter. Others will be able to bypass because the ramp to the house is full.

Now with that in mind... satellite communications with tracking by GPS down to 50 feet or less is followed by the company to ensure compliance with the law. (Also to check on your habits on the road but that is another thread entirely)

As mentioned above Tachgraphs are used to monitor speed against time. I had this daily hauling cement. Every day I hand in a disk to the safety man for him to check for maximum speeds. I will say that my rig a Mack R model was capable of 83 miles an hour. And we spend alot of time at high speeds becuase the cement plant literally has a insatiable appetite for the powder and you can make a extra load or two a day (about 4-5 loads to a plant 1 hour away)

The tachgraph in my truck was set to see up to 63 mph. Anything beyond that was up to where a policeman with a radar gun may be. If no one saw a speed violation then there is no problem. (A heck of a attitude to have but in those days you had to be hard driving and even harder in your ambition to deliver many loads) I have been chewed up and down and stripped by verbal lashing from red faced and very angry police who had to have a fellow officer do the writing of the tickets. =) All in the day's work.

Now in the national view truckers are generally very safe and they for the most part run within the law. Unfortunaetly there is always a few hungry drivers that are willing to bend the rules and drive super fast (100-130 mph is not uncommon in Nevada or other barren wastes of land stretching for hundreds of miles) spoiling it for the rest.

I ahve not talked about team drivers. Two drivers in a truck (Ideally a Husband and Wife team as Mine was) can keep a truck rolling 24/7 NON stop with onboard Food, Coffee, Water, TV satellite and cell phone. Plus a generator to make 110 volt house power for laptop computers with GPS for seeking out directions in bad areas such as South side LA, or Hunts point NYC.

(Hunts Point is a food market. It is worth your life to know how to get in there, when to get there and how to get out alive. I am not kidding. I myself spend 2 years working the Market from the Mid atlantic area until I was told by my doctor that I was seeing symptoms of "Battle Shock" that soldiers in wartime gets. And must stop going there.

I have given you alot of material here and am sorry for such a long post but am trying to present both the good and the bad.

Lee

[Hugh Jampton]

QUOTE: Originally posted by MP57313

Just curious how hours on duty/on the road are monitored...are the log books signed/audited? Are there that many inspectors?

Trucks are equipped with tachographs, which plot vehicle speed against time. They can be examined by any police officer, DoT officer, and other official types. When I was in the Teamsters we had to hand them in to the depot supervisor (who probably burned them to destroy all traces of evidence)

[MP57313]

Just curious how hours on duty/on the road are monitored...are the log books signed/audited? Are there that many inspectors?

[jeaton]

I found the court's order, and it directed the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to reconsider the regulations. The court was convinced that the FMCSA did not give consideration to driver health issues as required by the governing laws. Pending new regulations or appeals, the regs stay effective.

My initial thought was that the motor carriers had sought relief, however it appears that a driver advocacy group brought the action, with the objective of making the regs more restrictive in terms of driving and onduty times and requiring more mandatory rest.

The issues and the problems are set out quite well by HighIron in the post above.

[Anonymous]

The US Court of Appeals has overturned the new Hours of Service rules that was created and signed into law this year. There is a watch dog group that claimed in the suit to the Appeals court that accident rates grow up exponetally between 10-11 hour of driving.

The US Appeals Court agreed stating that the new rules are "Caparious" and "Abritary"

I drove for 16 years and the rules that were in force were written back in the late 1930's when doing 200 miles in a day was alot of work:

Maximum time in 8 days 70 hours. Maximum time on duty 15 hours this includes 10 hours of driving. then you must take 8 hours off.

A single driver can leave Boston on Monday morning drive 10 hours and 8 off resulting in a rotating day/ night time work and wreckage of normal sleep cycle added to that is the stress of the job and uncertian to poor diet. By Thursday he or she may be out of hours and legally cannot drive until about saturday midnight.

This law ignores shippers and recievers appointment times which must be met. For every driver that fails to properly use the law to stay legal and to stay rolling for the company will end up being replaced by any one of 50 or so recruits that fills up any trucking company's orientation trailer on a given week.

The new law was to allow a driver to drive 11 hours then must stop for 10 hours. (Sleep, dinner, shower etc) leaving 3 hours free for trade related onduty types of work such as fueling, scales etc.. After 70 total hours are accumalated then the driver CANNOT move for 36 hours regardless of where he or she is at. This could be a parking lot behind a rest area 200 miles from a nearby source of food, rest, shower water and laundtry etc Or a truck stop.

Predictably this will result in adding more trucks, drivers and load upon the shippers and recievers to meet appointment times.

The appointment times are usually set without the driver's input and sometimes a good driver will say "I cannot make it on time" and the cycle begins all over again with the orginal freight to A to B by X time and date.

Alot of drivers have left the industry due to drug testing, Alcohol rules and various other personal reasons such as health and the more common ultimateum from the spouse (My way or the highway) due to long and longer absences from home which usually runs from 6 weeks to 6 months at a time.

The battle over the Hours of service continues with the shippers and recievers on one side who DEMAND Just in Time delivery and other personel whose cargoes such as produce and gasoline cannot will not must not be delayed.

And the other corner will hold drivers, dispatchers, the company and the law enforcement as well as the families and friends of the drivers. Many times personal conflicts such as lack of sleep, bad diets and exhaust problems as well as outside interfernece such as hookers, bums and similar problems prevents the cargo from moving in a regular and timely manner.

Alot of drivers will abuse the hours of service and drive to thier personal maximums. For example I have run from Garden City Kansas with a load of meat from Satuday morning 10 Am to arrive in Bakersfield California at 10 AM Non-stop via NM, AZ (2100 miles or so I think) simply because the load MUST be at the reciever's dock by 4 PM monday or it will be considered a service failure against me, my company and the law. The problem comes in play when you have about 5 more hours to get to Salinas CA where the cargo is due.

I have personally driven when tired and sleepy at times. This is worse than drunk driving or drugged driving. I will attest to about 12 instances which I woke up with just enough time to execute a emergency manuver to avoid hitting and killing a bystander, cycilist or family broke down on the side of the highway. How many more lives I have saved by stopping to get 8 (Acutally 12 or more) hours of sleep simply because I cannot keep it between the lines>? I dont know, only God does.

This is one of many loads that were delivered with the legal paperwork turned in. As I am no longer involved with the laws of service I can truthfully state that there were problems between hours of service and expected appointment times.

I also must inculde the usual amount of time lost waiting for cargo to be loaded or unloaded which is measured in hours and days. Sometimes the driver is expected to do the work manually. 1400 Cases of popcorn will take one person about 5 hours to move. Or the driver can elect to pay someone large sums of money out of pocket for "Lumpers" to do the work while he or she tries to rest.

Grocery and Frozen food warehouses usually see 40-60 hours of standing by the dock waiting for word on the load (Alert, standing and waiting in line with other drivers) which is not paid, not covered by the law (One writes in 15 minutes loading and unloading on the lawbook while the rest of the time is created "Off duty" or "Sleep" to save driving time that will be needed to get the load to the east coast legally.

Thus the battle goes on. People in the industry have debated this for 12 some years now and we are not any closer to a new set of laws that makes everyone healthy and productive.

[Anonymous]

It's some what of a good thing though,In realty their are some truckers that "will" break the rules,case in point.
BNSFrailfan.

[overall]

I heard a very short item on the radio, WWTN nashville tennessee, that the new truck duty time rule had been overturned by some court somewhere. The item did not give any details. That rule was expected to help railroads somewhat. Some of you who are closer to this situation that know more about it than I do could comment on whether the government plans to appeal. Is this ruling coming from that court in california that gets reversed 90% of the time?They did say that the rule overlooks the health of the driver. I do not know what that means.

Thanks,

George