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new truck duty time rule overturned in court

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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
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