EOBR Electronic Logs - Good or Bad

At some point in the future a computer somewhere will take a major league dump and 1000's of the company steering wheel holders will be stranded not knowing which way to turn or what to do next.......

 

Two things... one it eliminates just about all of the CSA points that can be charged in the fatigue catagory. Second is the feedback that the load planners get, making fleet utilization much higher. When the FMCSA does a compliance audit these days they go right for the electronic data - GPS location tags matched to electronic location reports. They don't even want to see the paper trail.

I'm going to tell you right now that folks who do not understand HOS regulations are going to be behind the eightball from the git go. It has nothing to do with having a nanny look over your shoulder, or trust.

 

All the planning in the world will not keep you from having to shutdown within 30 minutes of yard or house. three weeks ago 1.5 hours from yard, had to get 10 hrs in plus 15 min. pretrip, so 1.5 hrs turned into 11hrs 45 minutes to go home.

 

Hey.... maybe you could just leave the yellow button pulled and drive as much as you want! Yeah, that's it--that's the ticket.

 

DOT has seen my paper logs many times and I never got one DOT log violation.
On my paper logs, I always showed 15 min for PTI and always flagged my pretrips and wrote 4, 5 or 6 min...

 

When you stop... manually change your status from line 3 to line 1 or 2 immediately. If you have a moment to do this after you stop at the top of an exit ramp - not too far from where you're going, then do it there. Then, allow the sytem to take its time changing you back to line 3 when you depart. Another savings...

Hint: When you're running close to the end of your 11 or 14 hour clocks, and you have to be somewhere by a certain time... take your GPS distance to go, and divide it by what's left on your DOT clock... that'll let you know if you can run fast enough to get to where you need to be. Its easier to speed-up early on, than to need to go warp 9 with not much time left...

 

Thats because it is showing you that what you thought was legal isnt. It is a interesting world when something actually keeps strack of our times and allows us not to worry so much of missed lines.

 

Gee, isn't that the main reason why so many people are against electronic logs in the first place, they have to actually log what they do, rather than what they "say" they did??

 

Your logs are telling on you.

You need to slow down. The e-logs (especially qualcomm's version) don't put you line 3 until you get over about 18-20 mph. I found that if I stay in 4th (on an 8 speed) and chug around at 1100-1300 rpm (12-15mph), I can go over a mile before the logs shift me back to driving. I actually discovered this at a Wal-Mart DC while looking for a lost trailer.

You're getting bumped back to driving because, between the gate and your door, you're grabbing all kinds of gears and going 25-30 mph because you're not thinking like the machine. You're super hot and bothered because you think you have to hurry to save time. Take it easy in parking lots and at customers and you can do all of your docking and parking, etc. on duty or off duty.

The system is designed to allow you to move around for the sake of parking, redocking, and all the other low-speed stuff. Just do it at low speed.