EOBR Electronic Logs - Good or Bad

Actually, that was someone else that said that one, not me. My dispatcher does not have access to change my logs, only my logs dept does, and several of the logs dept people have a ridiculously strict interpretation of HOS and if i'm complaining about the system, i'm usually complaining that it cut me short on hours I legally should have been able to use, but wasn't...

For example, one time i took a 10 hour break while the truck was in the shop. At some point i sent a message to dispatch, saying its taking a long time. Then the qualcomm screwed up and put me on line 4..it happens sometimes, and leaves you on line 4 until you fix it. Usually no big deal, but they're like, omg, cause i told dispatch that a shop was taking a long time.

I fail to see why i cant be in line 2 just because the trucks in the shop. Where was i? In the sleeper. What was i doing? A little sleeping, ate some chinese food, talked on the truckers report. Line 2. So it cut me short on hours and i had to take a 2 hour break to fix it. bunch of bull.

My comment on a million dollars and tamper proof is that...people are greedy. I have no doubt that some company will pay off the government to let them have a little hack in their logs program and let them alter logs with no records....

I'm probably the only one here who is knowledgable on SQL, but...what if a logs program was made that used MySQL to store the logs? SQL is a great system for such a thing..but it's an external program....therefore would be easy to tamper with....get what im saying?

I wonder if the FMCSA would even notice a company was using sql...

What does control d do? my qualcom doesnt have a control key!

Werner's system puts you on line 3 if the truck moves to another grid location on qualcomm...but if you were on line 3 for less than 5 mins or so it changes it to line 4 and leaves you there. Truck can move grid location by simply shaking, in some places..

it's the same system they use to determine what intersection to give you a route starting at..

I HAVE AN EOBR. I WORK FOR WERNER. That said, I take my resets at HOME. I never do a reset on the road unless its a layover...which if im laid over for 32 hours, im going to get with dispatch and make sure i get a 34 out of it, right?

How come if im laid over for 24 hours i cant get the same reset? Thats all im saying.

A better way of explaining my annoyance at the 34 hour rule...Right now, i have 15 hours to drive. I dont gain very many tonight, but i gain 10 tomorrow night. I just took what would have been a 34 because of a layover, however, i wanted to take a shower, so i drove for an hour. What's so #### wrong with that? I have just as much right to have those hours back as anyone. I didn't NEED the 34, but it would have been nice since i sat for that long without making money.

With an EOBR, its nearly impossible to drive the perfect 9 hours every day, no more, no less...



The rules cant be set to everyone. Thats the point. The HOS is totally stupid. I usually don't get any log violations, however, i get screwed out of a LOT of hours with this system.

As for the 14 hour rule. If i take a nap because im tired, why should i lose hours for being safe? Thats why.

I've been sitting at a dock for 5 hours right now. Why am i losing hours to sit here? Im sitting on my ### using a computer. It doesnt make me tired.
I love how people like you dont get it.

thats my point

 

Original post by Phroziac: (As for the 14 hour rule. If i take a nap because im tired, why should i lose hours for being safe? Thats why.

I've been sitting at a dock for 5 hours right now. Why am i losing hours to sit here? Im sitting on my ### using a computer. It doesnt make me tired.
I love how people like you dont get it)

phroziac, Take your 2 hour nap, you get the hours back when you only need an 8 hour break. I'm sure your spending your 5 hours in the sleeper, right? no cost to your 70 that way. I assume your not working, based on your statements.

 

What is wrong?? If you are teaming, maybe nothing is wrong cause once you are thru your 14, your partner takes over and you don't lose time, miles, money.

Let me tell you, the reason why Wal-Mart is using more and more OTR drivers like myself to run their darn store loads and other darn loads is because their drivers are having lots of problems with their darned elogs. They are coming short in hours and Wal-Mart doesn't want to hire more drivers.

A friend of mine, the only solo driver that I know so far who has used the darn elog at Covenant was always short in hrs, could not finish trips in time... had to reschedule appts. constantly, was making less miles, less money, a lot of headacke... She hated the darn thing and went back teaming
Hated that too (of course) and now will try to become a trainer...

 

Just because I drive team does not mean that I will never have issues with runnin short on hours. Theres been numerous times where for example, my wife, the day driver, has been so short on hours that she's only been able to drive 5 hours in her shift. I of course, the night driver, had to wait 5 more hours to start driving while waiting on my 10 which caused the truck to sit for 5 hours. But the good thing is, the load planners and your DM can see your log books on their computer screen and use that information to load each truck accordingly so that they can minimise the risk of giving a hot load to a solo or team with few hours or a slack load to someone with a bunch of hours.

Even when I drove solo for little more than a month, I really dont think a months worth of solo driving is any different than 2 years worth of solo driving because you only have 70 hours to use and depending on how hard you drive, you can use'm up real quick.

I never had an issue with running out of hours, nor did I ever have to give my load to a team because I didnt have enough hours to complete the load on time while running solo. There were plenty of times where I could only run less than 8 hours in one day because it didnt take long tilll it got to the point where at the end of the day, Id have like 2 or 3 hours left on my 70 and I was totally relying on the hours I gained back at midnight. If I only gained like 5 hours after midnight, then the next shift, I could only drive 7-8 hours for that day untill one of my hard, 10-11 hour days fell off after midnight.

Like I said many times before, its all about time management. Drive within your hours. Dont screw around too much at the truckstops. You're out there to drive, not dick around. Try to spend as much time as possible behind the wheel. Look at it this way..... If you ran hard a lot more times, then you have a bunch more hours gained back to you after 12. If you onlyt ran 9= hours a day in spurts and less that 5 on some days, when those days came back around to get dropped off, thats only 5 or less hours that you gain.

Even though the EOBR's are alot more strict and designed to put an end to driving illegaly, it is still possible to not lose miles and as a matter of fact, if used properly, might even gain you some miles.

 

Mostly it takes more up-front planning. You can't just rip an elog page out of the book and start over: You have to do it right the first time or suffer the loss of hours.

 

You can perform the preverbial "EOBR page tear-out and start over" to an extent but you just cant edit drive time. If you drove it, its gonna be logged.


With ours, its above 7 miles an hour and like a half mile traveled puts you atomatically on line 3.

Im not gonna speculate for other systems, but ours has nothing to do with the transmission. The Q-comm has a GPS in it that that knows where you are at and knows how fast your going and how much distance you travel.

 

I spent my 5 hours in the sleeper. Ok, I moved the truck from parked on the street to backed into a dock at one point during that, but stillllll....everyone does that.

What I really meant though, was like...lets say i drive 45 minuets to get to a shipper and get held up at shipper for 3 hours. You know that solo drivers mostly do short loads with these big companies, so....that usually involves atleast one load a day. Hell, team driving usually involves a load every two days..

So im in the sleeper for those 3 hours. Now I drive on down the road and i get tired and take a nap later...Ok, most of my naps are not 2 hours. If i take a nap its either going to be 15 mins, 30 mins, or 1.5 hours. Why? Werner trains us about sleep cycles...which you can train yourself about to with google too. If you wake up during certain parts of the sleep cycle, like deep sleep...you're gonna wake up groggy and dont remember where you are and what day it is, etc, and feel like ####e for the rest of the day. IN MY OPINION, 15 mins of sleep is safe, 30 minutes of sleep is safe, any more than that you should take a full 90 minutes. Two hours isnt bad, thats just another 30 minutes...but its usually more than i personally need...

But now that i ran up those 3 hours at the shipper twiddling my thumbs, every minute of that nap is costing me time. Now my dispatcher is going to be breathing down my neck. Not cool.

I have to say, I only take naps during a trip if I'm driving nights. I try to primarily drive days and then I get screwed into driving nights by dispatch or customers, and now i'm all tired from flip flopping like that. If i had a couple days to get used to it, its not so bad.....

Like i'm gonna drive all night tonight for example. Infact now that you mentioned it i'm going to split break....lol. And no, i did NOT take a nap. I did twiddle my thumbs for around 4 hours though....unloaded, had a preassigned setup but it wasnt in the yard yet..

Walmart has otr drivers. But i know what you meant. I'm always short on hours too. Like yesterday, I ran out of hours soo early..I was like, what the hell happened to them. Then i end up wasting my time and looking through my log trying to figure out where they went.

I always get my 70 run up so bad too. Not bad enough to need a restart but worse than it'd ever get normally. Like, lets say I drive to a drop yard. Lets say an hour late i tell dispatch theres no trailers there via qualcomm. And then the qualcomm throws me on line 4 accidently, and has me left there for that hour and more. Normally i can edit it (seriously, it put me on line 3 because I had my girlfriend in the sleeper once!), but now that i sent that message...they're gonna tell me i cant edit that hour cause i really was.

What if i really wasnt though? Sometimes i try to call dispatch and give up waiting on hold and send it on the qualcomm after 30 minutes or so. LOL. Waiting on hold does not count because i have speakerphone..im doing other things...and im in the sleeper anyway.. This hasn't happened in a while but it does happen.

Actually sometimes you can edit drive time...but all miles have to be accounted for. I moved 2 hours of line 3 to a previous day once. It was a genuine error but I wonder if I could have lied about it and done the same thing..haha... What happened was i parked in an NH rest area right by the shipper. Place was very shady, lots of trees, no signal. I contacted logs and then waited til morning, made darn sure i got my full 10 hours, drove to shipper (knowing it'd throw me into violation, and knowing i'd fix it after i got there), got the buzzin buzzer and all, and then checked my logs to see how it needed to be fixed...Oh, it shows i parked in CT and drove 100 miles this morning (drove 20 miles, haha). They let me fix it....

Usually that doesn't happen quite like that but I guess the qualcomm had some lag in recording where i was. Hell i remember one time i crossed into michigan on 94, and i get a message to drop the load back in channahon...i call em up, and say...hey, im in michigan! got "it showed you were on the other side of chicago wtf!!" LOL. Dispatch seems like they're used to it when you get into these conversations with him.

Hell one time customs tripped over my qualcomm that already didn't work right (Terminal refused to fix), and pulled the cord just right and i had to be on paper logs for 2 days. It sent and recieved messages but did not update position. I called my dispatcherman in the morning and told him, hes like "I Hate geting these phone calls all the time!! These sattelite systems keep breaking down!" lol...

 

Wrong. You can edit anything but drive time.

 

You are so bad wrong. I cant believe the stuff I'm reading on this subject.... go to work for a company that uses electronic logs, drive at least two years using them and then get back to us about your comments.