Hours of service questions and answers

Okay, already answered.

 

I have been working in an underground mine in montana for two years I have always been trucking or mining.. we work 10 on four off 12 hours a day and rotate days and nights 7 to 7 am or pm... and drive 45 minutes each way to work... It dont matter what I make per hour! If i make 25 dollars per hour I will want all the hours I can get if i make 40 cpm I will want all the miles I can get when im on the road im out there to run regardless if payed by the hour or the mile... percentage of the load is my favorite... the harder your willing to work the more you can make...

 

Most of us out here work hard. When I'm away from my family, I don't want to be sitting around. I know for sure that I'd be driving tired more and making more money if there weren't rules to keep me from doing it. HOS rules are a necessary evil.

 

Are you saying that you are not responsible enough to police your own activity to ensure that you do not drive while fatigued and that you are relying on the regulatory framework to ensure you are safe?

 

F-yeah! When I work within the law, I still come close to falling asleep. The regulations are a joke. My last job, they would scream (literally) at me if I didn't make the delivery according to their schedule, they didn't care if I was tired, if there were hours (or not) they expected me to stay awake and drive!
Another thing that is problematic:
There is nothing to stop me from racing my bike all day Sunday, going into work Sunday night, while exhausted, and driving 11 hours. Unless they regulate the 10 hours before I go to work, I'll always go in tired.
I would rather run like heck until I was tired, could be 1 hour, could be 16, then rest until I feel rested, could be 5 hours or 10 hours, then run some more. The regulations assume that we all have the same internal clocks for work and rest. They will never be fair, good, acceptable or even reasonable.
The only way to make it work half way good is to pay truckers for every single hour away from home, then you'd have no need to push the limits, but of course, I know that's not happening in my life time!

 

I wouldn't go that far. But I would say that I'm more likely to convince myself that I'm OK to drive if I have HOS available.

 

There lies the problem with the HOS that we currently run under. If you have to "convince" yourself that you are ok to drive then you are unsafe period no matter how you try and justify it. You might be legal but still unsafe if you are tired enough to have to convince yourself you are ok.

Under the old hours of service you could run 5 stop and sleep for 5 and drive 5 stop and sleep for 5 so on and so forth without penalty or having to "convince" yourself that you are ok. Now you are told that you don't have enough judgment to know if you are safe or not yet you are told that you can be legal to run/work for 14 straight hours whether you can do it safely or not.

Don't get me wrong the old HOS were not perfect but they were better than the current with the exception of the 34 hr reset that would have made the old HOS pretty close to as good as you could get in my opinion. I know some would disagree and that's ok cause we're all different and that's the problem. There is no universal magic # for all individuals to be safe and effective.

 

About a month ago. I spent a 10 hour break in Oregon awake the entire time because I cannot sleep in the day and besides, I was not tired.

At 10:00 at night, I again got the hours to finish driving into Portland. It was about 2 1/2 hours away. Then I got there about 12:30 and could go to the bed about 3 hours later than normal.

So, I drove there legally. But I was tired. I was not tired on the entire break, but could not drive.

 

I agree that the old HOS was better. I could stop whenever to rest and not worry about the 14 hour clock. Now, I feel I must drive, even when tired, because when the clock runs out, that's it!

 

The old hours of service would have not been any different.

I was illustrating how the log book does not take into consideration of the drivers ability to be rested.