Schneider chat room - Closed see new thread linked in the last post

It depends on your truck, your QC unit, how fast you accelerate, what gear you get to, time moving constantly, how far you go doing stop and go, what you ate for breakfast, which stars are in ascendency, and how badly you need it not to kick onto the drive line.

The rough guidelines are:
1) 3/4 of a mile of constant movement over 35 mph
2) 2 miles of constant movement
3) 4 miles of stop and go with no stops longer than about 30 seconds
4) 40 mph
5) Total ignition time (no firm idea here but the longer the engine runs the faster it kicks you onto the drive line)
If you hit any of these thresholds the QC should kick you onto line 3 - key word is should. There is remarkable variation between trucks/QCs.

Mindsoul is kinda right about being able to 'convert' short distances of drive time back to on duty. Any duty status lasting less than five minutes "doesn't count" if you manually switch statutes within that 5 minute window. IE I pull out of the T/S, drive 3 miles to the shipper during which the QC kicks me onto line 3. As soon as I get the to shipper I shut the truck off (automatically putting me onto line 4) or quick get into the HOS tab and switch myself to Line 1 or Line 4. No drive time will be recorded because the 'drive' I did was less than 5 minutes.

What does happen is the log 'breaks' and flags the break w/latitude and longitude. So using the above trick to get into/out of a customer can be handy but any deep look at your logs with show the monkey business. If you go more than about a mile it has a 50/50 chance of popping up as a 'false log'.

 

I ask because I had a dbl (same office, not mine) pushing me, subtly and without taking any responsibility for this, to drive like 5 miles from a truck stop to a shipper before my 10 was up. I'm telling her there's no way this assignment can be done on time unless I can park at the shipper, but the shipper isn't answering the phone and nobody can tell me if parking is allowed or not so she's telling me to park at a truckstop 5 miles away and "then I'll be ok to arrive on time" ...oh ok, so I'll just go ahead and roll the dice and see if there's parking at this east coast truck stop at 2am, then I'll just go ahead and roll the dice and see if driving 5 miles during my 10 hr break does or doesn't kick the mcp200 into line 3. The corporation has no consequences, just me the driver....but if I protect my own ### and arrive late, the corporation has consequences. So shift the risk onto me. Brilliant. Doesn't matter, I'm parked at the facility now. It's just the principle of how they operate....I find it shady and totally unnecessary.

 

But then again, if you scratch there back they just might return the favor. If I'm 5 miles from a shipper while taking my 10 I don't log the trip over. I don't log anything until I'm ready to leave. Save your 14 that way.

 

I agree but that is MY choice - not anyone else's. Especially not someone sitting behind a desk with 'plausible deniablity'.

I do my trip plans assuming I'll run 100% legal w/strick interpretation of the rules. If I can squeeze out an extra 10-20drive minutes here or tjere I'll do it but when I accept a load my eta to del is the time I KNOW I can be yhere safe and legal.

Two weeks ago I had a Home Depot load that was on the verge of being an impossible dispatch. The support shift person tried to get me to say I could gaurantee on time delivery by pulling some shenanigans and I read her the riot act.

 

Well said its not their license or csa points or livelihood on the line its ours protect your neck

quad core project butter smoothness

 

Exactly, its one thing if you do it to save the load if something unforseen puts you behind schedule but a whole other thing if its an impossible dispatch and they try to force it one you.

 

That's what's going on here...I got bounced from that facility and had to drive to find external parking and have had to drive back and forth since to pick up a load and then leave again and now wait for my 10 to be up....and I've done this sort of thing a fair bit. I just wanted to know the specs so I had a better idea of exactly if how when where and why the mcp drops to line 3 because that would have been a problem.

I don't like having my hand forced though. What's fair is to only dispatch a load that can be done legally under realistic conditions or to expect that other stuff might be late. What's not fair is taking it as a given that I'm going to stick my neck out so some widgets can get from point A to point B 45 minutes faster. In fact, just to use a real example, I got into this same kind of HOS trouble (DBL insists receiver allows parking, receiver kicks me out after 14...) over delivering a load of scrap cardboard to go on top of a giant mountain of scrap cardboard. You want to tell me my drivers license is worth having that there in the evening instead of the next morning. BS. B---effing---S.

So yeah, I take your point, I do take your point...I also think there's some nuance to this, and all I really want is to have a reason to feel like me and the office are on the same team instead of having a reason to feel like they're trying to screw me. I hope after the last few weeks of my taking a lot of bad loads and taking them like a man they will start to come around. If not, I'll have to send them a photocopy when I get my first million somewhere else.

 

The best way to watch it is by watching your DOT clock while driving. Usually you can get 2-3 miles before it auto logs you into drive. Once you see it start ticking down you just have to make sure you can get to a stop or slow roll to put it back into off duty before 5 minutes of drive.

 

Much easier to do in a city/town environment where there are signals or stop signs.

 

I can get 6 minutes of driving under 35 before it kicks in, in town, then once you see it start ticking, stop within a few minutes, switch it to off and it will all be off duty, wait another 7 minutes or so and start again.