30m break in a daycab (I’m sure this has been answered already)

Depends on what your loading and what the shippers and receivers require of you.

 

Yes if you are actively assisting or directing in the loading/unloading you are supposed to log it on duty. And i do. But all the other times where I'm just hanging out in the drivers seat waiting for them to get the crap off my deck, that's off duty.

 

Here is my rule, if there is no paper/electronic trail to prove what I'm doing, it's off duty.

 

They always allowed it. But before then, you needed a letter from your carrier that you were off duty. They wouldn't because of cargo insurance. Once they mandated that 1/2 hour break, they no longer required that letter.

 

I thought @Dave_in_AZ was king. This post gives him a run for his money!

 

Negative. In Swift orientation 2010, the main safety guy told us it was illegal to sit in the driver's seat and be Off Duty at the same time; there was no such thing. He said we could close the curtains and be there or otherwise we had to sit in the passenger seat. I can show you the old regs, in fact I made a video about it.

 

Point noted. When I learned, 10 years prior to that, you simply couldn't log "off-duty" at all except by written permission of the motor carrier. Even eating lunch was "on-duty" unless you ate it in the sleeper.

 

Every trucking company might handle it differently.

Personally I go off duty after 15 minutes when I hit a shippers area.

I don't want to burn my 70.

 

You guys are both confusing how your carrier told you to do it and what the regs actually said. At no point has it been illegal to log off duty when just hanging out in the drivers seat, nor has a letter from the carrier been required to do so. Heck the green bible used to even have an example of a pneumatic driver being off duty in the drivers seat reading the newspaper white his pto pumped his product off.

 

LOL