Personal conveyance

Ask your boss.

 

Personal Conveyance: Frequently Asked Questions | FMCSA

From the FMCSA
Q 1: May a driver, who drops his or her last load at a receiver’s facility use personal conveyance to return to their normal work location (i.e. home or terminal?)

A: No. Returning home or to the terminal from a dispatched trip is a continuation of the trip, and therefore cannot be considered personal conveyance.

My opinion: you can use PC to leave the warehouse and go home or restaurant. But when your weekend, 34 hour reset, 10 hour break, 30 minute break is over at home your return to the company terminal, customer warehouse, etc is On-Duty status or Driving status, not PC. I mistakenly used PC home and PC to terminal for a while. Company never complained and I don't recall DOT ever noticing or complaining. Getting away with something doesn't mean it's legal. It just means nobody punished you for it. It might be legal or it might not be big enough for them to enforce.

Also, your company can have stricter PC rules than the FMCSA and enforce those rules against you. So even making the FMCSA/DOT happy doesn't mean your company is happy. What does your company say?

 

Company I worked for a while back didn’t even have PC as an option.

 

Exactly. How are we supposed to know what the situation is? His employer makes the call, not some strangers on the internet.

 

Exactly... What the rules say is one thing. The logs are yours. Log it the way you want.

I never had a PC option as a company driver. I bought a truck and leased to Landstar 8 years ago this month. What they told us in orientation went something along the lines of "you cant use PC to advance a load, BUT they cant tell you what place to eat at, or what venue of entertainment to partake in. So you COULD for example, stop at a rest area, switch to PC and then go to this truckstop that you LOVE the food at that just happens to be a half hour down the road from where you stopped that coincidentally happens to be in the direction your load is going".

We had a company wide crackdown a few years back that only lasted 6 months or so because a number of guys were caught abusing it (I will admit, I abused the hell out of it but was never caught because I never passed a scale on PC).

But you have to understand the rules and the risks, because as Harry said, the buck stops here (meaning with YOU).

But your question as to using PC time to go "home" kind of depends on where "home" is. In MY case, right now I dont go to a terminal, and I dont go "home". There is a small truck stop less than a mile from the house that I park at when Im "home". So since it is neither "the terminal" nor "home" I would argue that I CAN use PC time to get there. Im sure a cop would argue the other way. But by the LETTER of the reg, I am right. By the SPIRIT of the reg, I am wrong.

 

By the "rulebook", no. You can NOT go from the shipper/receiver to your terminal.

However....

IF you are EMPTY, you can use it for "personal use" to say go to a place that just "happens" to be NEAR your terminal and say buy a pack of gum. And THEN, since you are NOT leaving a shipper/receiver you could THEN go to your terminal.

Now again, thats letter of the reg legal. SPIRIT of the reg is another matter. Your logs, your risk.

Personally I do that kind of #### all the time and have never had a problem with it. But it is ON YOU.

 

No. Because you’re returning to your home domicile, which is part of your job function. This can be considered as being used to save hours on your clock, since PC doesn’t count against you.

PC is for personal use, such as dropping a trailer at a customer, PC’ing to a restaurant, store, etc, then, PC’ing back to the customer. I do this a few times per week, as I do extended load times at a shipper.