DOCK/FACILITY ETIQUETTE 101 long format.

They, as well as JBS, were required to have ELD’s long before there was talk of a mandate simply to keep their authority active. Also, let’s not forget that the original mandate was only going to require them for habitual HOS violators. And OOIDA in their infinite wisdom decided to fight that in court. And when it came back around again the government had tightened everything up so that it basically made it pointless to try and fight it in court.

 

Feel free.

 

No way I’m reading all this @@@@ .Don’t worry about the mule just load the wagon complain to your wife and kids nobody else cares

 

Dispatch "Hey driver, I have great load for you to come out of the house with tomorrow!"

Driver "I'm not ready to leave yet"

Dispatch "You've been home for 3 days, what's the problem?"

Driver "Yeah, I got home on Friday, but my log book won't get home until home until Tuesday"

 

Oh, they absolutely do.

When Schneider stopped making trainees do paper practice logs in addition to their 'real' aobr, I noticed a marked drop in comprehension of the HOS, ability to calculate current and projected time, and an understanding of just where the hell they were. Paper logs forced people to do some critical thinking and made the HOS more tangible. With ELDs it became a fight to get trainees to do the math -'why can't I just look at the computer and let it tell me?'.

And it's not that the eld dumbs people down, it's that it allows dumber people to survive training. Just like switching to automatics lowered the quality of drivers on the road. With manuals and paper logs it was very easy to highlight a trainee's flaws and it would become self evident to them that trucking wasn't a good fit.

 

Load can pick up anytime after 0700, live load. Delivers 500 miles away at 2300, live unload. Driver posts up as close as possible to pick up the night before.

Working backwards, ideally a driver arrives 30 minutes before the appointment time to ensure being in the dock on time, 8.5 hours of driving, 30 minute break, 2 hour load time, 30 minutes to pre-trip and drive in. Add it all up and the driver should start his day at 1100, but that only leaves 2 hours to get off loaded and to safe/legal parking. It's doable, but makes for a rough day.

On a paper log, it becomes a non-issue, easy day. If the receiver goes long, no big deal - just don't log the time driving from the customer to the truck stop. The driver can also not draw any lines on the graph until he's loaded. That two hour live load magically becomes a 1 hour load. Even without tearing out the log page the driver can make a 14 hour day look like a 12 hour day.

Then you have the 'outlaws' who will arrive at 0700 and run down close to the receiver, stop for dinner and a shower and rewrite his log to show starting at noon.

When I went through CDL school, the logging instructor casually mentioned that it's easier to keep your log 'neat' by taking the staples out of the company log book and putting them into a two ring flip top binder. Then he mentioned that you should NEVER tear pages out of the bound log book because DOT will look for the gap in the binding, so it's best to void out the page if you need to recopy it to make the log more legible. I was dense and didn't understand he was telling us how to cheat the logs and not make it obvious.

Back in the day, I would often leave the house by dead heading up to the UP to pick up roll stock, then drive right back down past Green Bay, took about 5 hours total. On paper logs it was common practice to fill out the log properly, go pick up and then once south of the Abrams scale to stop and begin a new log page. The loads could all easily be done without cheating the logs, but it sure was more profitable to rewrite the log at the end of day.

 

I 100% agree that the narrative surrounding elds was about leveling the playing field.

However ELDs don't negatively impact efficiency, they impact productivity. A couple years ago I made a California run with another driver. On the return trip, I left six hours behind Bob, finished 30 minutes earlier while using less fuel and having more time on my 11/14/70. When all was said and done, we drove the same number of miles with the same loads with the same HOS rule set, but I was the more efficient driver.

Could paper log carriers out service ELD ones while following the spirit of the HOS? I'm not talking about the little massages like pulling in to fuel at 10:52 and logging the arrival as 10:45, or even not logging line 4 time properly during the shift. I'm talking about straight up falsifying the log like parking at 2000 at a receiver, putting the trailer in the dock from 0200 to 0600, then driving to the shipper as if you'd had a full, uninterrupted 10 hour break.

In 2018 a lot of shippers were surprised that loads they had booked for years could no longer be done in the same time. Drivers had been getting the job done by hook and by crook, but the Office Orifices thought that drivers were pretty much in compliance with the HOS. I tried to make this point to Schneider before they transitioned to elds in 2019. Regulatory actually thought we'd be more productive because the eld was going to log to the minute. By the end of 2019, Schneider decided to turn the trucks up to 65 mph because of "increases in safety and mpg technology". Yeah, right. They increased the speed because of the drop in productivity.

I fully admit to cheating the HOS whenever it was in my interests to do so. I've cheated on paper, I've cheated on AOBRs, and I've cheated on ELDs. Cheating the ELD tends to require more effort than it's worth, but that's the point of them.

 

Hmmmmm the irony. The things you laid out in your post is exactly what I think improved for me once I got to elogs. Elogs are somewhat of a tool for me. I knew how to calculate mileage and plan accordingly like you do on paper, but I have real time data of how long it takes to make certain runs, and for me that's an improvement.