Taylor University Accident (drivers read this)

I wonder how bad he REALLY needed the extra money in light of this.

There is absolutely no excuse for this. And I hope that his company gets a stiff fine for allowing this. I am willing to bet that they knowingly looked the other way plenty of times before that tragic night.

 

I hope a wreck like this never happens to one of our forum members.

 

I read the article. Sad for everyone. By the report it looks like he was driving some 20 + hours in one day. I often joke around a lot about creative writing. A long time ago drivers really twisted the logs. I think more today with the exception of some drivers like this that push themselves to far. I can see drivers making a little time here and there, but driving 20 plus hours in one day?

The thing that makes it so hard to stay legal is todays laws. If you spend 5 hours unloading /another 5 loading. There is 10 hours. Now given the fact that you can drive 11 hours, but not past 14 hours on duty. Look at your timeline if you logged legal. You have 4 hours of drive time left. Maybe 240 miles in your days run. Minus, pre-trip, fuel, city driving, etc. Now this is only one example and drivers know what I am getting at.

You have dispatch battling with you, customers etc. If we are going to crack down on truckers then they need to crack down on the driver's chain of command. You can stand your ground, but your miles can be drasticly cut. You can be setting for days. Drivers know the drill. Or you can be pushed once and then dispatch knows your a push over and will run when they tell you to off qualcomm. I am not taking up for this driver that killed these people, but I am familar with what a trucker deals with on a day to day basis.

 

I wonder if this guy had truly driven over his legal limit this far, or if it was a case of not updating the log book. It doesn' really matter in terms of the lives that were lost, or the fact that the guy didn't have the common sense to stop driving regardless of being legal or illegal, just curious what the actual situation was.

His hours of service violation doesn't really matter to me. The issue here is that the driver didn't pay attention to his body telling him to stop.

If the driver truly fell asleep at the wheel and caused this, I don't care if he was over his hours or not. The problem is that he didn't have the common since to do the right thing and stop driving.

My personal opinion on something like this is that I would want charges brought up on a truck driver, or a driver of a 4 wheeler, regardless of how long they had been driving, if they were driving while fatigued like this.

 

Amen brother, lets face it,sometimes you tell yourself 'i have to do what i have to do' and justify it, but when you get tired, you have to pull that wagon over and sleep it off. There are no exceptions to this rule.

My biggest problem with the new HOS (that leads me to creative logging) is the simple fact that even though we are under the gun, from brokers,dispatch,customers,etc, the average customer has no reason to even attempt to get you out their door in any amount of reasonable time. And since now, you can't stop your 14 clock (dumbest move of the new HOS) you get stuck in the spot where you have to play around with your logs, and show less time there so you can get the load down the road. And that's mostly what I do, is have to show shorter periods of loading/unloading so I can keep rolling. I don't like to, but that's the reality of the situation. Thankfully, loose leaf logs come to the rescue.

 

I think this driver just pushed himself right into jail. When your body tells you it's time to stop and sleep it's being nice. If you ignore that message it will just shut you down where you are. Unfortunately this driver was still on the road, and now he faces jail time for killing a bunch of people he didn't even know. I hope I never have to face someones family member because I killed there wife, husband, or child with my negligence. Nuff said.