Team Weekly Resets

Well, I guess if you are given 4 days to get to your destination, then not utilizing your 11 hours a day would not be necessary. We have never been given 4 days to run 2000+ miles on a load. Most of our loads turn in 48 hours, so if you don't use your 11 hours of drive time, you wont make your destination on time and hence a service failure for the company. I'm not saying my way is the only way to do it, but i would love to know how you only drive 8.5 hours a day and call yourself a Team Driver...more like a Super Solo.

 

You're right, everyone has to do what works best for them, but here's my thinking:

8.5 hours x 58 mph = 493 miles.

So that's 1972 miles with 34 hours combined on the drive line for a team. A little time here and there for loading/unloading, fuel, vehicle inspections, meals and showers should put you down the road easily 2000 miles in less than 48 total hours.

I know that sometimes the weather or traffic doesn't allow for this but I've always taken advantage of it when it does.

We'll see how it goes as a team soon, but 500 miles a day was plenty of work for me in all my solo driving.

I've done plenty more than this in my time, but I never saw where that put me ahead money-wise if I had to sit at the beginning of the next week for 34 hours not getting paid waiting to get hours back.

Slow and steady has always worked for me.

 

The wife and I do an average of 600 each per shift, that is our goal... we like the rolling 24 when we need it, so we can use it to do laundry and restock. We don't worry about using 11 hrs per shift because there is no way your going to use 11hrs, each driver, each shift every single day...no way. Some loads take a long time to pickup and some take a long time to deliver (unload). It took us 16hrs to get unloaded 24hrs ago and we are still sitting, waiting for time to come for pickup. So, why do an 8.5hr shift? We do a restart about once every two weeks or so.

 

When we drove dry van we were much more carefull to try to keep our diving down to about 9 hours to fry to avoid resets. Know that we are on reefer we run harder since there is more down time for loading and unloading.

 

When the new regulations go into effect, the the truck will have to be down longer than 24 hours for both drivers to reset, so maybe avoiding the resets will work out better in the long run(?). I know that its not likely to happen too often in the real world, but I was just pointing out that running 7000 miles in a week with a team is technically possible without needing a reset before the next week.

Sorry to hear that. This seems like a long time for a dispatch team to let a solo truck sit around without needing a reset, much less a team operation. I know all too much about the long wait times to get unloaded, but all the time before the next pick up really stinks.

You can trust that my intentions are not to shut down after 8.5 hours of driving each day, but, with my last job I was able to do it a lot because I tried to keep the length of each run under 500 miles to avoid the sliding pay scale. Using this technique, I was able to produce as many miles or more weekly than some guys that needed to do resets regularly, spend a couple of my 10 hours off shifts at home in a week and have larger paychecks to show for it.

 

I've ran the numbers and you actually will get more miles running hard pushing 11 hrs and taking a rolling reset as opposed to driving 8.5 hrs and never having to take a reset. Not only that but running hard for 6 days than taking a day off on the 7th allows you to be fresher, get things done, get a good sleep in a non moving truck, then only shutting down a couple hrs at a time between loads for 2-3 weeks straight.

Over 14 days...

Using reset

12 days driving @10.5 hrs at 59mph average = 7,434 miles

no reset

14 days driving @ 8.5 hrs at 59 mph average = 7021 miles

Of course with the new regs...that will be a thing of the past

 

That sounds great, now if I just knew anything about ‘truckers hours’

Here is a link to my newbie intro:
http://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/the-welcome-wagon/179160-one-more-to-add.html

 

Oh crap I need to learn Greek for this job? Ha Ha

I figure you vets see this info as a good read, I see it as “man I’ve got a lot to learn”, good thing I like to learn new things.

I’m going to add ’reset, 24 reset, 34 reset’ to my search list next, so I guess Thanks for the terms.
　

 

Do you stop long enough to shower , use a bathroom , eat & stretch your legs ?

 

Only teams can do a rolling restart. With teams it doesn't matter if you only run 9 hours each. You only stop for a few minutes to switch out. At most you lose 15 minutes on a run because you might stop one extra time.