8 days / 70 hours question.

I wish they would just do away with it and just keep the 11/14. With no limit on how many hours you can work in a time frame.

Ethan

 

it's obviousw 70 isn't enough hours. that's probabgly why they came out with the reset in the first place.

it didn't exist when i first started driving.

 

lawyers can make it look like anything they want...the logbook will tell the truth. do you know if this driver got a logbook violation with this.anytime a trucker gets in a serious accident, they check logs and will send him for a drug test. doesn,t mean he's at fault unless he,s proven guilty

 

I believe he was a fairly new driver the best I can remember, and there may have been the usual you have to deliver or else from the dispatcher. Will have to see if I can find the article I had read in the past. This also occurred in April, 2009. And I guess it was some of the original news that they had said they had pulled and reviewed his records on his logs trying to say that he was fatigued from the lack of sleep, etc.

He is supposed to be from Brazil originally and he seems to know the law well enough to fire his attorney, but does not have a working use of English?? and had to have an interpreter even though he was a pastor in MA for 15 yrs previous to truck driving.

**
I found an article about the sentencing also from Sept 8, 2011, he was on a road he was not supposed to be on hauling cars and lost his brakes running into 7 cars and a bookstore in the process, seriously injuring 3 and killing a 12 yr old and her father. Marcos Barbosa Costa, 46, of Massachusetts, guilty in July of two counts of involuntary manslaughter as well as three counts of reckless driving causing injuries. This article states that trucks are forbidden on Angeles Crest Highway. Anyways he was sentenced to 7yrs 4 mo and over $100,000 restitution.


And in this article dated Dec 10, 2010 it states after the fact:
Later that year, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a ban on commercial vehicles on the Angeles Crest Highway, State Route 2, between La Cañada and County Route N2 in Los Angeles County.
So now were there signs up previous to his going on Rt 2 forbidding trucks or were they put up afterward.


So even with 10 hours sleep it doesn't mean they won't drag you through the wringer if they can.

 

Give us a break from this paranoia. From when the first HOS rules were written, in the 1930s until 2004, there was no 34 hour reset rule. Yes, they will review your logs if you have an accident involving injury or fatality. Standard Operating Procedure, for many years. Guess what? If your logs are straight and comply with the HOS rules, there is no problem, even if you have never taken a 34 hour reset in your whole career.

 

Correct, no reset back then,


instead we had staple removers !!

 

So, it wouldn't bother you to never be able to legally take a day off? Nothing like your dispatcher saying, "you got hours, you can run, so get down the road, or find a new job". This is the main reason the HOS were written, to start with, to cut driver abuse by the companies.

 

Guess you have never flown a commercial airliner, nor driven a freight or passenger train. Yea, they have restrictions on hours, too.

 

lol, arguing about evidence in a court and basing it on law. You guys are funny. It doesn't matter what laws say, there is no right or wrong. All that matters is that you have the better lawyer. You could walk into a courtroom, shoot somebody in front of the judge and jury, then go in front of that same judge and jury and if your lawyer convinces the jury to say your innocent, then guess what? You are.

Even if there is no law requiring a reset, what makes you think a lawyer wont use the lack of a reset in his favor to try and claim you were fatigued in order to push for a harder punishment? Or even to lay the blame on the driver even if it wasn't his fault? There's no law against doing that either, and a lawyers job is to win regardless of the situation. Even if told it's not illegal, the jury most likely wont know anything about driving and fatigue, so may believe the lawyer and think that driving for so many days in a row without a reset was part of the cause of the accident.

Next thing you know, there's a law to require it. Just like laws have been made over lots of other things (not just in trucking), and made by people who have nothing to do with what those laws govern. All because those people making the laws don't know the truth about something and fall for twisted facts and misconceptions.

 

My dad worked on the railroad, died in 1969, and even way back when he had to have 10hrs off between runs, they weren't supposed to call you with another load till that time was up.