Swift Equipment

I think houstank does about 3k a week dry van.

 

I was pretty steady at averaging 3K a week for the past couple years, even during the winter, but in the past 4 months or so freight has seemed to flatten out somewhat.

I'm running 2.3K to 2.8K a week now and pretty much staying east of I-35. Everything seems a lot more hit and miss now.

 

It goes up and it goes down ... I'm still at a 3K clip ytd.

 

I would be happy to be at a avg of 2800 instead of about 2100

 

How was day 3 of orientation?

 

Day three is when you actually get hired. We started our 7 day logs so we could be on the truck. Finalized all of our hiring paperwork and got out driver numbers. Another safety meeting and a meeting with our driver development coordinator. Basically your DM while you're in training.
A few of us are already out with their mentors. Others are at the hotel another night.
Currently I'm in limbo. I was assigned a mentor in flatbed division so I got lucky. There aren't many of them. I didn't get so lucky in the fact that my mentor is on a run to Laredo right now. They might bus me out to him or I'll be waiting. We'll see. Everyone else in dry/reefer will be leaving by tomorrow though.

 

whats your take on this drive cam stuff?

 

so with Swift Transportation not having APU in the trucks does that mean idle the truck in order to use the AC? I thought that many states have laws that you can't idle the truck anymore.

 

From what I've heard not many of the drivers have them yet. They're installing them in phases. Dedicated and local accounts will get them, then intermodal, OTR will get them last. We touched on the topic during one of the safety meetings, basically all that was said was 10 seconds before and 10 seconds after an incident is recorded. They gave no reason to why. Personally, I don't see it as a problem. It doesn't sound like Swift is out to fire you, they're a starter company with incredibly high insurance rates and they've found a tool that will help lower their costs. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. If you're a safe driver you shouldn't have to worry, if you're changing and bent over with your ### in front of the camera when someone backs into you at least everyone in the office will know your name and you can't complain about being a driver number anymore lol

I'm not 100% sure about this but I think the truck has to be certified as a clean idle truck to idle. The shop manager came in and explained how to override the idle shut offs on all the trucks, never mentioned anything about the legality of it.

 

Thanks for the reply the reason why I ask because i hear some states don't just give out fines for idling that jail time could be involve to.