Driving night hours from 12am to 6pm.

I've been running flatbed for the last 18 months, but an expedited service to the oil industry. For me it is fairly common to be dispatched on a night run.

Even on long hauls I tend to gravitate to my favored starting time, just after midnight. This helps me get through urban areas on cruise control, and it gives me "pick of the litter" for parking for a ten in early afternoon.

Regarding flipping schedules and sleep:

Sleep comes in biorhythms of about 90 minute cycles, during which you go through all four stages of sleep. This includes an REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase during which you dream.

Another fact about sleep is it was common before the industrial revolution for people to have TWO sleep sessions every night. I now can wake up in the middle of a sleep, spend 90 minutes or up to an hour and a half "guilt free" being awake, then get back to sleep.

If I need to sleep when I am driving I stop and set my alarm clock for 90 minutes from when I bid off. That's one complete sleep cycle, and I am completely refreshed.

I dealt with jet lag for decades in international trade. It's a serious matter, very similar to flipping schedules as a driver. The most important thing is to "TCB" (Take Care of Business) during your off time: SLEEP. If I wake up in the morning after a good night's sleep and don't yet have a dispatch, I have breakfast, maybe drink a small amount of coffee, and then go back to bed. Sleep as if you are going to get that 5:00 pm call to run all night.

Don't be the YouTube ##### whining about flipping schedules. Do your ####ing job and sleep.

 

7-5

 

We are not. I'm a one man show and it works well.

There are jobs out here like you want.

 

I am stepdeck/flatbed specialized and I usually run midnight to 6am when I'm trying to get to the house. I might start my day @ 4am when I want to get a early jump on the day. Other than that I get up when my body tells me to.

 

I'm a night owl and would love to run nights all the time. You can make better time with less aggravation and parking is easy. Unfortunately, it does not happen much with West Side Transport.

 

Running through small towns with traffic lights is much easier at night. It seems most towns use on demand traffic lights. During the day there's lots of side street traffic, so you are constantly coming to a full stop. At night there's no traffic, so you can roll through the town at the speed limit, keep your momentum and get easily back up to highway speed.