C'mon drivers! What's the big deal about staying in HOS compliance anyway?

48 would be better to allow for more time to get chores done around the house.

 

But would really suck when your doing a restart on the road.

 

No matter how long or short, a restart shouldn't count UNLESS THE DRIVER IS IN A LOCATION OF HIS/HER CHOOSING!
Not some crappyass truck stop cuz dispatch decided not to "have any freight till Monday ".

 

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but I have to wonder whom your rule change would help.

And how would you enforce it? Ok, so the driver's HOS reset only counts if he's at home? What if he decides to take hometime elsewhere, like at a vacation spot or at a relative's house? What if, in fact, the driver honestly, truly, likes the truck stop he's stuck at?

What if, god forbid, the driver's home is his truck?

Personally, I don't often get a reset out on the road, but when downtime is forced on me, it's a nice perk to know that my clock is reset -- and I wouldn't have gone into OTR trucking in the first place if I couldn't abide solitude. I can make my truck fairly comfortable -- idle rules notwithstanding -- and I'm content to read a book, ramble on this forum, call friends, or listen to the radio for a day and a half if need be.

It'd be nice if the industry abided by the sentiment you express. It'd be great if we were paid for all of our work, given credit and just compensation for our personal sacrifices, treated like human beings by the wider world -- but unfortunately they don't, and we're not. Restricting the reset would only hurt drivers, not help them.

It isn't as if the reset is the main subject of complaint about our current HOS regs, anyway.

 

Heh, yeah. I haven't taken any scientific polls, but my impression is that most truckers' biggest complaint about HOS is the way the split break works (or doesn't).

You'll see some of that sentiment in this very thread. For what it's worth, the 14 hour rule doesn't upset me, in principle; 14 hours accounts for a pretty long honking day, after all -- and barring some extremely creative load planning, it isn't that hard to work within that time frame.

What's missing is flexibility. Say you get a bad night's sleep, or you have a delivery really early one morning, followed by a pre-loaded pickup at the very end of your shift. There's no room in the current rules to take a less-than-eight-hour nap, unless it's a less-than-two-hour nap, in which case it's basically worthless.

It'd be nice if you could take, say, a 4-hour sleeper break and have it count for something. (something more than 2 hours, that is. )

But here I go again on the rambling train. Others have already summed up these sentiments better than I could.

 

That's why people don't like the split-break rules.

But to play devil's advocate, you could argue your point for almost any job. What if a doctor doesn't get any sleep? An air-traffic controller? The bottom line is that you have a certain amount of time off every day, and if you're responsible you'll make a good-faith effort to get your required rest during that time.

With truckers, since we tend to have more erratic schedules, the issue is a little more complex. And since our minimum required rest is so closely regulated -- to my knowledge, more than in any other industry, excepting maybe the military -- we can actually end up being more tired when you comply with the regs than you might be otherwise.

That is, unless you can sleep soundly, and wake refreshed, on command.

For simplicity's (and brevity's) sake, I'll ignore the cute little things we've all been asked to do -- like swap a load in the middle of the night and post-pone the line-4 time til after the 10-hour break is finished. Suffice to say that we truckers are expected by our employers to remain flexible, but we're not given much leeway by the federal government when it comes to adjusting our schedules to get rest when need be.