Cost of getting in front

Think a line of 4 trucks doing 60 and I cam do 65, speed limit is 70. If I just pass all 4 at once, I'm going to have a long line of impatient cars stacked up behind me. I will find a nice big gap, pass the first two and then slide back right and let traffic clear and then hop back out for the last two.

I did this Tuesday night. While I could have waited for a large enough gap to get all 4 at once, doing so would have meant my 11 running out before making delivery. When I shut down I had 5 minutes left on the 11. If I hadn't driven assertively that day I would have had to get up early to deliver on time, then sit and twiddling my thumbs waiting for my pick up appointment.

Conversely, today in the same scenario I just sat at 60 mph for the last two hours into town because the 10 minutes saved wasn't going to get me anything.

 

You should realize that drivers are not robots to follow some normalized scheme of driving habits which goes against their human instincts. If a driver is restricted to how they must behave at such a micro level, their level of happiness at work will plummet down and they will go to work for someone else. Successful companies retain their drivers by keeping them happy. In exchange they have confidence they will get the job done. That's the most important part. They want them to be punctual, courteous at customers, taking care of equipment and safe. Unless there's a huge deviation from an average mpg at the fleet level, that is a secondary issue.

Maybe these laboratory level ideas will find implementation once the autonomous trucks are ready to go and the human - capricious element is out of the equation. Before then, the key element of successful trucking will always be found on the revenue side.

 

Things like telling drivers when they can pass or not, when and where they can break or not, governing their speed, face recording cameras and whatever else they can come up with, are all things that a normal person has no choice but to put up with. It is yet to be determined how they contribute to the overall safety but while such a micro managing may be sustainable for a plant worker, in OTR life they can surely wear down a person who is invigilated and controlled 24/7 and that person may be all right on HOS but is he safe: fatigue wise and mentally or is he not a ticking bomb?

 

Frankly Assured sounds more like an insurance or company safety compliance investigator than an actual driver but hey what do I know.

 

What's your purpose on here? Do you need some advice help, getting a job, have a mechanical issue that has you stumped? Or just expressing your thoughts? Please enlighten us

 

For me, it's usually once my trailer starts passing their window and they see the orange. At which my +5 mph differential becomes a -1 mph.