DOT and the State Boys have gone Mad!!!!!!!

se' habla espanole'?? (spelling is WRONG LOL)

 

What your going to have to accept is as long as your in trucking we are going to have to deal with pricks.And its bad enough we have to deal with them on the road and now we have to deal with them on a trucking forum

 

You reading your own posts? I agree with DB - and I'm GLAD he's made my life safer.
As for the HOS problem, I also see something there that simply has to be overlooked when a driver is forced to move; and we all know you can't usually park on the street outside of the shipper, if you want to keep your load and your life.

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Just so everyone is aware to what Dieselbear was referring from post #67; all enforcement officers have what is known as discretionary power. At an officers discretion, he can issues a summons/citation, or he can treat you like a dog & tell you if he/she ever catches you again he'll throw the book at you. The clue is how you're being treated and how you treat them.

If you treat an officer like a dog he/she will do the same. It's called human nature. Everyone, officers included, have 206 bones in their anatomy.......well, I'm better than most because I only have 205.......I lost one when I ejected over the South China Sea & the canopy didn't blow, then I went through the canopy & lost part of my thumb (I had about 4,000 hours feet dry over the top of that little fiasco). If you treat them like dirt, the discretionary power will treat you like dirt.

If you maintain your vehicle you stand a better chance of receiving a non out of service writeup because of the officers discretion. If you cop an attitude, guess what. If you violate an O/O/S order, guess what.

If you're speeding at 5 MPH over, the officer at his/her discretion can do either. But 10 over.....well, you guess

Because of the human nature factor during discretionary power activities if you call him/her a prick and live in a certain state; guess what, you prick. And if you skipped school on the day they taught spelling, guess what.

 

No, I conveniently chose to ignore it. That's not an enforcement officers problem, that's the drivers and the carriers problem unless you take the responsibility to complain to the enforcement people such as my former employer. I have been on shipper/receiver/consignor/consignee property many times correcting problems such as that after driver complaints. But the U.S.D.O.T. can't investigate what it doesn't know transpires.

 

Since it's been brought up, and you have been at these places - what is the drill when a shipper/reciever/coop tells a driver who's out of hours, to leave?

 

First, I would suggest that you leave & go to the nearest location for resting before they call the cops as that could get you into trouble for more than just an HOS violation & the carrier may lose the contract for that business. Next, call or email the FMCSA office in your home state. I believe the FMCSA website has numbers & contacts. But be prepared to wait as many times, depending on may things, it takes a while for a federal agent to get to the actual complaint (before I retired we were required to look into a complaint within 90-days & most of the time it took all of that before we could respond). The responce time may be longer now as I retired a few years ago.

In addition, every state has compliance officers that are qualified by the USDOT/FMCSA to act on their behalf. Many times action can transpire more quickly by them. If you choose this option, I'd suggest you go to the state headquarters to issue the complaint.