fmcsa wants to know your opinion

I just hate when duty time starts eating up driving time. I sat at a shipper for two hours, then three hours getting an alignment, and another hour waiting on a trailer. So I lost 3 hours of driving time while doing nothing. Unfair.

 

And you get to drive to the truckstop and conserve your 70 for the week. Tomorrow is a new day free from the stupid shipper.

Hopefully you write that shipper into a small notebook never to return there again in your life like I did.

 

I'm a company man, remember? I just follow orders. #### rolls of paper weighed 43,700k.

 

I try to remember. There are so many.

Paper rolls are even worse. That tells me you will be in bum#### Iowa 4000 miles away by noon tomorrow as happened to me from Virgina Bear Island by Doswell once.

I was there in Des Moines Iowa at 1 PM the following day after leaving loaded in 20 minutes that previous night. There was a werner driver giving me a hard time because he had waited something like 18 hours. The Mill Supervisor up on the ramp floor decides whose paper rolls roll down the ramp to the shipping floor and dock. Not me. It's not my fault to be loaded in 20 minutes and yes it's my fault for never stopping against my logbooks (Plural) and being late 1 hour and 10 minutes which was a service failure against me formally by the company.

You just cannot win. That was one of two that I collected that year, enough to cause ATS to want to fire me. I quit instead in a really bad way over 100.00 that was not paid.

 

No wonder you are always mad...

43K !!! oooyyyy.

I cancelled (while waiting to be loaded) a heavy load, and high tailed it to a 2K lbs load in a snap of a finger last week.

Same broker still loaded me this week, with a 12K lbs load.

 

So many truckers are willing to give their opinions here on the forum, but think it's pointless when the rule makers actually ask your opinion? I say, take the 10 mins you'd be wasting by voicing that opinion here and post it for the rulemakers. Better yet, just copy your previously posted opinion and paste it into the form for it. The tea party showed all of us that if you speak up and get loud enough, things change. It's what the resistance is doing now.
I'd like the rules to be made for real life situations. Sure, it'd be nice to be able to take a "real" break for a nap or something, I get tired in the afternoon and would like a nap, but how many "super truckers" would be willing to lie about that break and be actually on duty during that time. You may follow the rules, and you may honestly report all on duty time, etc, and you may be able to know when you are really too tired to drive, but how many guys will take an energy drink and move on when they are dangerous? Do you want to drive with them? Do you want your family at risk because of them? How many hours is too many to be awake and on duty or driving? Studies tell us the answer.
I also see a lot of truckers saying that they log hours at the shipper as "sleeper" or "off duty" when they know they are on duty and have to be alert to when to move their trucks. We see it all the time - truckers saying "I log off duty as soon as I clear the gate", even though they still have to park, get papers handled, and be alert to move their trucks. So, what I see is some people who would abuse any leeway given in the rules. If we could all be trusted to be honest about the rules, we wouldn't need rules. If truckers refused to drive tired, or refused to drive in bad weather, or refused to wait long hours at companies, we could change the industry. The fact that some ppl had "two log books" shows how far they are willing to go to break the rules. There's no proof you were in your bunk, is there? No sensors that show weight on the bunk (which ya'all would just put your chains there or something anyway). Inward facing cameras might be a solution, but I'm not willing to give up that kind of privacy, are you? I see a lot of ppl on this forum saying that it is an invasion of privacy.
Most humans need 6 to 8 hours of sleep to function well. 14 hours a day is all your brain can handle before you start to fail at your task. Failing in a truck means losing control of 80k+/- lbs of deadly force in motion. We need to keep track of the bad companies. We can blacklist them, like they do to us with DAC reports. This forum and others need to have a category for this. Titles in the forum need to be "shipper xyz - wait 3 hours" so we can all see which companies routinely waste our time. We could ask for this kind of reporting from the same ppl that create DAC reports. We have the technology to do it ourselves if they won't. The kind of time we waste at these bad companies reduces our wages, sometimes to below min wage. This should not be allowed to happen. We need to demand our $30 an hour or so (or whatever it is for O/Os) for EVERY hour we spend sitting still, since we only get paid for moving miles.

 

I submitted my opinion. I basically said $20 lap dances and $8 well drinks is just too much. We’ll see what happens.

You’re welcome.

 

I have been complaining about the free time. In two hours I could have been 130 down the road and made 50 something more dollars. There should be a stop fee and hourly fee.