HOS Violation????

You were doing line 4 on duty activities logged line 1.

The existing violation is pretty clear. You never had a 10 hour uninterupted break. To avoid the violation you should have been on duty until parking your truck at 1:15 and a ten hour break until 11:15.

 

Not necessarily. He's only "on duty" while attending to a broken down CMV, which implies you're disabled on the side of the roads...NOT safely parked in a truck stop. Drop your truck off at a shop and leave, and once again you are "off duty" the entire time they are working on it, as you have been released from duty and free to do as you please.

Side note: One time as a company driver I had an output shaft seal blow out on a PTO while unloading a pneumatic tank. Called the company, and they called a wrecker. Wrecker called me with an ETA several hours out, so I called up a friend who lived in that town and we went out for dinner. Came back and waited another 30 minutes or so before the wrecker finally showed up...the whole time on line 4. Why? Because when Friday rolled around and they were looking for people to work the weekend, I was "out of hours"...didn't have to use an excuse and argue with them over whether I "couldn't" work or "wouldn't" work and whether my "excuse" was more important than work.

If you gotta keep a log book, use it to your advantage.

 

I disagree. On paper one can flag without using an entire 15 minute block. If the truck is moving then it's drive time. Also, since ELD count every second there's zero excuse to misclassify the drive time as on duty not driving when the machines can add it all up properly to the second.

 

The violation comes from that one little blip when the ELD registered you moving the truck. Since you didn't log it as off-duty driving (personal conveyance) it will trigger a violation. Legally, this violation is correct, although in practice most drivers do it differently and would have used PC to move the truck in and out of the shop. Federal rules are very clear on the start of the 14 consecutive hour period as well as the need for 10 consecutive hours of off-duty and/or sleeper. Yes, there is a way to split the sleeper with an 8/2 period but your log didn't do that either.

Your violation comes from a combination of the driving blip at 9:45 PM on the 23rd and again at 1:15 AM on the 24th. This interrupted the off-duty period you thought began at 8 PM and resulted in your "tour of duty" being calculated as if it started at 5 PM on the 23rd, putting you over the 14 hour window at 7 AM on the 24th. You then did not have a qualifying break of either 10 consecutive hours off-duty or at least 8 sleeper combined with 2 off-duty to reset your 14 hour clock.

If you were qualified for the intrastate rules legally, and your device had been set to use them, then you may have had a qualified break and avoided the violation. I say maybe because I am not a intrastate expert in TX or FL and only have the Federal hours of service committed to memory but know that they have different and more flexible intrastate only rules for drivers that qualify.

 

Still has to be legible, which isn't going to happen with that many flags. I remember a day I had...ordinarily would've been a short-haul exempt day, but wasn't because I picked my truck up at Mack in the morning and ended at my house. The day started loading at the quarry about 2 miles from Mack. Hauled rock across the state line and dumped 7 miles from the quarry. 15 loads and a splash of fuel later, I was rolling the 14 miles back to the house about 8 hours after picking up the truck...and I had to try to keep it legible. Doesn't matter how "fine point" your pen is, you can't write small enough neat enough to keep it looking good. Hell, if I had elogs, the printout probably would've taken 3 pages and then some.

And my excuse for using YM to keep myself on line 4? The 3 minutes of drive time it saves isn't worth the hassle of constantly fighting with the stupid ELD when trying to put myself back on line 4...or worse yet getting preoccupied with what I'm supposed to be doing and NOT switching back to line 4 in which case it burns through a good size chunk of my drive time. Happened one particular day when I knew I'd be cutting it close on both the 14 and 11...had to go to rec#1, untarp, and drop. They'd pull their stuff off while I hooked to an empty and went across town to load my back haul. Drop that there and bobtail back to rec#1, retarp, and drive to rec#2. Drop trailer there, and bobtail back to grab my loaded trailer home. Didn't manually change it about 3 or 4 times that day, and hit the 11th hour when I stopped at the post office to check my mail on the way home...8 miles from the house. Yes, I drove home. Had to annotate §395.1(o) for driving past the 14th hour, and annotated the 11:09 on line 3 "Not stopping 8 miles from home, F****** ELD logged 20+ minutes of line 4 time on line 3."

And yes, I typed it out...no *'s in my annotation.

 

Sure. But he did not leave it and go home. And Petro or wherever the heck it was will not drive your truck out of the shop. You have to remain in attendance.

Guidance even says he would be on duty.

Now do 99% of drivers falsify in this situation? Sure do. Do most companies allow them to? Yep because they need to save those precious hours instead of being paid to wait.

But by regulation, definition, and guidance he should not have been off duty. Maybe he could have had some time where they say "It is going to be an hour. But at a bare minimum he should have the time arranging the repair, and paying for said repair as on duty as well as any time waiting to move trucknoit of the bay.

 

I shouldn't suggest this, but I had a similar situation come up and it was so frustrating I just decided to break the rules and see if it would fly.

USE ONLY AT YOUR OWN RISK!!

I was doing a trade show 5 hours away from "home base" 7am "appointment" time and although I was "released" from work around 3pm I still had a commute, and family time at home. (Not to mention trying to sleep in the daytime) so I got up at midnight with only a few hours sleep, drove to the yard and pre-tripped in the dark and took off around 1-1:30

I get to the trade show staging yard at 6:30 am, nobody shows up until 7, they then tell me sign it starts at 9. (Of course I went Line 2 the minute I pulled my breaks, so I took a few cat naps)

9 am I walk to the sign in cue, stand around and BS with other drivers for an hour get a piece of paper and a "don't call us, we'll call you" attitude from the show managers.

So I get a call around noon, they'll take me after they get back from lunch (how nice) but I can move my truck to a dock now.

Now at this point by any legal definition, I should have told them that once my truck hits that dock, it has to stay there for 10 hours! (Hahahahah) or I can see what I can make happen.

So I unplug the ELD, drive the PRECISELY 1.4 miles from the staging yard to the convention center, let them load/unload whatever, clear the dock so the next guy can get in, go back to the staging yard, plug my ELD back in and finish sleeping. I'll make sense of my logs later.

Now, I was probably more "well rested" when I drove 1.4 miles illegally mid day than I was at 1:30 am after a few hours sleep even though I "legally" had a 10 hour break.

Should a big fancy trade show just hire a "switcher" to operate between the staging yard and the dock? Probably. But nobody asked me.

Would I have gotten in trouble if I'd hit something in that 2.8 miles? Well yeah, but how much trouble would I have gotten into if I'd told the trade show they couldn't have their product.

So we're still in a lose-lose conundrum. Yes you can use the law when dealing with an obnoxious client but nobody WANTS to be a jerk, so you try to help people out if you can.

 

All of this makes perfect sense to most of us. However, the longer we continue to bend the rules, the longer those rules take to get repaired. It's an unfortunate consequence but now is the time for the rest of the industry to feel the pain and reality of BS HOS if we ever want to get this mess fixed like it should have been done a long time ago. Just seeing how DOT is backpeddling on the PC issue shows they're beginning to crack.

 

I still like the idea of some HHG company leaving their moving van in Bethesda / Tyson's Corner. overnight because-rules. Nothing says added value to the neighborhood like Billy Big Rig treating a gated community like a Pilot lot over night.

Loooolll