Indian River

The is a terminal in PA also which has no idle laws. I idle as I need to, have yet to have law enforcement tell me otherwise. I don't pay any attention to signs posted on private property if I am outside a bay and the climate requires idling for comfort.

Still wish we had APUs on all the trucks (I've seen a couple with them) as I sleep better with the engine off assuming it is cool enough for my comfort.

 

Can you imagine to outrage (and massive lawsuit) if a cop wrote a trucker a ticket, the trucker shut the engine down and then subsequently froze to death?.

No way I would want that kind of heat if I was a cop. Better to a be decent human being and look the other way.

 

Probably most likely scenario is perfect weather for opening the windows for natural airflow, and the neighboring truck getting mad about your idling.

 

Please answer a few more questions I have:

Would you say this job is similar to reefer in terms of customers and sleep schedule? Do you find yourself flipping your sleep/wake cycle?

Are customers like reefer where you're there for multiple hours usually? Does dispatch expect you to do split sleeper during this and then get rolling even though you didn't actually sleep while at the customer, and now you're supposed to be on a completely different sleep schedule all-of-a-sudden?

A couple other questions about this company:
Do the trucks have driver-facing cameras? How about for the new/rookie drivers?

And lastly,
Do they expect you to chain in bad weather or are they OK with waiting for the road crews to clear it up?

 

Nothing like reefer as far as the customers. I always hated cold storage warehouses because of how crabby employees there were and then you had lumpers to deal with. Tank customers I typically go to are 24hr operations, but that's pretty much the only similarity. It's still not a 9 to 5 job though and you will occasionally have to run at night if the load requires it. Noone will force you to use split sleeper and in fact during my orientation the safety guy said they would rather we didn't use it as it has caused some drivers to screw up their hours and go into violation. I still use it if it will benefit me and have yet to hear any objections.

No driver facing cameras, actually only the newest trucks have forward facing cameras. I don't know what or when they record though. I have one in my truck and there are no flashing light on the back or anything which other drive cams tend to have. I can't even be sure it's even switched on.

No forced chaining, one of the first questions I asked in orientation. I once refused a dispatch because of an in coming ice storm and didn't get any fallout. If that refusal put me on some blacklist, I couldn't tell any difference to my loads/money.

 

Do the trucks have refrigerators and inverters?

 

Yes, built in dorm style fridge and 2,000 watt inverter. APUs are a rarity, only ever seen them on a couple Internationals. Don't know the story behind those as the vast majority of the fleet are Peterbilt 579s.