Just some of the stupid things I see

Yeah, he screwed up.

 

Thank goodness I'm not on e- log yet. Company pushing it, I'm fighting it.
But if on it and I want to go home or someplace. I would use it. Even though I have my own trl and I have to permit it to move the thing even mty.
Personal use. My trk and trl..

So I'm taking a long trip to the store. HaHa

 

I'm not gonna pretend to know the ins and outs of the rules, but if you aren't under dispatch, and you are headed home even if home is 185 miles away, then that should be ok. 1000 miles is a wee bet suspect.

 

At least he was honest. I believe Injun is right on this and he should have been shut down. Now if he was going home for personal time and not to grab another load and he is an owner op then he should be able to run to the house on PC.

 

But if you pick up a load in Seattle to take back to Atlanta....
I would not buy the story that the trip west was personal conveyance.

 

If I went straight to Seattle to pick up that load, you would have every right to be suspicious of my story. However. If I went to my home in Idaho and stayed a week, then went to Seattle for that Atlanta load, there would be no reason for question. As long as you've been in the business, you know loads aren't generally posted to the load boards until no more than a week before pickup time.

 

I found out the hard way last year that the personal conveyance exemption is too vague to do me any good around here. I was coming home from VA after delivering a load to take a week or so off. I definitely wasn't under dispatch, because I wasn't even sure how long I was going to take off. Knowing that I was going to go over on both 11 and 14 hour clocks, I drew my line from line four to line one, and wrote "using vehicle for personal conveyance" in the remarks section. Got randomly stopped at the scale in Bull's Gap, TN, and shut down for being over hours. They told me that since I was hooked to my trailer that I had "freight carrying capacity" and couldn't use the vehicle as personal conveyance. After a couple of hours of doing a level one (no defects) and all the paperwork, they told me I could drop my trailer and bobtail home, which obviously was clearly illegal at this point since I'd been shut down for ten hours. I had been up for about 20 hours by the time I got home to Knoxville. When I went back to get my trailer, I talked with the Trooper in charge of the scale to see if I could get him to remove the out of service order, and he quoted the same "freight carrying capacity" line, which is nowhere in the regs. I asked if that meant a dump truck could never be used for personal conveyance and he said "Not unless the bed was removed." I then asked if a truck that did power-only moves would have to have it's fifth wheel removed before it could be used for personal conveyance, and he said "We deal with that on a case-by-case basis," which of course meant "I don't know WTF I'm talking about." I wasn't issued a ticket, so I had no way to fight it in court, so I was kind of stuck with getting it on my CSA score. I tried to appeal it to the FMSCA office in Nashville, who told me that I was "up the proverbial creek without a paddle."

Bottom line-I learned instead of leaving interpretation up to some idiot cops who are less familiar with the regs than I am, I'll just break the law to start with and rip out a page and make it look right.

 

There is the problem.

Your interpretation is one and may not be correct. Yet, you have the authority to put out of service and ticket with fines.

Does not make it right or LEGAL.

 

Josh, you are right. There is no mention of freight carrying capacity in the regs. All it says is "unladen."

I believe some of these rules are deliberately written vague to give both truckers and law enforcement some wiggle room. Too bad you weren't a member of OOIDA. Woould have been interesting to hear their interpretation.