No personal conveyance?

This is correct

 

How do you log personal conveyance on paper logs? Line 1?

 

https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/title49/section/395.8
Question 26: If a driver is permitted to use a Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) for personal reasons, how must the driving time be recorded?

Guidance:

a driver is relieved from work and all responsibility for performing work, time spent traveling from a driver’s home to his/her terminal (normal work reporting location), or from a driver’s terminal to his/her home, may be considered off-duty time. Similarly, time spent traveling short distances from a driver’s en route lodgings (such as en route terminals or motels) to restaurants in the vicinity of such lodgings may be considered off-duty time.

The type of conveyance used from the terminal to the driver’s home, from the driver’s home to the terminal, or to restaurants in the vicinity of en route lodgings would not alter the situation unless the vehicle is laden.

A driver may not operate a laden CMV as a personal conveyance. The driver who uses a motor carrier’s Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) for transportation home, and is subsequently called by the employing carrier and is then dispatched from home, would be on-duty from the time the driver leaves home.
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note

D.O.T. told me a laden vehicle in the case of a semi is with a trailer. The attachment of the trailer ladens the CMV.

.

 

That officer should look up the definition of the word.



An empty trailer is not carrying a load. When that officer performs an inspection of your CMV, does he stop at only the tractor? Or does he include the trailer in his inspection of the CMV? If the trailer causes the truck to become laden, then you'd have to have a BOL for the load the truck is pulling. You aren't required to have a BOL for an empty trailer because you are not carrying a load...thereby meeting the definition of "unladen".

Hell, even 49 USC 31132 defines a CMV as "a self-propelled or towed vehicle". That means the towed unit IS part of the CMV, not a load being carried by the CMV.

When pulling an empty trailer, you are unladen.

 

All I can tell you is how it was told to me by the people that write the tickets.

The logic I got from them was the tractor is the unit you are driving. It has a fifth wheel to tow a trailer. When you add weight to the tractor by attaching the trailer you are ladening the tractor.

I guess it all comes down to whether you really want to argue with a beat cop over what laden and unladen mean. Most cops will tell you I am not into arguing, that is for lawyers and the court system, good luck sign here.

 

Ask most enforcement officers if all the lights on the vehicle must work, including "chicken lights", and a large percent, if not most will say they do.

Yet from this publication, it shows that is not the case. So just because one DOT officer says so, doesn't mean it is so. I apologize for having to link to it instead of cut and paste.
https://www.teamrunsmart.com/mobile/c6c328eb-3de6-4639-a53e-2012c6e992eb/articles

 

No need to post the whole article, just the regulation:
§393.9 Lamps operable, prohibition of obstructions of lamps and reflectors.
(a) All lamps required by this subpart shall be capable of being operated at all times. This paragraph shall not be construed to require that any auxiliary or additional lamp be capable of operating at all times.

In other words, if it is required it must work. If the light is not required by the regulations, it doesn't have to. Just as in the case of "unladen", if you want to look like an incompetent fool in front of the judge, go ahead and write it...the regs are on my side.

 

It is not against the law if you don't get caught.

 

As long as im off duty I can do whatever I want, I go to the Wal-Mart and pretty much anywhere else I want to go, this sounds more like a company policy!

 

Thanks for doing it. After the latest update on my phone, when I Google something, it doesn't open in a format that I can cut and paste it. Thanks for doing it for me.

Further, I have seen in a publication by the FMCSA summarizing the HOS that moving your home is also PC. That laden refers to commercial cargo. I will try to find a link to that one too.