Pride Transport

I want put some information out here about Pride Transport because the thread by Kryon on this subject was instrumental to me in choosing to work for this company, but his thread is quite outdated. My experience so far is:

When I completed school and agreed to sign with Pride they offered to fly me to their only terminal at Salt Lake City or get me a rental car and reimburse me for gas. I chose to drive my own car with gas reimbursement for personal reasons.

They do not do the background checks, employment verification, or drug tests before you arrive which is kind of a negative, but in my class of 10 there were no problems with any of that.

They put you up in an okay hotel about 10 minutes from the terminal. You get a room to yourself with free breakfast at the hotel. (They give you lunch all 3 days of the orientation. It was deli sandwiches the first 2 days and Dickey's BBQ the third day.) They have a shuttle pick you up the first morning of orientation then we drive the shuttle back to the hotel after that first day. We leave the keys at the front desk but we can borrow for anything we want to do until 930pm.

They have you get into town Monday, then orientation is Tuesday through Thursday from 8 AM to 4-4:30 PM with an hour break from 12PM to 1PM.

So the staff at Pride is exceptionally nice and driver friendly. They call it the Pride Way and it seems to be contagious. It's easy to be nice to people when everyone is being super friendly to you. As an example, a woman who team drives with her fiancee was upstairs in the driver's lounge playing her XBOX. I chatted with her. Later she told me that I could stay after when my orientation was over to play her XBOX then just take her personal car to the hotel as long as I brought it back in the morning. People are crazy friendly here.

The first day of orientation is drug screens, new physicals, new DOT medical cards paid for by Pride, and then road tests. The road tests are about 60 to 90 minutes long and done by everyone who doesn't need a trainer. In our class we had 7 drivers with OTR experience who did the road test. It's basically just showing drivers how they want their equipment handled. 1 driver with 26 years of experience has no OTR experience so he just has to do a quick 50 hour eval with a trainer then he will road test and go solo.

Myself and one other student were fresh out of school so we must do a 100 hour super solo with a mentor followed by 200 hours of team driving with a mentor before we road test and go solo. Pay for everyone is $360 for the three days of orientation. Pay for trainees like myself is $450 a week during the super solo then $.15 a mile for all miles driven during the team driver phase.

When a trainee such as myself goes solo then I start at $.41 with some bonuses. The bonuses are:
$5000 signing bonus if you are in their service area, paid $200 a month for 24 months (last is $400)
$6000 tuition bonus, paid $125 a month
Mileage bonus: which is .5 cents, 1 cent, or 1.5 cents per mile for the whole month at the end if you have driven a certain amount of miles. The 1.5 cents if for 13k plus I believe and drivers tend to land in the 12.5k to 13k range.
MPG bonus which is set based on the truck. $30 for meeting the benchmark and $30 for every .1 MPG you beat the benchmark by. Paid monthly.
Produce loads is $30 for every dock bumped and $100 layover if you can't make every pick within your HOS.
$15 for bumping the dock on a non-produce load for every dock except the first and last.
Detention is $15/hour starting after you waited 2 hours and calculated in 15 minute increments.
Layover is $50/day for a full 24 hour period. Same for breakdown pay.

Bad things in regard to pay are:
Trainees just out of school don't sign a contract but must agree that after the 300 hour mentorship they will stay with Pride for 6 months or pay a pro-rated $5000 depending on how much of the 6 months is remaining.
All drivers must pay for their own inverter from the company (can't use own) and the company will install it. These range from $400-$500 for the non CPAP inverters and are paid at $50 per week.
The $500 dog deposit is not refundable but you can transfer it to a different truck as long as your truck is reasonably clean.

Anyways the second and third days of orientation are typical. Security, HR, paperwork, tours, getting comdata/fuel cards, taking pictures, logging on to Transflo. They watch the videos in their orientation playlist on their YouTube channel. The 3rd day drivers who don't need a mentor meet their fleet managers and figure all of that out.

After orientation, so Friday now, all 7 experienced OTR drivers got seated in their trucks. They all got Freightliners though the company does have some Peterbilts. They ranged from 2016 (the oldest the company has - getting phased out) to 2019s. Autos and manuals. They won't put anyone in a manual who doesn't want one but they did ask for volunteers. The trucks are really beautiful and well maintained. They install DirectTV for free for you and they install the mount for free, but you must buy your TV and I believe you must buy the mount. Then they charge $60 a month for DirectTV. They have a scale for that which decreases the cost to you and if you are out there driving then that ends up being free.

The driver who needed the 50 hour eval and us 2 trainees all got a hold of our mentors on Thursday to come pick us up. The other 2 people's mentors will be here Monday and mine will be here on Saturday. All 10 of us got our hotel stay increased to Monday though.

Anyways, that's basically the orientation experience here. Everybody I talk to is getting a ton of miles, not having maintenance issues, and just very happy here. I'll write more about how the mentorship goes and how the solo driving later goes if anyone is interested.

 

I finished my first week with my mentor at Pride. So this is Phase 1 where I drive 100 hours with my trainer watching and it is scheduled to take about 2 week. Then we team drive for 200 hours for Phase 2.

In 7 days I drove for 59 hours and drove about 2700 miles. I'm attaching a picture of my HOS.

My experience so far is great. My mentor made it home for 5 of those 7 days so I slept in the truck by myself. I'm ahead of schedule for hours and getting a lot of miles. Russ, who is in charge of mentoring, called on Friday to make sure everything is going great. Also they have driver advocates which are 2 couples who team drive for Pride, and they called to see if I need anything as well.

I'm looking forward to the team driving and even more so to going solo. I'll keep you updated.

 

So everything is still going well. Today is the end of my 15th day. It took 13 days to get my 100 hours to complete Phase 1. Now I have been in Phase 2 doing the team driving for 2 days. So far we haven't sat at any point waiting to get a load assigned to us. It's just go go go which is great. Any complaints I have are with shippers or consignees, not with Pride. I haven't added my miles up recently but I'm close to 3,000 a week. When I add them up I'll post details.