Serious as a heart attack

The industry standard (for owner ops) is 14 hours of driving per day. We hear all the time "you dont start making money till 11 hours"...

I hope DOT figures out how to make all trucks run OBC's. Then maybe I can drive 11 hours per day without having to compete with cowboys who want to drive 15 hours.
I cant for the life of me figure out why people argue that we need MORE hours everyday to work.
How many jobs can you think of where people think you're a slacker if you only work 11 or 12 hours a day?

 

I have been OO for over 15yrs, and have not a clue what you are talking about bud.
I can count on one hand the amount of days I have gone over 11hrs of driving in the past year, and that would be for my own reasons, not to make a living.
If these idiots need to run that hard, EOBR's wont change a thing. Coming from a country that has run tachographs for all the time I was driving, there are more ways around it that you could know of the top of your head.
If you think you have to compete with outlaws, may I suggest changing your freight etc? I know I dont have to drive near 10hrs a day to make a decent living.

Martin

 

I drive a 62mph truck with an elog. My paystub for march 2nd, 9th week of the year showed year to date income of 9690 dollars. Just shy of 1100 a week average. We have quite a bit of drop and hook, but still secure and occasionally tarp as we are flatbed. While I'd like to run faster sometimes, the elog works ok. Just need to plan, and of course hope shippers and consignees are on the ball when you get there. And while I agree with guntoter that is silly to want to work 15 or more hours a day and complain when you can't, I do not want the govt mandating EORB's. The govt is way too far in peoples business now. And don't need to be any farther. Anything the govt gets involved in seems to end up more screwed up than it ever would have gotten if they had stayed out of it or at least left it as it was.

 

It is wonderful that you have the smarts to be asking this kind of question. But you need to take it a step farther with the company that wants to hire you. Get out your calculator and start with how much money per week you want to make, or that they say you can make, and then work backwards using whatever their pay rate is, to get how many driving hours per week at a reasonable/allowable/governed speed. If it is not realistic, then your chances of making that kind of money are zilch.

 

If you run legal there really are no drawbacks to you as a driver. A EOBR has literally too many benefits to list. The biggest one being that the mainstream carriers can't run you illegally like they used to. If you're out of hours, you're out of hours and they know it. Dispatchers already know what you're hours are without you even telling them.

Companies make up for the lack of productivity by hiring more drivers. Most mainstream carriers try to push solo drivers to either team with someone or train so that they don't need to buy as many trucks and trailers. They also reduce the requirements for trainers, so that you can have a trainer/student truck sooner. Unfortunately this is the case of the blind leading the blind when a driver with only 6 months experience becomes a trainer.

 

The company I'm working for hauling bulk cement guarantees like $900 weekly and home every night for experienced haulers with a yr+ experience.

We use electronic logs. But we get paid by %
Right now, still in training, I drive about 8 hours a day. Then I have ON DUTY time doing pre-trip, loading, unloading, post trip, unhooking, etc etc.
So I put in any where from 8 to 11.5/12 hour days running mostly early mornings off by noonish.

Personally, I've built and programmed computers, but this people net electronic logging combined with the paper work that has to be done and kept up with for accounting, BOL, and customer records is giving me the run around. It seems like there is always something new to learn daily with it.

I'd rather everything be on paper. For example, I did my pre-trip, recorded everything in my VCR aka DVR/DVIR but forgot to log it into the people net.
Half way through the day outta the blue I realized that I didn't record it and logged it in. My trainer said that I would have been fined if DOT asked for it and I was unable to show it logged. Even WITH the paper portion of it being done.

I have a feeling once I get the hang of it that it'll be a good thing.
But honestly, I believe that it's more of an administrative/logicstical advantage for bean counters instead of the drivers.

my $.02

 

They don't always care.

A couple weeks ago I turned down 3 loads from Salt Lake to Denver.
The first two were because I only had 7.25 hours left on my 70 with no hours coming in the next day.
Can't drive 530 miles in 7.25 hours.

The third was because I would have had to run the entire 530 miles straight through, with no breaks, to make the delivery on time.

I know, I know...
I am being unreasonable.

 

I got into my shipper tonight with 5:30 hours on the clock. They told me I would not be finished till 8-8:30 loading at 3:20 PM. They just burned the rest of my day up.

I immediately went to off-duty and am going to Sleeper here shortly. I will take my 10 hour reset and leave at 1:30ish AM. It will get me home earlier than if I had continued to run my 14 hour clock out.

Think outside the box.

We do a lot of hook and drops too. You can manage your time down to minutes with 5 minute minimum steps needed to log a change of duty. IE stop for a rest area, plan on 6 minutes for it to be logged as off-duty time. Gives you a nice breather too for stretching those legs out as well.

Same thing when sitting at the dock. I take 8-13 minutes to do my paper work, and then go to off-duty time laying in the bunk of the truck waiting for them to do their things. I have no obligation to anyone at that time, so I really am off-duty. You aren't burning up 3-5 hours drive time sitting on line 4. There are drivers that do this in the company and they are the ones complaining that they have no drive time during the week.

Company is well aware that we do this too. We are no-touch, so they have no issue with it either.