Switching from Short Haul Exception to Standard 60/7 or 70/8

Thanks for advice. I actually did, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense. That's what I was talking about when I said that if you start 60/7 it says you have to follow those rules for the following 7 days and I assumed that meant a 34hr reset and then you could switch to the 70hr rule. I wasn't sure and came here for clarification and the only response I got was someone apparently thought I meant that the dot was telling you that you had to run 7 days straight or something and replied that the dot doesn't tell you how long you have to run? On another thread someone said refered me to ooida which I'm a member of cause it was required for the health insurance I purchased. One of their advisors said you can switch which what rules you're following whenever you just had to notify the office. (Meaning make a record in your home office that you were switching which rules you were following.)

 

Agreed could have been straight forward; however, sometimes your mind gets bogged down with everyday work and life and it's just easy to rattle on. Most of the post were placed in a short time while my helper was unloading. I do keep a log even though not required. I use the big road trucker app for the iPhone on the 60/7 short haul rules. Which brings another question. You said that I'm not required to keep hours split for short haul... Are you positive that's correct? Every HOS sheet I've ever filled out as a company driver had to show the split and hours of availability. You just didn't have to show start and stop. You just had to show total for the day. Now my question is this. If you are right and you say that all my duty hours count toward the 70 then if I keep an actual log does that change and could I actually go off hours driven? I agree with keeping it simple, but please understand with all the misinformation I've been given lately by self proclaimed experts. I'm a little afraid to just go by what people say.

I figured coming to this forum would give me a lot of responses to form a census. Unfortunately the only two conclusions I've come to is that I should have either been born with the knowledge of the fmcsa rule book and that people assume this was a life long dream I've had and took a short cut to it. I doubt that if anybody here had a job in the service/trucking industry (service was always the most important before forced to be an owner operator) that they were extremely good at and it was the only successful way to provide for their family. I doubt if someone told them they had to get their own authority to keep doing it that they would refuse until they understood every word in the rule book. Now I understand that HOS our probably the most basic thing to any trucker whose main job is to get the product their safely. Please keep in mind. This is not my background. I have to get the product there safely so that I may setup up and install it safely. My responsibilities are greater after the product gets there than on the way. Now I'm not down playing the importance of road safety at all. I'm trying to get everyone to understand my ignorance. I wasn't trained in my 9 years in the field to worry about hours of service. I guess I was keeping them with out even knowing it. I honestly for the first 5 years thought they're were tracking my time to see how quickly I was getting installations done. The importance was always installation, care for customers homes, and quality of service not ever how many hours did you drive. The fact that I was driving a CMV was an after thought. If even a thought about it at all. My thought process was "it's not a tractor trailer and how else are stuff gonna get there? Won't fit in a car." Now that I'm more aware I come for advice from the experts to get on point. And I get responses from ignorant people who sound like they think I watched an episode of shipping wars and would just go get me so authority and they're offended at the fact that they've been truckers for years and I'm the new kid on the block. Not the case my friends. I Just like my job, fighting to keep it and doing the best I can to make a living. Scalemaster none of this last part "the rant" really as anything to do with you response. I found it very helpful. But others responses have really been eating at me all day and I finally had time to put some thoughts together.

 

Crankinwise thanks for the advice. That sounds like it would work just fine if you were running 5 days a week following the exemption, but on one of the 5 regular days you were going outside of your radius. What I'm actually trying to do is pick up additional days to get more work. Because of that as I understand it I will be loosing my right to the short haul exemption because I will not be "available" 7 days a week. Which is fine. I understand and am ok with that. What I was wondering is if discovered a load in the middle of the week that I wanted to take on a weekend then could I switch and how would that affect my previously logged hours and my current hours of availability. One thing that would have made this simpler from the get go would have been if I was running 70hr rules all along. I advised by someone from the company that the 70hr rules didn't work for our industry because of the reset. Which I found out was bull because the resets were the same. The next simplest solution I've found is that I start a reset tomorrow evening just because of normal scheduled time off so Tuesday I'm going to just start on 70hr rules. I was mostly just looking for advice for a what if scenario. Thank you for the advice though.