why do roadside inspections take so long?

Actually, nit-picky or not, the Sheridan officer was correct. When you were relieving yourself and kicking the tires, you were not driving. You were briefly "off duty" and then briefly "on duty not driving". All of the duty status changes combined were not long enough to log actual time on line 1 or 4, but it should have been flagged at the time of the stop with the location noted. Granted, few actually DO that, but if you were logging as per the regulations you would have done so.

 

given a day like today where it seemed like I had to "go" every 30 minutes, my log book would have been filled with notation lines as a result. Instead I made one line for a 15 minute "driver relief" break.

 

9-2-14 I was struck in construction backup on I-90 south of Madison, WI. A driver with a strong southern Appalachia accent was jaw- jacking about another inspection blitz between 9-3-14 and 9-13-14. The objective is 100 % roadside or pulled into rest areas for "air brake inspections".

I replied to I believed that DOT is still too busy with harvest roadside weight scaling to do this now. I don't know if he was telling the truth or just trying to get drivers riled to cut the backed up in traffic boredom. I was going to make a post about it. He said he had a friend who is a DOT Officer and that's how he knows. IF I was that DOT officer, I would check the forums and see how far my gullible driver friend took my rumor and had a laugh with it.

 

Brake check week. Your friend is correct, although how many inspections will happen in a given state is always debatable.