Your experience with violating HOS.

Never heard of such stuff, what is this map thing on y'all talking about looking at?

 

Google maps. It's a gps app with real time traffic updates for phones and tablets. Its not truck specific so some common sense is needed but it's great to alert you to ever changing traffic conditions and road closures.

 

Thank you Spyder, never heard of it but is interesting.

 

You're knowingly violating your HOS. Car driver comes up on you drunk or texting and runs into you. You're not violating any other laws. No speeding then and no speeding anytime in the past 15 minutes. Driver dies. Guess what? You're going to jail for manslaughter. You were violating the law, and that fact can be proven when the tattle-tale gizmos on your truck are gone through. Your criminal act got somebody killed, and if you had been obeying your HOS, you wouldn't have been on the road and the car driver would have probably lived, as you wouldn't have illegally been there for him to hit. At least that's what a prosecutor will argue. And it'd probably stick.

 

I'm reasonably sure you first have to be liable for the accident. I know there was a landmark case somewhere because a car full of teenagers had a fatal collision with a drunk driver parked at a red light years back. As I recall the drunk driver got off both criminally and civilly and he was wealthy enough that they were absolutely going after him with the same intensity they would pursue a trucking company.

 

It isn't that cut and dried.

It's not that cut and dried. The high profile cases I've seen involved a lot more. People are prone to leaping to conclusions based off a one paragraph summary of a verdict when there was actually hours, days, even weeks of evidence and testimony submitted. Generally news reports allow comments by both parties. So the driver focuses on the one that died had been drinking and records shows had been texting while driving. The prosecutor focuses on the log violation. That's the deciding factors for both, why they don't doubt they were right. The actual deciding factor might have been the skid marks headed for the ditch, the impact marks on the passenger side of the trailer showing clearly the driver changed lanes in front of the one that died. Honest mistake? Not with that violation.

The moral is if you're going to knowingly violate HOS then don't kill someone while doing so. If you can't assure that you have no business on the road.