Over the next several days, weeks, and months, we are all going to hear some pretty funny stories about shippers and receivers, and how they deal with ELOGs. I thought I would start a thread so we would all have a singular place to tell our stories and let everyone else have a good laff too.
I think that one of the greatest challenges will be in training Drivers, or should I say re-training Drivers in how to us
I agree 100% the 14 hours is lots but being able to stop it for a nap or to wait out traffic is key. I ran Wisconsin pretty steady when I was an o/o here. We would get loaded about 2-3 pm head for the truckstop have a nap for a couple hours go in and shower and eat and blast right down through Chicago and head for West Lorne. Pull in there get another 6 or so hours in the bunk and head to TO unload reload and head back. Being forced to work tired is about safety??
I have a lot of mixed thoughts about this, I agree that a driver sometimes needs to pull over and close his eyes for 20 minutes, I've spent 16 years running the corridor and have done it myself. I also get the idea that
a driver's internal clock doesn't always run in harmony with the MOT/DOT clock. I've worked both long haul and city, but the better part of my driving career was spent running nights on the 401 corridor. Working either days in the city or running the corridor at night enabled me to at least adjust my sleeping habits.
Long Haul required a lot of trip planning and often required leaving earlier so that when I slept or took my breaks, I didn't end up running into rush hour traffic through the major cities. With the H.O.S. as they are, it wasn't too bad in Canada because you could split your total 10 hours off any way you wanted to, as long as both periods were 2hrs or more in duration. In the U.S. you "have to" take 8 hrs off in the sleeper birth as part of your daily 10 hrs off-duty requirement, and that in itself could hold you up 2 hrs in rush hour traffic.
Most dispatch software calculates delivery times and when a load has to be moved by taking the
distance to delivery/ 50mph, so now you have dispatch waiting to the last minute to assign loads, expecting the driver to do what the dispatch software says he/ she can without pre-planning a trip. My humble opinion is that both H.O.S. regulations (DOT/ MOT) need to be
unified as one set of rules for both the US and Canada, TMS or
TMW systems need to calculate delivery times based on the historical delivery times, if they don't have that information on hand, then they can go to the vehicle position history
on their telematics platform and query the last couple of trucks that delivered to a given location and take the mean average for the time it took to deliver. It wouldn't take a smart Carrier long to
build a data base tailored to projecting ETA's for his customer's freight. Lastly, if the industry wants
to retain their drivers and get "New Blood", they have to
put more emphasis on higher wages and company wide H.O.S. training, so that Drivers can utilize their available hours more efficiently and, at the end of the week bring home a decent paycheque.
(and yes, I think dispatchers really need to be trained as well).
Grant Conrad
