# Hours Of Service



## stonefly (Oct 27, 2010)

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> Noone is forced by HOS to drive tired.


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica] 
[/FONT]​The  above is a weak statement. The intent of the statement, however, is  obvious and far reaching. The statement speaks more about the author  than about hours of service regulations.

Of course no one is  forced by the regulations to drive tired. The regulations are only that,  regulations. By themselves, they don't do anything.

It is people  who force other people to do things. The methods of applying force are  many and varied. The point of a gun and its implied threat of death is  one method. The whip is another method, chains another. Economic  sanction is yet another.

Loss of liberty and personal freedom is a  great loss. Men, patriots of this, our country, have died for personal  freedom and liberty.

I'm still alive. One of the best things to  do while still alive is enjoy personal freedom and liberty. Although  trucking is a tough business which requires a great deal of personal  sacrifice, there was always one simple but great reward. When driving  for a while, and experiencing the first signs of impending sleepiness,  one could always enjoy the freedom of beginning the lookout for a spot  to stop the truck and rest. By planning trips, from the first moment an  agreement to take a load is contemplated, it's possible to avoid the  situation where there is inadequate time for rest. That way, one should  be able to rest whenever the need arises.

Presently, I no longer  feel I can do that. I have suffered a loss of personal freedom. I've  been fighting to get it back, within the system, using the keyboard as  the weapon of choice.

The loss of freedom is such a great loss  that it usually must occur in increments and insidiously, otherwise the  loss would not be tolerated. If the slogan, "United We Stand, Divided We  Fall" has any meaning, then when one segment of the population loses  personal freedom, we all do. Truckers in this case are the segment of  the population who have directly suffered a loss of liberty and personal  freedom.

As stated above. It happened insidiously. There was no  declared economic sanction, yet the result is the same. If I stop my  truck when I notice signs of impending sleepiness, and take the usually  prescribed method of dealing with the situation, which is to obtain  sleep, my work time dissipates while I sleep. The clock keeps ticking.

Whose idea was this?

Does this make sense?

This is the present state of hours of service regulations.

If  I rest when the need arises, which has always been the method in the  past, then circumstances arise such that it will not be legal to finish  the load on time. That...is an economic loss, and that...is a direct  result of hours of service regulations.

The hours of service  regulations do not force anyone to drive tired. Men try to force other  men to drive tired through the application of the principle of economic  loss. Yet what men? The police? Aren't they just doing their job? The  FMCSA? Didn't they come up with a decent set of regulations which were  thrown out by the courts? The courts? Aren't the judges just doing their  job? If a case comes before them which has merit, under principles of  law, aren't they compelled to find accordingly? The plaintiffs? Weren't  they acting according to their own interpretation of the significance of  changes in hours of service regulations? Ourselves? Are we forcing  ourselves to drive tired? Some truckers will force themselves to drive  tired rather than face economic loss and rather than disobey the law.

Is  it possible for a group of people to make a mistake collectively? Is  our system of regulatory agencies and courts inadequate for the task of  working collectively to produce sane regulations? If citizen groups,  through lawsuits, can destroy the work of a regulatory agency, why  cannot the united clamor of many truckers who are forced to work under  oppressive regulations serve to reinstate the work of the regulatory  agency and restore the original regulations which were, by the standards  of most truckers, workable regulations?

The mandatory eight hour  sleep break does not belong in the hours of service regulations, yet it  is there. Something has to give. With regard to hours of service, the  worst thing any truck driver can do is continue driving while falling  asleep at the wheel. The second worse thing he can do is fail to deliver  freight on time. Last in the order of priorities is obedience of the  law. The law is not sacred. It is made by men. The people who we entrust  to write the rules for hours of service were undermined by private  interests who call themselves public citizens. The only way I can see to  fight back is to disobey the laws and keep our freedom to sleep when we  need to and drive when we safely can. The law has been subverted and  perverted. We are the recipients of the trouble caused by the  malfunction. Therefore we are the only ones who can hopefully stand up  and correct the matter.[/FONT]


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## garza (Oct 28, 2010)

It would help to know what country you are in. Presumably the U.S. but can we be sure? Second, what are the Rules of Service? What is their purpose? Who instituted them? Do they apply to all truckers? What part of the Rules of Service would seem to require that a driver continue driving while needing sleep? 

The piece is very well written, but fails to communicate with anyone who is not already familiar with the situation. You have an international audience here. Take advantage of that by giving us some background so that we can understand the point you are trying to make.


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## The Backward OX (Oct 28, 2010)

garza - I think anyone sufficiently interested would be able to nail it by googling FMCSA, as I did.


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## stonefly (Oct 28, 2010)

Thanks for reading and for the comments.

I wrote this for a trucker forum and decided to post it here as well.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to draw up an outline of what is going on in the USA with regard to trucking regulations.


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## garza (Oct 28, 2010)

xO - Your are correct. Anyone sufficiently interested would certainly do that.


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## garza (Oct 28, 2010)

Okay, I've read through Part 395. Which part of that can be interpreted in a way will lead to drivers continuing to drive when tired?


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## stonefly (Oct 28, 2010)

garza said:


> Okay, I've read through Part 395. Which part of that can be interpreted in a way will lead to drivers continuing to drive when tired?



Where do I begin?  The scenarios are so many and varied that I can only give a few.  However, I will offer a url here for a web page we set up in order that anyone may go online and read the grievances of a great number of individual truckers.

I'll just cut to the chase here and say the problem started in October, 2005 when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced that henceforth no sleep breaks of less than 8 continuous hours would count toward a drivers sleep requirements.  In addition, no sleep breaks of less than 8 continuous hours would stop the 14 hour clock.

Let's start with a simple, inexorable fact of life.  If you're an independent trucker, you must meet delivery requirements.  I you have a habit of calling in to a broker to say you can't be on time,  you will soon discover that when you call on a load you'll hear, "Sorry, it's covered."  They won't load you because you have a bad reputation for having to reschedule loads, something that nobody wants to do.

Here is an example.  You have a noon pick up appointment in Janesville, WI.  You're delivery is in DuBois, PA, 6 AM the next morning.  From noon to 6 AM, the next morning, is 18 hours.  The distance is about 615 miles, using practical miles.  That should not be a difficult task for a professional driver, and under ordinary circumstances, it isn't.  There should be enough time for everything.  Fifty six miles per hour is a reasonable average speed on the interstates, assuming we don't run into accidents or rush hour traffic.  That leaves 7 hours for loading, fueling, eating, rest, and what ever else may occur.  It shouldn't be a rush job, and loads like that are staple.  I know because I've been doing over the road for almost 13 years, 8 of that as an independent.

Here is the way it plays out under the rule change of October 1, 2005.  You've had a good night's sleep because you arrived at the shipper's lot the night before. (not always possible)  You're on time for your pick up.  You go to the shipping office window and tell them who you are and give them your pickup number.  They say, "Wait in your truck and we'll call you when we have a door for you."  Under the rule change of 2003, the 14 hour clock begins ticking from the moment you stepped out of your truck to walk to the shipping office.  The law says you need to stop the truck at 2 AM and take a 10 break.  So, even though your delivery appointment is not until 6 AM, you have only until 2 AM to arrive.  If you're lucky, they will have a door for you and have you on the road, by 2 PM.  You need to be extremely lucky, it is the rule rather than the exception that loading time will be longer than that.  If you hit the road by 2, you are facing the task of doing 615 miles in one stretch.  It's doable.  I've done it many times.  It's easier out west however.  Janesville to DuBois?  ...Tough.  Again, if you're a human being, somewhere in that 615 miles you will likely feel sleepy.  You can't fight sleep.  You can only fall asleep.  When you feel like you're fighting sleep what you're actually doing is falling asleep.  Some people try and kid themselves.  That's where the danger begins.  I don't kid myself.  When I notice the first signs of impending sleepiness I look for a place to stop.

A few hours of sleep would suffice to take care of any sleepiness.  It's not a night's sleep, but in my years of trucking I've grown away from the standard "night's sleep".  I don't miss it and in fact, I love the trucking life because there is never a routine, absolutely never.  Somebody managed to get their pet idea into the regulations that we all must have eight unbroken hours of sleep and any period of sleep less than that counts for absolutely nothing at all as far as hours of service regulations are concerned.

Soooo... I feel sleepy, but if I stop for a few hours I wake up to see the clock hitting 2 AM.  The 14 hour clock did not stop ticking while I was asleep in my bunk.  I have plenty of time to make my delivery appointment.  I am rested and eager to drive, but I may not legally drive.

If I wait until I finish a 10 hour break, I'll be well past my appointment time.  Often that means rescheduling until the next day.  In the case of Walmart, It always means rescheduling until the next day.

This is only one scenario, but if you look at our web page, we have about 400 comments to the FMCSA from truckers.

The ironic twist is that the comment period during which those comments were submitted was intended for other topics, but the concern over the loss of the split sleeper berth provision from hours of service regulations was great because it is by far the most intrusive rule change the feds have ever pushed on us.

Those 400 comments are only the tip of the iceberg.  We couldn't glean all of them which were made in protest of the loss of the split sleeper berth provision and remember that only a small percentage of truckers even make comments to the feds.  The majority of US truck drivers are aggrieved by the loss of the right to split our bunk time.  Splitting our bunk time means that we can stop when we're tired and drive when we're rested.


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## stonefly (Oct 28, 2010)

I didn't list any more scenarios here where the loss of the split sleeper berth provision makes life miserable on the road.  There are too many.

I will add that the reason the issue is particularly relevant at this point is because EOBRs (Electric On Board Recorders) are in the works for new regulations.

Presently, as in the case I described above, there is an escape route to facing the choice of driving sleepy or losing one's livelihood.  The lie.  Just stop the truck, sleep, make the delivery, but log it such that you drove the entire stretch all at once (legal) instead of breaking the driving and resting into more manageable blocks of time. (illegal)

The EOBR will make the lie impossible.  Then, the only drivers who will get the loads are the ones willing to do the non stop 10 and 11 hour stretches behind the wheel.  We'll be right back to where trucking was in the early 1930s before hours of service regulations were enacted...the game of..."Who Can Stay Awake At the Wheel."


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## garza (Oct 28, 2010)

This is a good example of regulators trying to help, but unfortunately not having the least idea of what they are doing. If you could get some of the people who write the rules into your truck for a few weeks of actual work and let them experience what you are talking about it might make a difference. 

They remind me of the scholastic agriculturalists. I've had a running battle with the University of Belize for the past few years over how agriculture should be taught. The highly educated educators at the university want to teach agriculture using books and computers with a little time in the chemistry lab. They reject the idea that to learn to farm you need to 'dig in the dirt'. 

Your rule makers have it all figured out on paper, or more likely in a computer, and do not consider that they are dealing with real people who cannot be programmed like a machine. You are not going to get anywhere until a trucker falls asleep and t-bones a school bus because he was following the regulations.

How do the regulations affect drivers who travel in pairs? I had some good friends some years ago, a man and wife, who traveled as a team. They never had any set time to sleep. When the one driving started to get sleepy the other took over so there was always somebody awake driving the truck. Is that allowed?


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## stonefly (Oct 28, 2010)

garza said:


> This is a good example of regulators trying to help, but unfortunately not having the least idea of what they are doing. If you could get some of the people who write the rules into your truck for a few weeks of actual work and let them experience what you are talking about it might make a difference.
> 
> They remind me of the scholastic agriculturalists. I've had a running battle with the University of Belize for the past few years over how agriculture should be taught. The highly educated educators at the university want to teach agriculture using books and computers with a little time in the chemistry lab. They reject the idea that to learn to farm you need to 'dig in the dirt'.
> 
> ...




The teams have taken the hit the worst.  The way you describe it above is the best way, and the only true safe way to team.  The way it is now could not be any worse.

Having a team could be a great way of trucking.  You'd have to team with someone you know and trust.  Personally, I would not drive team because I would not trust anybody to drive my truck, especially when I'm trying to sleep in the bunk.  Long ago, I had a brother.  If he was still around, I'd team with him, but he's not, and I'm strictly solo.

Yeah, when one guy gets tired the other one takes over.  That makes too much sense to be allowed by law any more, I guess.

Presently, for teams, 10 hours on and 10 hours in the sleeper berth is the way it must be done.  Sleeping eight consecutive hours in the bunk of a moving truck is near impossible.  To make matters worse, the law states that any time in the passenger seat must be logged as on duty.  Therefore, the off duty driver must not leave the sleeper berth for 10 straight hours.  That is highly stressful.  Nobody is going to be decently rested after such an ordeal.  Then, when the 10 hours is up, the un-rested driver who just left the bunk must face 10 straight hours of driving.

It's rough on us solos, but teams have it even worse.

What bugs me more than anything else is the loss of freedom.  There are many times when I feel tired...sleepy...so I stop the truck, climb in the bunk, and then wake up 4 or 5 hours later, spontaneously, feeling great, on top of the world, ready to go, wantin' to feel highway rollin' underneath.  Under present rules, I have to sit there and watch the clock for 3 or 4 more hours until it's legal to go.  By that time, I'm no longer feeling good.  I'm aggravated, sluggish, and ready to go back to the bunk, but I have to drive.  Only a driver knows things like this, but the laws are made by people with no experience as truckers.

I'm happy to have the opportunity to express these things here on the non-fiction section of Writing Forums.  I'm also fortunate to be part of a truckers' forum where these matters are discussed.  The web page in my link was done by me and several other people from the truckers' forum, OOIDA, Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association.

I have a perfect safety record.  No accidents, no moving violations, and I keep my rig in good condition.  I figure they all ought to be leaving me alone.  I'm wantin' to get out of it and it's a shame, because I'm good at it and I can do it without letting my rig get out of control.  You'd think they'd want to keep me on the highway.  They're driving me out.

How's Belize?  Good place for a hard working poor man to retire?  The USA ain't.


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## garza (Oct 28, 2010)

I think you said it all with the line '...the laws are made by people with no experience as truckers.' 

Have you considered asking for a Congressional investigation of the issue? Please stop laughing, I'm serious. As your website says, these rules affect everyone on the highway, not just truckers. It may well be that you could get some attention from Congress that would put pressure on the regulators to make rules that make sense. Has anyone suggested having drivers actively involved in making the rules? 

If enough people understand your situation, and the danger that situation puts everyone else in, then surely at some point there will be a change. Your Drivers Association needs to keep the heat on in the media and with elected officials. 

You either love Belize or you hate it, and it takes about six months for most people to figure out which it will be. I've loved it since the day I landed, and I've known others who've sold all they had at a dime on the dollar just to raise money for a plane ticket to get out of here.


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## The Backward OX (Oct 28, 2010)

What garza said about needing to do the work yourself, to know how it’s done, is so right. I have a situation here, right where I live, involving big trucks. Thirty-six-wheeler, double articulated, double decker cattle trucks. That is one big truck. Anyway, these trucks come around a tight corner, on 66-foot-wide roads, across from where I live. And to get around the corner more easily they take a wider swing at the apex, by going off on to the dirt shoulder. This causes clouds of dust. If the wind’s blowing from them to me, this means all my windows need to be closed. I have gone on bended knee, almost, to the local authority, asking that money be spent on road widening. And what do I get? “Oh, we had our steering geometry experts look at that corner. Those trucks can negotiate that turn and keep all their wheels on the bitumen.” Theory is all very well, but it ain’t life.

http://dart.det.nsw.edu.au/gallery/On the road/fullsize/Truck_and_Dust.jpg

Re the EOBRs, this may not be a perfect answer for everybody, but some smart cookie will probably come up with an electronic way of altering what they record. It’s been done for years with meters in cabs. Even down to by-passing the official seals. I never said that.


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## stonefly (Oct 28, 2010)

garza said:


> I think you said it all with the line '...the laws are made by people with no experience as truckers.'
> 
> Have you considered asking for a Congressional investigation of the issue? Please stop laughing, I'm serious. As your website says, these rules affect everyone on the highway, not just truckers. It may well be that you could get some attention from Congress that would put pressure on the regulators to make rules that make sense. Has anyone suggested having drivers actively involved in making the rules?
> 
> ...





It's money.  There are citizen groups who have created a large part of the problem.  They get funded to do their dirty work.  They get congress behind them.  It's a game of the big bad dangerous truckers versus the poor defenseless loving families potentially splattered across the highway.  Congress pushes through any measure they can find to show themselves to be the champions in the great crusade to get "rogue truckers" off the roads and clean every last bit of blood off the road.

If you look up the definition of the word lie you'll find a unique form which is called something like "careful speaking."  Congressmen speak carefully.  At congressional hearings for funding, representatives (seeking funding) of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and representatives of the National Transportation Safety Board speak carefully.

They all refer to statistics in the genre of "truck related fatalities."  The numbers are high.  They leave out the statistics which have shown in every study made on the subject that over 3/4 of all truck/car fatal crashes are the result of a dangerous move on the part of the driver of the 4 wheeler.

The Electronic On Board Recorders are a promising multi-billion dollar business.  Do you think the manufacturers of these "black boxes" have the ear of congress?

It's not an issue of safety.  It's an issue of money in the name of safety.  It's lies, more lies and the safety business.

OOIDA is on this.  That's why I'm a member.  We all know what's going on.  It's all crooked and we know it.  It's the old contest between doing what's right and doing what's in the vested interest.

I read about the barrier reef.  I did my sailing in the Florida Keys.  I abandoned my motor boats and went to sail.  For a few years I was the king of the Keys.  I went everywhere for free.  When the wind didn't blow, I didn't go, but when I'd go, it was free.  It was rare to be becalmed in the Keys.

I lived on an out island named Sawyer Key.  My nearest neighbor was 15 miles away...by sailboat.  No grocery store.  I went in the water everyday with a spear gun.  Mangrove snappers...one for me and one for my dog.  I cooked mine over coals.  She ate hers raw...alive, if I hadn't made a kill shot on it.  I know mangrove snappers must abound off the coast of Belize.  I could live near the coast, no problem...live on fish, just like I used to.


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## stonefly (Oct 28, 2010)

The Backward OX said:


> What garza said about needing to do the work yourself, to know how it’s done, is so right. I have a situation here, right where I live, involving big trucks. Thirty-six-wheeler, double articulated, double decker cattle trucks. That is one big truck. Anyway, these trucks come around a tight corner, on 66-foot-wide roads, across from where I live. And to get around the corner more easily they take a wider swing at the apex, by going off on to the dirt shoulder. This causes clouds of dust. If the wind’s blowing from them to me, this means all my windows need to be closed. I have gone on bended knee, almost, to the local authority, asking that money be spent on road widening. And what do I get? “Oh, we had our steering geometry experts look at that corner. Those trucks can negotiate that turn and keep all their wheels on the bitumen.” Theory is all very well, but it ain’t life.
> 
> http://dart.det.nsw.edu.au/gallery/On the road/fullsize/Truck_and_Dust.jpg
> 
> Re the EOBRs, this may not be a perfect answer for everybody, but some smart cookie will probably come up with an electronic way of altering what they record. It’s been done for years with meters in cabs. Even down to by-passing the official seals. I never said that.





If they force me to have one of those boxes in my truck the first thing I'm gonna do is try and figure out some way to control it.  I never said that either.


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