Security Guard VS HoS

I would like to debate this.

Lets say you arrive to a receiver with hours still left on your clock. For this example, lets say 3. You arrive and they take 4 hours to unload you. So now you have no hours of service remaining. You drive 2mph to park someplace at the receiver because the nearest truck stop is 2 miles away. A few hours later the security guard tells you that you cannot stay, you must leave to the truck stop.

What do you do? What is legal to do? And what is the right thing to do? Technically, you cannot drive because you have no hours on your clock. But does the security guard have the authority to overrule that and still make you leave. Or would you refuse to leave because it was result in a logbook violation.

Who has the power in this situation?

Personally, I've heard stories of this happening. I don't see how they get away with it. If I have no hours I cannot move. But then they could just say that you are trespassing.

Where do you "draw the line"?

I would love to chime in on this but I never had electronic logs so I never faced that situation. I had paper logs so I drove whenever I wanted to drive and logged it any way I wanted to log it. We also didn't have the 14 hour rule for the early part of my career so that wasn't an issue either.

Ya know, I'd be really curious to hear what the safety department has to say about that. Have you ever asked em by chance? I'd love to hear their answer.

I know this happens all the time to drivers and of course you're right - it's a no-win situation for the driver. You can't stay but you can't leave either.

I'm totally at a loss on this one. It's the ultimate catch-22.

I would also love to hear what the police would say if the customer called them because you wouldn't leave. When you showed them you were out of hours and couldn't legally move, and yet the customer is within their rights to force you to leave, I'd love to know what the officer would say. He obviously can't tell you to drive the truck. I guess he could write you a ticket for trespassing if he wanted to.

I'll tell ya man - the trucking industry is full of those kind of situations. I've had to go over bridges and down roads that were rated below my weight because it was the only way in or out of a customer.

One time I was almost fired for showing up too early to a customer. The customer didn't want any trucks in there more than 15 minutes before their appointment, but my company said if we were late more than once in a 6 month period they would fire you. And yet you couldn't get close to the customer and park because it was near downtown Dallas and there was no place to put a truck. So you couldn't be early, you couldn't be late, and you couldn't park anywhere nearby to stage yourself. You had to magically nail the drive in perfectly I guess.

And of course let's not forget one of my favorites - new trucks are not built to DOT standards. Ask any DOT officer in the country and they'll tell you that they can find problems with any truck on the road - even brand new off the factory floor. And it's true. So technically, every truck in the U.S. is illegal at all times in some way.

Crazy stuff. That's just trucking.

In the end if you are told to leave a property them you have to comply. HOS or not. The property owner or in this case property manager (security guard) has the right to tell you to leave the property and not much you can do about it.

Remember its not them breaking the law telling you that you have to leave so they can do it.

Brett, I can answer this for you..

Swift safety dep. told me, if Im at a shipper/receiver and am out of hours due to them taking forever to unload,

I am to Ask for permission to stay in there yard for 10hrs, if they do not allow you to do that, request the person(s) name and number, send in a message on the quallcomm stating So and So said I can't take my reset in their yard. Their number is blah blah blah. I am proceeding to a "safe" location. Will message again when I've arrived safely.

Thats what Ive been told. Ive also had a night DM tell me to do the same but also contact local police and ask them for an escort to a safe location. <-- though that would probably get a ticket for if the officer wishes...

I've had a few officers ask to see my logs and when I say im on electronic they turn their heads and walk away... Ive had to drive over 15mi to find a safe spot. Some place's you may just have to find a large turn out and just park it. May get a ticket..

As Brett said, its a catch 22.. damned if you do and damned if you don't..

Thanks for that David! That's really interesting. It's just one of those things that there is no good answer for a lot of times. Maybe you get lucky and you can find parking right outside their gate or a very short way up the road, maybe not.

David, is your system setup where you can drive a certain number of miles at a very slow speed as "off duty driving" or something to that effect? I know a lot of people have mentioned that their company has policies that will allow them to do something like that for the exact reason we're talking about. Maybe you just have to drive two miles to the nearest truck stop but you're out of hours. So you can flip it into "off duty driving" and drive either a limited distance or at a limited speed to get where you need to go.

If you were to ask Congress about how drivers are supposed to handle situations like this, they would say, "We don't know the answer to that, but we know that pretending to look out for the public safety by needlessly tweaking the logbook rules will get us re-elected!"

Of course they would say that if they were being honest. But they're not honest and they don't know the answers. Their job isn't to make sense or make sensible laws. Their job is to make it appear as if they're sensible and making sensible laws so they'll get re-elected

My E-logs have a skip button for this situation. You can in reality run 1000 miles off duty or in sleeper berth if you wanted. I only know of 2 weigh stations that actually inspect the e-logs activity page most of them either don't bother or just want to see your 1 day and how many hours you have available to drive.

Good idea about the Off-Duty Driving. However, this isn't an option at my company. Off-Duty driving is defined as using the tractor as your personal vehicle. As a company driver, we are told that we cannot use it as a personal vehicle. We don't even get line 5 (Off-Duty Driving) in our Qualcomm and I was told that anyone leasing is only allowed to use Off-Duty Driving. So for me, that option is out.

The only "slow driving" for this situation I'm aware of is being in first gear and never touching the accelerator. Basically just crawling speed. But 2 miles would turn to about 15 minutes.

Good idea about calling the police. But calling an officer and telling him that I want to drive illegally scares me.

The only real logical way to avoid this is to arrive when your hours are almost gone. But that's not always possible. I guess I'm just damned :)

At my company our People Net (like quallcom) Allows you to drive 3 miles in the sleeper berth or off duty. We also have 10 miles of personal conveyance time. With WEL if a custmoer refuses to let you do a 10 hr we can use the safe haven rule of 2 hours to make it safely to park somewhere. We simply send Safety a message. Its rare it happens though. Ive never had a truck stop tell me to move and I slept in the fuel island last night.

Well, WEL definitely has a nice system in place!

Well, WEL definitely has a nice system in place!

Its handy:)