Question About Running Out Of Hours.

Say you go to a dock where the employees are in no real hurry. They take so long in fact that either your 11 or 14 hr clock runs out. Now add the issues of them not allowing you to do/finish your 10 hours and no nearby truck parking. What do you do? Risk driving? Sit there till they call the cops? What?

It's the ultimate catch-22.

I would 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.

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.

In the end, it's a no-win situation for the driver. You can't stay but you can't leave either. I'd be really curious to hear what the safety department has to say about that.

Daniel, just out of pure curiosity and not leading to an answer for Mason, but what would you do in that type of situation?

Notify your company at the first sign of your clock running out. They can get in contact with the shipper/receiver to make arrangements for you to stay there. They could also get another driver to come take over for you. In the worst case, the safety dept. would have to get a tow truck to take you to the closest truck parking.

Mrs.Hashtag,

I've been in that situation plenty of times. I delivered to a Spartan Foods in Michigan and they took forever. They woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to leave. This was a small town and a truck stop was less than an hour away so I put my truck in first gear and crawled to the truck stop. If you drive in first gear (about 3mph) the Qualcomm will not notice that you're driving and won't give you a violation. But as soon as you touch the accelerator it will start screaming at you that you're violating the HoS rules.

Another time I broke down on the side of the road. By the time the repair man came to me and fixed my truck my 14 hour clock had expired. It was 9 miles to the nearest parking. So I logged out of my Qualcomm and drove to the parking. I logged back in the Qualcomm and it says "You have logged X amount of time driving, would you like to credit this to your profile?" (Or something along those lines.)

I then chose "No." and it logged back in and updated my logs and didn't give me a violation. Its a dangerous trick to use because if you get an inspection and it says you parked at city X and 5 minutes later you're in city Y all while you were on sleeper berth - well, you're going to have to face some difficult questioning by the DOT officer. But I would rather gamble and avoid the violation, especially since I only got 1 inspection in a year.

What GA Rookie said is technically true. But getting ahold of Safety at 3Am in the morning is difficult enough, and then you would have to get ahold of Customer Service and get them to talk to the shipper/receiver.. All I can say is good luck, I don't see it happening. I also highly doubt a driver would come to you just to drive your truck to a safe place, how will he get back to his own truck?

I've had my clutch break on me. As in, I no longer had the clutch pedal. And I was told to bobtail with no clutch to the Freightliner dealership. If they wouldn't buy me a tow to the dealership, then I highly doubt they would buy me a tow just to move me to a parking spot. Tow trucks are expensive and companies aren't foolish with their money. Just my opinion from been there done that.

Each company is going to have a different policy. I was just stating Crete's policy regarding the situation. They actually address this out of hours situation in their safety policy. It is written in their policy that they will call a tow truck. I am sure this is only worse case scenario where you are forced to leave the property, but can't legally drive. Will they be happy about the bill...NO!...but it is their written policy so I would hope they follow it.

Each company is going to have a different policy. I was just stating Crete's policy regarding the situation. They actually address this out of hours situation in their safety policy. It is written in their policy that they will call a tow truck. I am sure this is only worse case scenario where you are forced to leave the property, but can't legally drive. Will they be happy about the bill...NO!...but it is their written policy so I would hope they follow it.

If that's true then my hats off to them!

I'm glad Crete actually has a way to handle this. My company doesn't. The standard answer you get is "Do good trip planning." Yeah, I should know ahead of time that an unload at a company I've never been to is going to take 12 hours.

I asked my driver manager about this and got no real answer. I asked my fleet manager about this and got no real answer. Finally I called up our safety department at headquarters and they said, "Note on your logs that you are going to safe haven when you have to drive past your hours and they'll take it into consideration if we audit your logs." I said, "OK, that covers me with you guys, but what about with law enforcement?" She said, "Oh, you can still get ticketed for the HOS violations.

Finally, I got stopped at an inspection point for random Level 1 DOT inspections one day in TN. (I passed.) I asked the trooper about it. He said he used to drive trucks. His answer was, "If it was me, I'd drive to the closest safe haven. If the customer calls me because you won't leave their property, you're going to jail." I asked him if what I heard about calling law enforcement for an escort to safe haven was true. (My safety department had also suggested this as a possibility.) He said, "We're not coming out to give you an escort anywhere." I said, "So, basically, we're just screwed by circumstances beyond our control, right?" Then he said the most telling thing of all, "I'm not going to write anyone a ticket for just trying to get to safe haven. But I can't guarantee some other prick won't write you a ticket."

So, my takeaway from all of this is, avoid the violations as much as possible, log what happens and why, and if a LEO catches you for it, be extremely pleasant and cooperative and hopefully you won't get an expensive citation. It's totally no-win at this point.

I can tell you what the trainer I've been rolling with would do, he would go to line 5 and drive to the trucks top. Sill not technically legal, but that would be his solution. Guess the argument would be you are driving for personal reasons. The shipper said you can't stay or you may be arrested so I'm moving my person to another location.

Although not all companies offer line 5 as an option on their elogs.

Woody

As I understand it, line 5 is only for owner/ops, because it's meant for people using their trucks as their personal vehicles. Can't do that if it's not your truck.