Going Local

It all depends on who the customers are and where you are driving to. I start at the local terminal at 3am and assigned a daycab. I usually head up to First Quality Tissue and garb my preloaded trailer and its either a single stop or two-stop run to Costco or Sam's. Live unloads and return to grab a load and drive to Atlanta, GA. Mainly NE to SW in the Fairburn, GA. Having to cross Atlanta is a challenge every day. Those fools constantly wreck. When I get down there I am dropping my trailer and grabbing an empty to head to my next pickup and drop the empty to get my loaded trailer. Then to get back through Atlanta, GA and drop the backhaul in either Greenville or Anderson SC. I always end up maxing my 14 and usually have to do use the short haul exemption every week. I get paid hourly and I end up averaging 65 hours in 5 days.

It all depends on who the customers are and where you are driving to. I start at the local terminal at 3am and assigned a daycab. I usually head up to First Quality Tissue and garb my preloaded trailer and its either a single stop or two-stop run to Costco or Sam's. Live unloads and return to grab a load and drive to Atlanta, GA. Mainly NE to SW in the Fairburn, GA. Having to cross Atlanta is a challenge every day. Those fools constantly wreck. When I get down there I am dropping my trailer and grabbing an empty to head to my next pickup and drop the empty to get my loaded trailer. Then to get back through Atlanta, GA and drop the backhaul in either Greenville or Anderson SC. I always end up maxing my 14 and usually have to do use the short haul exemption every week. I get paid hourly and I end up averaging 65 hours in 5 days.

I salute you. Personally, the entire reason that I went local is to get my life back. You wouldn't catch me working 65 hours per week. Local is for work:life balance. OTR is for working 65 hours per week to maximize the income- in my opinion.

You say that, but I just got done with a 65 hour week. I'm still getting around 51-52ish in 4 days, and worked 5 this week. At least you get to go home though (Although if things went south yesterday I would have to have spent my sunday morning driving back and getting like 3-4 hours pf time)

I’m going to take on a local driver opportunity with my same company. It’ll be a little pay bump but the big selling point is home daily and weekends off. If I end up not liking it, they told me I can go back to OTR whenever I say the word. I’m sure it’ll also help me fine tune my backing as I’ll probably bump more docks in a week than I normally would in a month.

Any advice for maximizing time from local drivers? I got pretty used to sleeping at shippers and leveraging detention time time for 10 hour breaks. Any tricks anyone has for maximizing the clock or pay for a local driver would be great.

Doing something local was my long term goal, I’m glad I am able to do it with the same company and much sooner than I thought possible. I’m also glad I started OTR. It taught invaluable lessons in route planning, HOS , backing and maneuvering in traffic in a safer environment.

Dude, the Minnetonka/Wayzata area SUCKS driving a truck through in the winter time.

Whatever DID happen to you local/yocal 's this winter'ish season'ish?!?!?

~ Anne ~