Home Time Transportation

Hey guys. I have what is probably a dumb question.

I finished school and took my final test a couple days ago, including the road test in a freakin' snow storm. :)

I'd already been talking with a recruiter from Knight and accepted a position this morning.

I live about 75 miles from the Salt Lake City terminal. When I go home, am I allowed to drive my truck home, or do I need to get picked up at the terminal or leave a car sitting there?

I see rigs sitting in people's driveways sometimes. Are those just owner operators?

Rules vary by carrier. You can generally park your truck anyplace where it's safe and legal to do so. Some carriers require your truck to be parked in a locked yard with a fence or wall. I usually just parked at a local truck stop when I was OTR. Some drivers cut deals with the management of big box stores (Walmart, Lowes, etc.) for parking if there are no truck stops nearby. Some drivers will even rent a parking space near their home, but that's generally to meet the locked yard requirement.

Ask your DDM or recruiter. It varies by terminal with us, if you're not in a residential neighborhood like with an hoa, they can review it and see. What a lot of us do is park at a truck stop near the terminal.

I'm out of the Denver yard but live 70 miles away. I normally just park at the yard, keep cars their and drive home. SLC has secure parking for personal vehicles. Sometimes though I'll park down at a truck stop by my house if I'm only doing a 34 or under load.

Love the handle btw. Welcome to the Swift/ Knight family. Like Davy said.. who works for knight. That is a question for your driver leader when you finish your over the road mentor training. I work for swift. We pretty much have the same policies. Final decision is with your driver leader and terminal manager. I am fortunate and close enough to a terminal that I can run my bobtail to my house.

Very true that home time truck policies vary with companies.

When I drove for Schneider, they vetted the parking location pretty thoroughly including getting a satellite image of the exact location.

With my current company, they just asked if I had a good place to park. I said yes, I did. And that was that!

Thanks man. As for the nickname, I got it many many years ago. It stems from an incident involving a bonfire, nudity, and a lot of whiskey.

Thanks for the welcome. I'm already getting the sense from my interactions so far that this is going to be a good, well-run company to drive for.

I'm really hoping that they will work with me on the taking the truck home thing. I don't really have the extra car that can just sit at the terminal for weeks on end, and even though she will do it, I hate making my wife go 150 miles round trip just to take me to / pick me up from work.

I run through SLC a lot, in fact I'm here tonight. 75 miles outside should put you pretty well out of the metro area and hopefully in an area that is condusive to a bobtail. Also depending on what type of position you're doing will determine your frequency of home time. For instance if your local, you'll be home daily, but regional and OTR will be further out.

Also, if you're dry van , ports or refer makes a difference. With the exception of ports and local, you'll most likely do 30k miles OTR first as your Squire miles, they are training miles, but you can still take home time as needed. Part of the purpose of that is to get you experience with different areas, customers and procedures.

There's many options for taking home time, and it's been my experience that Knight has bent over backwards to get me home when I need to be. The flip side of that is that I'm incredibly flexible with them on taking it and will stay out I'd needed. I'm currently coming up on a month out.

Definitely out of the SLC metro area. I live in a pretty rural area up near the Idaho border.

The job I took is with the ports division. It's a dedicated run from SLC to Long Beach, two round trips a week and home on the weekends. Here's a link to it.

https://driveknight.com/job/dedicated-ports-truck-driving-job-salt-lake-city-ut-65000-year-home-weekends/

There's definitely no problem parking the truck at my place if they will allow it. I really hope I don't need to try to find a weekly ride from my house to Salt Lake, but I will if I have to.

By the way Davy, I just wanna say I dig all of your posts. I liked your training diary and also your weekly logs. You're one of the big reasons I wanted to work for Knight in the first place.