The Source for Trucking News, Opinions and Trucking Jobs | PATT’s Real Mission

Every time I read anything on PATT’s website my head explodes. I can only take a little at a time, here’s my latest headache quoted from their website, this page dated from 2003 -

PATT
New Rule Will Not Adequately Address Truck Driver Fatigue
Decades of research, both on commercial drivers and shift workers, has shown that increasing the length of time a worker must spend performing certain tasks correspondingly reduces alertness and performance. This leads to an increased risk of worker deaths and injuries, as well as driver errors such as motor vehicle crashes.

Under this final HOS rule, truck drivers will be forced to deal with personal and family matters and get sufficient sleep to restore alertness and safe driving performance in as little as 10 hours each day. This is an unrealistic demand and will likely result in insufficient quality sleep and increased crash risk.

But they want to go back to the old rule that only allows 8 hours off? Wouldn’t that leave even less time for family matters and sleep?

The FMCSA’s exclusion of on-board recording devices only goes to illustrate the agency’s reluctance to meaningfully enforce its own proposed HOS rule changes. In 2000, the FMCSA admitted that commercial driver paper logbooks were widely falsified and that a high percentage of drivers routinely violated the maximum number of driving hours permitted. Drivers themselves have admitted this fact in independent surveys, such as the survey published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The problem with black boxes is that they can only tell if the truck is moving or not. It can’t tell if the driver is working on the dock or sleeping in the bunk. A black box company is going to get rich after such a ruling. I wonder if PATT and PC have a particular black box in mind? And what their connection to the company is.

Granted the paper logs are only as good as the enforcement. My cure is to make all fuel receipts have a date / time stamp. Most have the date, but none have the time, leaving room for being creative. Every truck has to buy fuel somewhere. If a trooper asks (they don’t now) for the fuel receipt with a time stamp and compare it to the logbook, it’s just as good as a black box.

The original HOS rule proposal from the FMCSA would have extended the consecutive driving time to 12-hours. With the support of truck safety advocates around the nation, we were able to get this decreased to 11 hours. Additionally, the new rule moves the trucking industry towards an appreciation for a driver’s circadian rhythm, which is the foundation for normal sleep patterns in people.

Circadian rhythm in trucking? Tell that to the shippers and receivers. Produce usually gets shipped late in the day after it’s been trucked in from the fields. Produce usually arrives at 3 or 4 in the morning so it can go out to the store first thing in the morning. A perfect shift isn’t going to happen while getting the job done.

I’m still looking for what kind of HOS rules PATT & Co., would be happy with. From the above statement (and on the actual web page) Driving 11 hours is too much and 10 hours off isn’t enough.

Increasing the number of consecutive hours that commercial drivers are permitted to operate their trucks is clearly an effort to trade off trucking industry economic interests against improved safety,…

In the real trucking world you don’t drive constantly, there is down time waiting to load or unload or waiting for a new load. Plus, if you only drive and sleep you will run out of hours for the week. Either wait till you have hours or you take that 34 hour break. Plenty of time to deal with family matters and such. PATT saying drivers don’t have enough time to take care of the family matters (whatever that means) plus sleep. My opinion – When I’m working, I’m working. I don’t want to be stuck at some truck stop for any longer than I have to. There’s only so many family matters you can take care of in a day, especially when you don’t have family matters to deal with. More rest time would be a boon to truck stops and disaster for the rest of us. That’s the best excuse they can come up with to keep us off the roads longer than 8 or 10 hours. They are only about keeping us off the road.

The front page of their website has a new mission statement. Saying they are doing this for truckers, to get us paid for all the uncompensated time etc… If they can join forces with OOIDA that would give them legitimacy in the trucking community. It’s only a ruse to get more people on their side. Their real agenda is to keep trucks off the road as much as possible.