Dillon, you are exactly correct, the desk jockeys and their 14 hour rule made things much more unsafe. Electronic logs just made it worse.
Example: we run from Twin Falls to Seattle. Load in the afternoon, for a little over 600 mile run. In the paper days, you’d run till you got sleepy, about 11 or so, went down for some sleep, and picked it up again in time to hit the receiver when they opened in the morning. You’d have 18 hrs or so to do the 11 hrs, so you got time for some beans and some zzzzz’s. If there was snow, oh, well, you slowed down and slept an hour or two less, and just pencil whipped the log into submission.
With the 14 hr clock and and electronic logs, no slowing down for snow, and absolutely no naps. You had to push through the 2 -4 am drowsy period, park at the receiver at 4 am and only then could you get some rest. And then your entire next day was messed up, because moving the truck into the dock. meant your 10 hour break was interrupted, so you’d have to start another 10 after you were unloaded before you could drive again. So a one day trip took two days to do legal. This is where a lot of today’s capacity constraint came from.
The good news is that the FMCSA, under TRUMP, recognized the idiocy of that inflexibility, and modified the rules. You can now stop the 14 hour clock with a rest period of at least two hours, (part of the updated split sleeper rule).
We’re running livestock, so technically we are allowed to still use paper, but we use ELD’s. Betwixt the Ag exemption rule and the new split sleeper, we can run hard enough legal that the convenience of the ELD doing all the logging and calculation work is worth the rigidity.
Unfortunately, the new split sleeper rule is pretty hard to understand, many of the larger trucking companies do not allow their drivers to use it, because they’d eff it up. So the 14hr rule still messes with a lot of drivers on a daily basis.
