". . . but I have MILES TO GO before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep." Robert Frost

For such a long day, this was a rather enjoyable one. Good weather to start, I thought I might have an evening off with beer and pizza at a New Kingstown, PA pub. But the company asked me to drop my loaded trailer and accept an assignment that left me scrambling to try to figure out mileage, times, and routes to squeeze a trip into the limits of the new hours of service rules. I made my decisions as I usually do, on the fly. Leaving the warehouse with an empty trailer, I turned right instead of left - guess I won't park tonite and go to the pub. Headed south to Baltimore with a destination on the eastern shore and at I-95 I kept straight heading to I-97. Guess I won't go to Laurel for a beer at my hometown hangout.
I stopped for some soda and a candybar for dinner (it was about 9 pm now) then headed over the Bay Bridge. Dispatch told me the shipper is open all night so I decided to go there directly instead of stopping enroute for sleep and starting fresh in the morning. Heading east on 404 I came up on a fatal accident that closed the road. I was a few hundred yards from an intersection where an hour earlier a car tried to cross at the same time another 18 wheeler was underway at 60mph. According to chatter on the c.b. there was one dead and 3 people had already been med-evaced out by the Md.State Police copter.
I was behind about 4 dozen vehicles, maybe 15 other trucks. It's a rural area, but a lot of trucking goes on here from farms, factories, poultry places, lumberyards, etc. The road was a narrow strech of country 2 lane with fairly deep ditches on either side. One farmhouse had a very narrow driveway, not big enough to back a truck into. So we were stuck. Cars one by one turned around and left and we inched forward. An hour or so later I saw a flashing yellow lite a mile behind me - apparently the highway dept. had arrived and closed the road back at the last intersection. They came up and knocked on car windows giving the drivers directions of where to go if they wanted to turn around. Due to the fatality, MSP would have to have an accident reconstruction specialist come out and investigate, photograph, measure, and make road markings - it would be hours before the road was re-opened. With other truckers scoffing at me, I told 'em I was backing up, get outta my way! I moved forward into the left lane, turned on my emergency flashers, turned off my headlights, straightened up, flicked the hi-low selector to high, and shifted into reverse. It took me 5 or 10 minutes to back up the whole mile and if I do say so myself I did a damn fine job in the moonlight! Every so often a car or a State Trooper would cautiously pass me, but I chugged past the other trucks, eased by the DOT crew, came to a stop,hit the headlights, and took off on the detour route.
For the record, a confession : technically, because of the new rules, I was in violation. We must begin and end our day in one continuous 14 hour period with no extending that period due to taking showers, eating, traffic jams, naps etc. Any of those events are included as part of our 14 hours of 'work'. It's a lousy law and I hope it is the first thing they change. My delay took the time I had planned to finish the drive to the warehouse, swap trailers, and come back 20 miles to a truckstop. I did all that anyway, and logged it as if I did not spend 90 minutes parked on the blacktop.
My rant :
The Federal Government says the new rules are for safety, to lessen driver fatigue and decrease the number of fatigue related accidents (read : deaths). I say the exact opposite will occur. If I HAVE to drive my allowed 11 hours in order to get a load delivered on time, and if I get tired, and if I have used up those remaining 3 hours by taking a shower, sitting in trraffic, getting the trailer loaded, I don't have time for a nap. The nap counts against the 14 hour work day and cannot be used to extend it. So to do my job, and do it under the new rules, I must drive tired. It's that simple. It is a typical scenario to have a busy morning, use up those 3 extra hours, be driving in the mid-afternoon with another 4 hours or so left to go, when, especially in the summer, you get the afternoon drowsy feeling. The summer heat, the late afternoon sun making you squint, the time of day putting you on the road at rushhour. It's always been easy to fix. Park, crank up the A/C, pull the curtains closed, and go to sleep for 3 hours. You wake up refreshed, traffic is gone, the sun is down, and you finsh those 4 hours of driving safely. No longer.
You can thank the government for sleepy drivers being on the road in the late afternoons from now on. There are other parts of the new rules that many other drivers say will affect our ability to do the job, but I think they are lesser evils. We still are limited to working 70 hours over an 8 day period. We have been given an extra hour each day to legally drive (11 instead of 10). And we are now required to take a full 10 hour break (up from 8) before resuming driving. I think time in the sleeper or not driving should NOT be included in the 14 hour workday and that the 70 hour rule be broadened to 80 hours in 8 days. There is one group of drivers who will ignore the rules. They keep multiple sets of log books to show incorrect (but legal) driving times, so that they can drive as much as possible. These drivers are paid job to job so the sooner they finsh one the sooner they can start the next. These drivers will violate the rules now just as they have in the past. These drivers are the one's who are getting into fatigue related accidents and since their habits won't change, they will still be getting into these accidents. There will be NO reduction in deaths due to these accidents but as I described above, the government has now created a new breed of driver who was safe in the past who now will be forced to drive unsafely to perform the delivery he has been diaptched on.
Time itself does not create fatigue in a professional driver yet the government committee that came up with these new rules did so relying almost strictly on hours on the clock and not on the type/duration of the activities we perform in the course of a day.