Why is this so complex? Really asking.
It seems it should be simple.
In any 24 hour period the person can only be behind the wheel for 12 hours and must have a 12 hour (unbroken) gap until the next time they are behind the wheel. Or whatever is deemed safe (i.e. I made those number up…don’t get hung-up on them).
You can fit rest breaks and what not in there but, overall, it seems it should be simple(ish). It does not matter if you have another person with you. Each person follows those rules.
Was it this?
I’m not sympathetic to this.
Let’s say we let them drive an extra 30 minutes as a “gray area” so they can get home.
Every driver will just drive into those extra 30 minutes and then say they got stopped 30 minutes from home. Rinse and repeat.
At some point you need to draw a line. Where that line is, I do not know. But wherever it is there will always be a driver who will claim they were stopped and made to sleep in an unsafe place and/or only 30 minutes from home.
Maybe I put it badly:
The crime is less serious than trying to cover it up.
Without truckers, you wouldn’t have food to eat or clothes to wear. Seems to me that you ought to be willing to hear truckers out on the issues that they face, out of naked self-interest, if nothing else. But you seem to feel that only lying scumbags drive trucks. Do you feel the same way about other working-class jobs?
Without farmers we all starve. I’m not willing to let them abuse workers if they feel it is necessary. I’m not willing to hear them whine about it either. I apply the same standard to bankers and doctors. And accountants, actuaries, airline pilots, marines, police officers, whatever.
This is true. We had to take an in-service course on it that was taught by a DOT inspector. But that was damn near 40 years ago. I’m sure things got more complicated as time went on.
The department I work for now has only 1 small section of freeway that we don’t actively patrol. And if we have to deal with trucker issues on city streets we’ll have either State Patrol or the Sheriffs Office highway unit back us up. The last time I had an issue regarding drive hours was with a charter bus driver, not a trucker.
It seems to me that the problem is more with trucking companies refusing to compensate truckers adequately so they can make a decent living without having to fudge their logs or break the law. Also with big customers always pushing the trucking companies and other parts of the chain to constantly reduce costs. If truckers are so important, they need to be paid to match their value to the economy.
Working class people only have value to some people if their racism and stupidity can be harnessed to preserve a system that only makes billionaires richer.
I mentioned earlier that my parents were a long-haul trucking team for 15 years; when loads were available (like following big natural disasters) they could roll 24/7, earning a very respectable blue collar income as owner-operators.
Dad often referred to himself as a ‘gentleman trucker’; he never worked on his truck himself – all maintenance and repairs were done at the garage by the dealer or truck mechanics.
Owner-operator is not a job, it is a business. One thing Dad often mentioned was the tendency of those new to the business to live high on the hog when they suddenly started getting those $600+ a day paychecks and then finding themselves in trouble when they needed to buy $12,000+ worth of tires and the taxes came due.