Thought I would bring this one up front again after the presidents remarks yesterday basically blaming everyone in the supply chain for it’s failure. Hello how about your administration taking some of the blame also. My bosses fuel costs have just about doubled since you took office 10 months ago. That alone has had a huge impact on just how much we as a company are able to grow. We’re facing a multi million dollar increase in our costs that we didn’t even see coming. Then throw in to this mess even more restrictions on ports containers then paying people more to stay at home then they’re getting to work and you can’t figure out why the supply chain is this nation is broken.
One of your first acts as president was to end the HOS regulation waivers that were in place. Yes that allowed my driver’s to get more rest however the simple fact is that those waivers were the only thing keeping the supply chain intact. Now it’s busted to hell and beyond and you and your transportation secretary are both missing in action on how to fix it.
Maybe the supply chain is cutting their plans for routine upgrades and investment as they worry about the rising financial risk of investing with hyperinflation on the horizon. Maybe they are not convinced of the childlike premise of the Fed and the Administration that spending multi trillions will lead us all into the good life.
Zugman as usual you have zero clue how or what the logistics in this nation actually are run. So instead of just being able to ignore when the shipper or receiver has held the truck for 8 hours and burned the clock of the driver that day now those driver’s are being forced by the HOS regulations regardless of if they slept through their delivery or shipping delays to stop and rest another 10 hours. You can’t keep crap moving when the truck is sitting 18 hours a freaking day. But what would I know about HOS regulations considering I have 250 driver’s I have to keep in compliance with.
If you think inflation is bad right now just wait until the democratic proposal of a 8 cent per mile tax rate driven goes through. That means for an average OTR truck a tax increase of between 10 to 15 grand a year. Guess who will be paying that.
Considering the trucker shortage - it seems like the industry is pretty clueless, too. But expecting people to work like robots with lax/no HOS seems like the absolute worst solution to this. The days of people spending their entire lives working is starting to come to its natural close, methinks. But hey, keep grasping at the good ol’ days.
But hey, don’t let me get in the way of your thinly-veiled political rants and boogeymen regulator fearmongering.
I don’t think inflation is bad now. It is hardly anything right now. I am talking about hyperinflation that can drain everyone’s life’s savings overnight. I suspect few people understand the concept because it has been rare. Meanwhile people think inflation is just that gradual erosion of buying power a few percentage points now and then that the Fed is always stewing about.
Yep, that is the way hours of service work. Should a pilot not count the hours sitting on a taxiway waiting for a storm to pass if they can get a couple winks of sleep while doing so? Should train crews not count the time waiting in the siding for a meet? Of course they should. And truck drivers should not be any different. The truck industry has too long taken the public safety for granted, and it is time to stop.
Hire more drivers.
Scary.
Good. Maybe less of the general fund will have to get transferred over to cover the highway fund. And shippers can find other ways to ship if the taxpayers stop subsidizing truckers ROW.
I understand most of what you are saying but I would like to understand what your drivers are facing. I percieve that they arrive with the tractor at a shippers dock to pick up a loaded trailer or do they bring a trailer to be loaded. If they arrive with a trailer to be loaded, I presume their clock is running. Does the shipper have any monetary skin in the game to load the trailer quickly? Then when on the road, the clock is ticking and when they reach their time limit, they have to park and get rested (sleep) before resuming the trip. Or if team driving, swap drivers and continue. Are there any operations that use a pony express type of operation where they have a pool of drivers that swap out like Railroads do? Do your drivers deliver a loaded trailer to its destination and have to wait for it to be unloaded or can they drop and go? If they have to wait, can the receiver be billed after a period of time? What happens if their time expires while waiting?
A second question. Back when I was a teen (late 40’s), my dad worked for a local trucking company based in Cincinnati as a rate clerk. LTL. Common carrier. Every thing had a rate and there was a tarriff that covered it. He was licensed to practice befor the ICC. I understand that deregulation did away with that. How does trucking work today? If I call Hunt or Roadway to name two, and want to ship 4 tons of boxes of XYZ to Cincinnati, or a full truckload of whatever, how is my cost determined. Dad had rates that were based on the material, value, damageability, etc weight, distance, and of course, what the competion’s rate was. Is there anything like that today?
Zugman as usual you have zero clue how or what the logistics in this nation actually are run. So instead of just being able to ignore when the shipper or receiver has held the truck for 8 hours and burned the clock of the driver that day now those driver’s are being forced by the HOS regulations regardless of if they slept through their delivery or shipping delays to stop and rest another 10 hours.
Yep, that is the way hours of service work. Should a pilot not count the hours sitting on a taxiway waiting for a storm to pass if they can get a couple winks of sleep while doing so? Should train crews not count the time waiting in the siding for a meet? Of course they should. And truck drivers should not be any different. The truck industry has too long taken the public safety for granted, and it is time to stop.
Shadow the Cats owner
You can’t keep crap moving when the truck is sitting 18 hours a freaking day.
Hire more drivers.
Shadow the Cats owner
But what would I know about HOS regulations considering I have 250 driver’s I have to keep in compliance with.
Say one of my driver’s has a delivery in Joliet to make. But due to lack of parking which is a major problem he had to stop in Morris Illinois for the night before. He gets up drives 30 minutes after doing his pretrip
Since I do most of my long distance traveling in the wee hours of the day - most Interstate Rest Areas have none or very few parking spots available for trucks during the night. The entrance and exit ramps of the Rest Area have rigs parked along both sides nose to tail.
How much is the OTR industry contibuting to state coffers to expand truck parking at Interstate Rest Areas?
Part of the problem is that with Amazon, Walmart, etc., being so big compared to even the biggest trucking companies, they can refuse to pay detention time for trucks waiting well past their appt times and the trucking companies can’t do anything about it. The vendor will just cancel their contract.
Sounds like the trucking industry needs to stop parking in public places. They need to spend their own dime, and create safe parking places in metro areas. Problem solved.
In your rant that I quoted, you were talking about otr trucks. Again, those can be replaced.
Increase the pay like other industries are doing in order to retain and get more people. Stop running them in the ground, and when you ignore HOS laws, you are doing just that.
We have increased pay our average OTR driver here last year netted not grossed close to 90k. Our owner operators were in the 220 to 250k in revenue for the year in our van division. The tanks and blower aka pneumatic drivers were about 25 percent higher on those numbers. The top paying fleets are in the 70 cents a mile range for OTR drivers now less than a decade ago 50 cents was top pay. If you’re willing to run decent miles of around 3k miles a week making over 150k a year isn’t hard at top paying fleets. That’s before any bonuses are offered.
You’re missing the waiting to load, waiting to unload, etc. times. Also, you’d be surprised how much driving isn’t on interstates. Then, there’s even the problem of getting routed back home. There’s also “resets” on the road.