Hours of Service violations have twice the impact on your scores of any other violation. And figuring out how to avoid them isn’t as easy as it should be. There are rules on top of rules and things like Personal Conveyance create even more gray area and confusion. The good news is our guest on this episode is an expert on not just how to avoid HoS violations but how to play the system to your advantage.
Highlights from the conversation:
Derek Rogers 0:05
Welcome to Safe as Truck, the podcast focused 100% on breaking down the challenges of compliance and safety in the trucking industry. Safe as Truck is powered by LogRock, the only digital tool built exclusively to help America's trucking companies stay compliant and stand strong when the DOT or lawsuits come knocking at your door. Now, let's jump straight in with our host, Hunter Yaw.
Hunter Yaw 0:35
This week we have with us Brandon Wiseman of Trucksafe. We got to know Trucksafe Because we've been following a lot of their webinars and realize that there is just an awful lot of information that they are covering there that fleet owners directors of safety and compliance need to be on top of and this isn't just like another YouTube video with how to fill out your Ifta, or whatever this is really relevant interesting stuff. Brandon and his partner had been in this space for a long time not gonna steal their thunder want a wallet, Brandon introduced himself but sharing that we got to know them because we were really excited about the insight that they have and the ways that they're helping fleet owners and fleets in general, stay ahead of the curve, stay ahead of the DOT stay ahead of the nasty travelers trying to come in and chase an accident into a big paycheck. So without further ado, Brandon, do you want to talk a little about yourself and about Trucksafe?
Brandon Wiseman 1:22
Sure, appreciate it. And thanks, Hunter. appreciate the invite, happy to join you today and talk about some of these issues that I never get sick of talking about.
So yeah, like you said, I've been in this space for many years now had been practicing law primarily in the area of duty safety and compliance for about 12 years now was formerly with a large transportation specific law firm in Indianapolis, helping some of the nation's largest fleets with their DoD compliance issues, safety rating upgrades, appeals of fines, and helping them with their CSA scores and their contracts and stuff like that. So a lot of good experience doing that. And then early last year, broke off on my own started Trucksafe with the idea to get a little more hands-on with my motor carrier clients and be able to really help them develop their compliance programs through a lot of training content, you mentioned our content, we try and put out a lot of content because there's no reason for us in this industry to hide the ball, let's get as much information out there as we can so that we can keep the roadways safe for the motoring public. So that's what we wanted to do. That's what we are doing and so started Trucksafe. And then also a colleague of mine also started his own business at the same time a small law firm called Children's Law. So we teamed up together and so we run both businesses now the law firm and Trucksafe Consulting, and we continue to do our best to help fleets with their compliance issues.
Hunter Yaw 2:48
Excellent. So we're very much not gonna hold being a lawyer against Brandon. He started his own business, he's helping fleet owners, he's making the road safe. We're gonna forget about the lawyer piece and focus on helping everybody run their fleets better piece.
Brandon Wiseman 3:01
I'm a recovering attorney.
Hunter Yaw 3:02
Exactly, a recovering attorney. We're gonna help nudge you along that path to recovery today and talk about things that, to be honest, I think a lot of attorneys and a lot of folks in the space don't talk about it. And your point, there is a good one, which is there's a tendency—for better for worse, but I think just for worst—in the industry of folks to hold information that they have close to their chest. Maybe you tell somebody a story at a conference at a bar or whatever. But there's a lot of this culture where people think, man, I got this tip, I got this trick, I got this hack, I got to hold on to it. It's a challenging time for the industry in a lot of ways and I think there's a lot of value to be had in that openness and that sharing. God knows lawyers are not famous for doing that either. Much easier to bill for the extra hour than to let someone figure out how to do it themselves.
Brandon Wiseman 3:51
And particularly on the defense side, right. We talk a lot nowadays about these types of nuclear verdicts, I know you've done some shows on them, as well. And one of the things that always strikes me about those nuclear verdicts is the camaraderie amongst the plaintiff's bar and how they have these conferences in these classes. And these books where they're just sharing all of this information about how to prosecute a case against a trucking company using this reptile theory. But on the flip side of things, on the defense side of things, you hardly hear of anything like that any kind of information sharing amongst defense attorneys to try and get information out there about how to defend these types of cases. So I think we would all do ourselves a big favor on this side in the industry to share information like that.
Hunter Yaw 4:36
100%. So let's do something lawyers also don't like to do and put our money where our mouths are and jump right in. We went back and forth with Brandon because there are a lot of different areas where they're consulting trucking companies and Brandon to his credit is really an expert in a lot of these different spaces. But we wanted to talk today about hours of service and as I said, this is not going to be another YouTube video about how to manage your ELD or how to track your timecards or whatever else it is that people are trying to give you a 1, 2, 3 step solution to, instead we're gonna get right into the nitty-gritty. And we're going to talk about what the trucking companies do wrong, what the trucking companies do, right? And where are the mistakes? And where are the opportunities, frankly, with managing out of service, and also why it matters and understanding the significance of, of hours of service violations in the eyes of the duty the FMCSA, and potentially also litigation. So let's jump right in. I think Brandon, maybe the best place to start would be you had plenty of clients, I'm sure at the big law firm you're at now you got a bunch of clients now for Trucksafe and for the law firm. What are the biggest mistakes? What are the most common mistakes that you see folks are making? Everybody knows ELD, hours of service, they know what it is but people are still stepping on a bunch of rigs and a bunch of landmines out there. What are those rigs? What are those landmines? And how can we help people keep their legs attached?
Brandon Wiseman 5:51
The first thing to know is that hours of service is an issue to some extent, for virtually every fleet that I've ever worked with some more than others, as you would expect, but the issue is a lot of carriers will come to us and they will have high hours of service score in their CSA metrics. And the problem with that is that if and I think you've done some shows on this as well if you understand how the T kind of looks at the various factors that are rates, motor carriers, and you'll know that hours of service is the only factor of the six or seven that it looks at that is actually double weighted, so any violations discovered in the hours of service factor have a much greater weight on you as a motor carrier in terms of your safety scores than any other violations. And so what that means, practically speaking, is that if you have high CSA scores in the hours of service factor, you're going to be at much greater risk for DOD enforcement, usually in the form of the DoD audit, but also civil penalties and warning letters. But perhaps more importantly, than DoD enforcement, you're also exposing yourself to pretty significant exposure in the context of highway accident litigation. One of the things that I thought was interesting that I saw just in the last year or so the American Transportation Research Institute, actually, you may be familiar with them, they publish a bunch of helpful studies to where they look at a variety of topics, and one of the studies that they looked at, or one of the topics that they studied recently, were these nuclear verdicts and what were contributing to these, this significant uptick in nuclear verdicts over the years. And one of the tables in that study, you can just Google it, you'll find it actually nuclear verdicts study, one of the tables in that study looked at all of the various safety-related issues that were involved in any of these nuclear Vertica cases against trucking companies. And then it looked at what percentage of those cases that involved a particular issue resulted in a verdict in favor of the plaintiff. And number one on that list was Hours of Service issued issues. So in every case that they looked at every nuclear verdict case involving a trucking company that they looked at that involved in hours of service issue, typically drivers being operating in excess of hours of service, or falsifying their driver logs, 100% of those cases resulted in a plaintiff's verdict. So a verdict in favor of the plaintiff. Yeah, so none of those cases resulted in a defense verdict. So that just shows you how big this hours of service issue is. It something that you cannot ignore, it's something that you have to address and you have to have policies and procedures in place to address it. Because if you don't, it's just gonna come back and bite you in the butt for sure.
Hunter Yaw 8:28
It sounds like North Korea, man. 100% conviction rate. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard not one of those cases was won by the trucking company. Not one. Incredible. Wow. Well, there's a data point for you. So two things to take away, I think, from what Brandon just said that I honestly didn't know either. And man, we all should. Double weighted, an hours of service violation is twice as bad as any other violation that you can have. Wow.
Brandon Wiseman 8:52
So for example, if you're selected for a do T audit, if your carrier and DOD comes in and does an audit, they're looking at six factors, they're rating you in six factors, and they're given you a score a rating in each of those six factors of satisfactory conditional or unsatisfactory and then, depending on how many of those scores you get, it'll, it'll determine your overall safety rating that's published for everyone to see. The interesting thing about that is that you can get some violations in the other factors and still come out of that audit with a satisfactory safety rating. But if you get one critical or one acute violation in the hours of service factor, you're automatically gonna be downgraded to a conditional safety rating, which causes all kinds of trouble it'll lose your business, if you're a for-hire motor carrier, it will make your insurance premiums go up. And if the instances of those violations are bad enough, it could lead to an unsatisfactory rating, which could shut your whole fleet down.
Hunter Yaw 9:49
Yeah, and important for folks to remember, freight markets can be crazy as they have been the last couple years and they can also cool down as they did plenty of times before that. One of the first things you're gonna see shippers and brokers do is cut from their carrier pools from their exclude from their RFPs pull away from their spot freight anyone with a conditional rating, or anyone who's got a profile that raises the risk because brokers and shippers can get dragged into these lawsuits too. So that's the hours service role in that whole dynamic is basically what you're saying is, is twice as important as anything else, right, whatever else you might be thinking about in terms of improving your CSA scores, if you improve your hours of service, you're doing twice the work for that, for that change, or that amount of effort that you have to put in to get that improvement. You're getting twice the value twice the upside. On the flip side, if you mess up with your hours of service, you're punching yourself in the face twice as opposed to just one time.
Brandon Wiseman 10:38
That's right. Yeah, there are severe consequences to these types of violations. So anytime we have a carrier that has issues in a variety of factors, we always try and start with hours of service get that taken care of first, recognizing that it carries typically the serious consequences.
Hunter Yaw 10:55
And then on the 100% conviction rate, man, that's insane. So what that basically means is, if you have a highway accident, you get sued, someone comes in they and find a violation, the hours of service, you're gonna lose. That's it. Why do we know that? Because 100% of the trucking companies before you that got hit with an hours of service violation—as something that got put in front of a jury as part of litigation—lost. And if you think that you're going to be the guy that takes that number for 100% to 99% or 98%. Don't get me wrong, we're rooting for you, but I'm also not betting on you.
Brandon Wiseman 11:30
Yeah, and I'll go another step and say that I'm not saying that you have to have a 0% violation rate, because every motor carrier is going to have some level of hours of service violations. And what you would hope is that if you, God forbid, you get involved in one of those catastrophic accidents, your hope is that they will focus on the driver involved in the case, the one that caused the accident and what his hours look like. But the reality is, when we start talking about these nuclear verdicts, we learned pretty quickly, that that's not the tactic of the plaintiff's attorney, the plaintiff's attorney is more interested in the reputation of the motor carrier the safety-related reputation than the circumstances of the accident at hand. So what they will do is they will, this is their whole tactic. This is the reptile theory of litigation, where they will cast you as a bad act in the way that they cast you as a bad actor as they look at your compliance history. And if you've got your hours of service score is above the alert threshold, that's going to be shown to the jury. And that's not going to play well with the jury, the jury is going to want to do something about that. And the weight, the tool that they have available to them is to render a judgment against you and to lodge punitive damages against you if they're interested in punishing you for that bad behavior.
Hunter Yaw 12:45
So we understand now why it matters. Hours of service, do not screw it up. I'm listening. I'm thinking man, I maybe I knew that maybe I didn't, whichever, you got my attention now. But let's get into the nuts and bolts and let's be tactical, let's be specific. And it's helpful to understand with examples or stories, where are people messing up? What are the most common mistakes? What are some of the less common mistakes, and then from there, we can shift into what are some hacks and some smart things you can do. But we want to focus first on the things to avoid.
Brandon Wiseman 13:12
So here are what I would consider the biggest things that get fleets in trouble kind of in order of priority here. First and foremost are going to be log falsifications. So this has been an issue going back many years back to when drivers were using paper logs, we all it was common at common knowledge that drivers would fudge their logs in order to get more time to complete their load. And often unfortunately, that was done either at directly at the direction of the motor carrier, or with the motor carrier's knowledge, the carriers just kind of turned in their head to it. And so that became a huge issue. And that was the driving force for the electronic logging device rulemaking that we saw a few years back where the idea was, let's make it harder for drivers to falsify their logs by automatically recording when their vehicle is in motion. The idea being that if we know when the vehicle is in motion, the driver can't really fudge that driving time because the device knows that the engine is on and that the vehicle is moving. So we automatically know when the device is or when the driver is in motion. The problem is and we kind of expected this to be the case, eel Ds are not immune to falsification. There are ways that drivers and unscrupulous carriers will find to get around the hours of service rules, even still using electronic logging devices. So there are a number of ways that that happens. But the one that we're seeing pretty frequently and that is a problem area for many motor carriers that they really need to get under control is what's called unassigned driving time. So this is a situation where the vehicle is recording motion. The ELD is recording motion, but there's no authenticated driver that's logged into the electronic logging device.
Hunter Yaw 14:57
Self-driving truck!
Brandon Wiseman 14:59
Yeah, exactly. If you don't have one of those, then you've got a profit. As that means somebody is driving the truck, and nobody's logged into the ELD. So obviously, that's the prime way to try and get around having an electronic logging device, the driver just doesn't log in and says, Oh, look, my hours are fine. Well, that's not how it works. Because that device is still recording that time on the device, it's just that no drivers logged in. So practically, what happens then is when that driver then gets pulled over and transfers his or her logs, to law enforcement, that transfer is going to include what's called the unassigned driving report, that's going to show if the device is captured anytime where a driver wasn't logged in. And that's also going to be all that that report is going to be available to you as the motor carrier in your back office ELD system. And so that is a report that the DoD focuses very heavily on when they come in and audit your hours of service compliance they want, believe it or not, they want you to rectify every last minute that is on that unassigned driving time. Now, it may be the case, and it's probably often the case where maybe you just had a someone jump in the truck in your lot and move it for five minutes, you already may have a yard move, essentially. And so nobody logged in because it was just being moved in the yard. Well, what you need to do is you need to go through that report in those situations really yours you need to have a kind of a mechanic account or something like that, where you could place that time. But long story short, if you're so so I've had situations where I've gone and done mock audits for motor carrier clients, and they will literally have 1,000s of hours of unassigned driving time on that report. That's just asking for trouble it eat both roadside, and also during an audit. So what I say to them is, if it's not practical for you to rectify every last minute on that report, you at least need to prioritize the most significant chunks of time that are unassigned, you need to figure out who they belong to. And you need to send them to that driver and have him or her accept that time as his or her own. Because the way that these get written up in roadside inspections, and in audits are log falsifications. These are considered false logs. And those carry huge points on your CSA scores. And if you have a bunch of those in the context of an audit, that's one of the things that's going to cause your safety rating to get downgraded to conditional.
Hunter Yaw 17:24
Okay, so a few minutes here and there of yard moves, totally fine, but you should have a system in place where your mechanic or whoever is making that your move is logging at. However, when we're talking hundreds 1000s of hours of unassigned tracking time, real hard to explain that away as the truck that's made the most yard moves ever. And so you've got to be on top of that. So that makes sense. What should I be doing? How do I control this? I'm not going to sit next to the driver in the cab, ask him every five minutes is his ELD on? Is he authenticated? I'm not going to have my dispatcher do that my driver is going to quit if I don't handle that right? Or if I do that too much? How can I practically how can I be on top of that? How can I avoid that?
Brandon Wiseman 18:07
Two things. So number one, I think first and foremost, you as the motor carrier need to be auditing your unassigned driving report, you need to understand how to access it in your back office system for your ELD. It's a report that every ELD generates. And it's a report that not many men, not many motor carriers review, unfortunately, but you need to be looking at it if not on a weekly basis, at least on a monthly basis to see, again, who are your worst offenders My advice to you is to prioritize your worst offenders and get those taken care of. Because then once you get those taken care of, then maybe you're at less of a risk. So that's number one is monitor that report and take action against the worst offenders figure out which truck is accumulating the most mileage with no driver assigned to it and figure out whose truck that is who was in that truck at a particular time. And then go have conversations with those drivers that are causing that problem. It may be is sometimes it's not nefarious of the drivers aren't doing this on purpose. Sometimes it's as simple as the driver forgetting to log in, let's say they stopped for the night. And then in the morning, they're ready to get going. They just forget to log in. And so they go half their day without logging into the ELD. Now you've got half a day's worth of unassigned driving time on the log. And that's going to be written up as a false log, just as if he intended to do that on purpose. And so, again, the advice there is go talk with those drivers get that worked out for your worst offenders. Number two is the importance of driver training. True enough, you're not going to want to get into a situation where you're having to have somebody ride along with all of your drivers and monitor their every move. Your drivers need to be appropriately, appropriately trained, though, on how to use their devices and the importance of logging in and using the devices and not engaging in this conduct of trying to get around the hours of service rules by not logging in. So there needs to be serious consequences for drivers that do that intentionally. And for drivers who do it unintentionally, there needs to be some additional training you need to be, whether it's sending out a video, if you've got some kind of learning management system, we recommend you send out a video that kind of walks them through, just a reminder, here's how you log into the vise, here's why it's important that you do. So here's what happens if you don't. And here's how we will send that time to you if you forget to log in, and it gets placed on the unassigned driving time. So those are the two things, monitor that report and then make sure your drivers are properly trained, and that there are consequences real consequences for drivers who don't follow those rules.
Hunter Yaw 20:30
All right, so number one most common violation and one of the most serious: if you do not own a self-driving truck, do not claim that there was no one driving your truck. Make sure that you do not have any unassigned hours, or at least such a small number of unassigned hours that you can make that plausible argument that listen there's a couple of your posts here and there but this isn't anything serious. Great, that makes a lot of sense and there's a clear a couple of practical solutions on how to address that and where to go check right go check whatever you do. If you're listening to this and you are not regularly—keep at least once a month or so, as you were saying, ideally once a week—looking to see where that unassigned hours report. I got that right. Unassigned driving report, unassigned driving report. There you go. Once a week or at least once a month, go take a look, see what's going on, focus on the serial offenders. Makes sense. What's next on the list?
Brandon Wiseman 21:13
Next on the list is another report that you can run through your ELD. And it's one that you should be running and this is the personal conveyance use report. So personal conveyance is another systemic issue in the industry, it's one that is has become even more of a problem with the advent of ELDs in the use of ELD is because it's another potential way for drivers to get around the hours of service rules now that they have the devices in their trucks that are essentially monitoring them. So personal conveyance, for those of you who aren't familiar with it is the idea that a driver in certain limited circumstances, can operate his or her commercial motor vehicle for personal reasons, not at the direction of the motor carrier, and log that driving time as off duty time rather than driving time. So the general rule is that when you're operating when you're driving a commercial motor vehicle, that time has to be logged as driving time. And you're limited to if you're a property carrier, you're limited to 11 hours of driving time, essentially every day in between each 10-hour off-duty break. And so the issue is that nowadays in this, again, it was an issue even before ELD is but a bigger issue now is that drivers have become wise to the fact and some carriers that, hey, if I run out of available hours of drive time, I could just flip over to personal conveyance status, and it will, the device will reflect that I'm in off duty status, so it won't flag any violations of the driving time limit. But the problem is that personal conveyance allowance is very limited in scope, you can only use personal conveyance status when you're operating a commercial motor vehicle for personal reasons. In the DOT, the FMCSA has specific guidance on what scenarios can and cannot be logged as off duty. They give like, I don't know, a dozen or so examples of conduct that would be personal conveyance and conduct that wouldn't be I tend to my advice to most my carriers is let's not make it too complicated. If the driver is truly on his own time, his or her own time, they're going to a movie, let's say they're done for the day, and they're driving their commercial motor vehicle to the movie theater or to go get dinner or something like that, or from their hotel to a restaurant. They're on their own time there. They're not doing that at your direction. And so that time can be logged as personal conveyance legally, but it's the situations like for example when drive this is pretty common. A driver will get detained at the shippers or receivers facility for several hours at a time and they run out of hours while they are at the shippers or receivers facility and it's tempting to switch over to personal conveyance status, so they're not stuck in the shippers or receivers facility. The guidance allows them to do that, but only when they are when they when the detention time has caused them to run out of hours. The personal conveyance guidance says that they can use personal conveyance but only to get to the next safe resting place that's available to them. They can't use that status to then get all the way home. If to get home they have to pass other available spots where they could get the required rest. So again, my advice here is if you're a motor carrier, you need to be monitoring your personal conveyance report because again, if drivers are misusing the status, it's going to be written up as a false log. If you have multiple false log violations that are going to raise your CSA score is going to cause a potential safety rating downgrade. And this has become a pretty big abuse in the industry. So monitor personal conveyance use among your drivers. One other thing I recommend: consider implementing your own company policy having to do with personal conveyance. So the regs don't require you as a motor carrier to have a personal conveyance policy per se, but a lot of motor carriers do and I think it's a good idea And a lot of those policies will place limitations on the use of personal conveyance, they'll say something to the effect of you as a motor carrier, or you as one of our drivers can use no more than you can log no more than one hour of personal conveyance time per day. That's still pretty lenient one hour of an off-duty driving time, essentially the doing anything more than just really putting you at an unnecessary risk. And so I think it makes a lot of sense to put restrictions around how often and, and even potential mileage restrictions on how much time your drivers are logging personal conveyance status.
Hunter Yaw 25:35
Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. So keep it simple because it is complicated. Let's say there was an hour a day and that was just the law, you can how tie would be simple, but it's not right, you got these dozen examples. You don't want to be in a position where you're trying to explain to somebody whether it's do T whether you're talking to a jury, your lawyer, because you're about to be sued, whatever it is, and you're trying to flip through these examples and say, which, yes, it's a gray area, right? It sounds like it's a big gray area. So keep it simple. an hour a day, it sounds like it's a good rule of thumb or a mileage limit. What would you say is like a healthy mileage limit, or at least a range that you've seen them on your clients?
Brandon Wiseman 26:15
It's usually kind of tracks that hour. So you may see something like 50 miles a day or something like that is what I've typically seen. But yeah, I mean, you're exactly right, it is probably the biggest gray area in the safety regulations. It's something that I'm dealing with every week for our motor carrier clients. You'll hear from a lot of drivers well, especially owner-operators, drivers who own their own trucks that they're loathed to be subjected to a policy that restricts their ability to operate their own truck whenever they want to. My point is, if we as the motor carrier are putting limitations on the use of personal conveyance, that's not telling you that you can't use your truck for personal use. It's just saying that when you use your truck beyond the limits that we've said, it's got to be logged as driving time. And yeah, maybe that cuts into your available hours. But I would rather have, if I'm the motor carrier, I would rather have some hits to my efficiency in that regard than to suffer the consequences of those log falsification violations that you're inevitably gonna get from drivers using incorrectly using personal conveyance status.
Hunter Yaw 27:23
Yeah, I think that's another. As many challenges as the ELD is introduced, and as much complexity came with picking an ELD, implementing an ELD, training the drivers on the ELD. At the end of the day, there are some real benefits for fleet owners before with your timecard with everything written out on paper, you couldn't just pull that report, right? Or you had to have someone on your team who's sitting there, right and a lot of building a spreadsheet about how people did that, to be honest. But now it's a couple of clicks through your your your ELD account to be able to pull that reports you are a fleet owner, you are a Director of Safety. This data is at your fingertips. It's really a question of how you use it. And whether it's the black and white area of unassigned driving where any unassigned area driving is bad, right? Or the gray area a little bit of PC if pushing PC and personal conveyance. In either case, you are a couple of clicks away from being able to see (if you're listening to this right now) how much risk you are currently in. Because a big amount of PC or any amount of unassigned driving, that's a serious problem and that's it, no matter which way you slice it.
Brandon Wiseman 28:29
And the other thing to keep in mind is that most ELDs allow carriers to turn off personal conveyance functionality altogether. If they wanted to. You could say really, yeah, we're not even interested in that potential risk. So we're just going to turn it off. And so any time the vehicle is in motion, it's going to be logged as driving time. So we have a number of clients that turn it off altogether because they don't want to live in this gray area. They don't want to have to deal with it. If that's not you, if you have it turned on, then this is another one of those reports that I recommend you prioritize where you again, look for the biggest trunks of personal conveyance time and get those fixed, make sure that they were at appropriate use. And if not, then you need to work with the drivers that are abusing the status and get that taken care of.
Hunter Yaw 29:11
So you can have a personal conveyance policy that's just one line and it says "there is no personal conveyance at this motor carrier."
Brandon Wiseman 29:17
That's right.
Hunter Yaw 29:18
Interesting. I gotta say, I'm curious because, if I'm a fleet owner, that's got us I'm pretty tempting to me right now. That's a big way to close a big gap in my armor when the FMCSA comes knocking. Are there major downsides to that?
Brandon Wiseman 29:36
I suppose they could lose drivers over it but the downsides you the downsides to it are that you lose some efficiency for legitimate uses of personal conveyance, right? So let's say that you're a carrier that has a lot of detention time where your drivers are on any given day detained at a shippers or receivers facility, and they may be there for hours. It's hard to tell how long they're going to be there. You don't want that driver to be stranded. At the shippers or facility or receivers facility, you want them to be able to get to the next safe resting place. Well, if you have personal conveyance turned off, then when they operate from that short distance from the shippers or receivers facility to the safe resting place, that's going to be logged as driving time. And if they're already out of hours, it's going to be throwing a violation. And so what you lose by turning off personal conveyance is the ability to use that status when it's actually called for.
Hunter Yaw 30:27
But can I go back and edit my logs? If I talk to the driver? And I say, Hey, man, you got a violation here? And he says, honestly, I know. But this was a legitimate case of personal conveyance, can I go back into my logs to reflect that?
Brandon Wiseman 30:41
It's gonna vary from device to device. Some of the devices I've seen where you've turned it off, you don't have the ability to go back and add that in. So let's say that driver then gets pulled over roadside and is in his ELD is showing an 11-hour violation, because he's running out of hours, he may be able to convince the officer just by talking with the officer, hey, I was actually in personal conveyance status, it's just that, that my log doesn't have that functionality. I would say that pretty low chance of success with that when you're relying on your driver to talk with the officer. So so that's where you're going to lose out some if you turn it off. But that said, I would say probably 50% of the fleets that I work with have it turned off to insurance in particular, particularly fleets that don't have problems with the substantive hours of service limits, right. So there's going to be a lot of fleets whose drivers never even really come up against their 11-hour or their 14-hour time limits. I think of short-haul drivers who may be starting from their house and home by late afternoon, they're never really going to run into substantive hours of service problem. So let's turn off personal conveyance for those drivers because they don't need the extra flexibility to use legitimate personal conveyance time. So let's just get rid of the gray area altogether. That's typically my advice. For those carriers who don't run into a substantive issue. For long haul carriers where their drivers are constantly up against their time clocks, it's going to be a harder sell, and a lot of those carriers will decide to leave it on, they will just have to be more careful in monitoring, personal conveyance use.
Hunter Yaw 32:12
Got it, got it. All right. So make sure you got a driver assigned. If you do have a driver assigned and they're running personal conveyance, make sure you're on top of that. That's one, that's two. What's three?
Brandon Wiseman 32:23
Number three, and we're getting easier to address as we go down the list here. This is probably one of the easiest things that you can do today if you're a fleet to fix your hours of service score if it's starting to tick up. This is something that every carrier has a problem with, I don't know why they have a problem with it, because it's so easy to fix. And it is what I call the three deadly sins. So you'll see this on a lot of—
Hunter Yaw 32:49
This is better than what you get into church. In church, you get the seven deadly sins. Brandon has optimized this down to the three, so this is a better place to be hanging out.
Brandon Wiseman 32:58
So you'll often encounter a driver roadside inspection report where there's going to be three hours of service violations. This is almost like clockwork. If they have one of these violations, they're going to have all three. And this has to do with the required paperwork that they have to have in the vehicle with them, even though they have an ELD. So the ELD rule says that commercial drivers have to have three types of essentially paperwork with them. Number one is an instruction manual that explains how to use the ELD. Number two is a manual that explains how to transfer electronically transfer their logs to law enforcement, they have to have that manual. And then number three, they have to have a supply of blank law paper logs in their truck in case their device malfunctions, and they have to switch over to paper, they have to have at least eight days worth of Blink logs in their truck. And so what you'll see is that you'll see those three violations written upon so many reports where they get hit three times. And so the problem is now you got three violations all from one, essentially one problem, which is that you didn't have the required paperwork in the truck. Or more likely, you have the required paperwork in the truck, your drivers just didn't know where to the rule says that the per the instruction manuals and the transfer manuals, those can actually be kept electronically on the device themselves. So depending on the manufacturer of your device, a lot of them will have the manuals built right into the interface. It's just a matter of the drivers needing some training on how to find it in the event of a roadside inspection. Because when they get pulled over, the officer is going to ask for those things. And if they can't produce those things, they're going to be written up for all three of those violations. And you see that very commonly among all the carriers were looking at their CSA scores, they will have a ton of these violations and it's just so easy to fix. Just give your drivers some additional training on where to find those materials and how to give them to the law enforcement during roadside inspection.
Hunter Yaw 34:49
Yeah, talk about an unforced error that feels pretty high on that list. And I'm betting that if the officer that pulled them over, even if they know they recognize the LD, they know that it So a brand that has the the the the instructions in there, if the driver can't find it, the officer is not going to say, "Hey, by the way, it's in the ______."
Brandon Wiseman 35:09
If you get an officer like that, count yourself lucky because most times they're not going to be searching for it for you or for your drivers, even though they probably know where it's at. If your driver can't navigate to it says I have no idea what you're talking about, you're going to be written up for those three violations, that's going to cause your hours of service scores to tick up. And then you're eventually going to get over the threshold. And you're going to be high on the list of the DOT for an audit.
Hunter Yaw 35:34
Dor a really dumb reason.
Brandon Wiseman 35:37
For very dumb reasons.
Hunter Yaw 35:40
So that was three, is there a four? Or are we focused on those three?
Brandon Wiseman 35:43
I could go on and on literally for hours about hours of service problems. But I think those are probably the three that I see most commonly that I think if you get those three under control, you're probably going to be in a good place, relatively speaking, compared to your peers. Now, obviously, we haven't even talked about substantive hours of service violations, if you've got problems with substantive hours of service violations, where your drivers are having high occurrences of 11-hour or 14-hour, 60/70-hour violations. Obviously, that needs to be your starting point but those, again, are a matter of properly training your drivers on what are the hours of service rules and how to comply with them. That's essentially kind of the elementary type thing that you got to have with your drivers. But beyond that, I think these three that we've just talked about are the three that I'm seeing the most often.
Hunter Yaw 36:33
This is the high school level. We skipped the elementary. We're assuming you've got that figured out. If you can't recognize your guys regularly exceeding 11 hours. And that's there's only so much we can do to help you with that step back.
So then let me ask you one last question. What do you see most often among your smartest clients, the ones that are just super on top of this? Where you come in, you take a look at the company, you're like, "Man, I can skip hours of service. These guys are all over it." What's one or two things, which when you see that a company is doing this or doing that, you think, I know these guys have got hours of service crushed, the risk of them shooting themselves in the foot over hours of service is extremely low. What are a couple of those things?
Brandon Wiseman 37:12
It's going to be the carriers who are proactive in looking at their data that's coming in. So number one, understanding what data their ELD devices are capturing in the first place. I'm often surprised going into look at motor carriers, how few of them actually know what amount of data, the devices are actually capturing, I'll give you one story we went into a carrier wants to do a mock audit. And they didn't realize that their particular ELD device was actually giving every one of their drivers a score of how safe the driver was and it was taking into account non-hours of service issues, as it was looking at telematics essentially how many harsh braking events does this driver have that type of stuff, and it was scoring their drivers is giving them a letter grade. And they were continually elite continually using drivers who had a score of F. You could see how that's gonna play badly. If that carrier gets involved in a catastrophic accident. The plaintiff's attorneys gonna be all over that data and say you let this driver continue to operate even though they were graded as an F. So number one, you need to understand what data the devices are capturing. And then number two, equally as important as you need to be able to manage that data. So I would say that the carriers that we encounter, who have this best figured out are the carriers who, number one, understand what data they're capturing. And then number two, have a plan for addressing it. Because even if you know what data you're capturing, but you have no plan to actually do something with it, then you're just you're shooting yourself in the foot. So carriers that are proactively monitoring their reports that we talked about, but also periodically auditing their drivers logs. So that's something that I think not enough carriers do where you actually pick a sample of logs. A 10% of the logs is a pretty common level of auditing that we see among our larger motor carriers. Well, they were they will say, every week, we're going to at least 10% of our logs to make sure that there are no issues there, whether it be substantive violations, or personal conveyance abuse or unassigned driving time. And then once they do that kind of internal log audit, then they take the steps that are necessary to address any problems that they find. And so those carriers will have usually some kind of a driver handbook that lays this all out here are the here are the rules, here are the consequences for not following the rules. And then they deliberate about taking the appropriate steps once they find the issues through their log auditing through the reports to address this with the drivers and getting them fixed before they balloon into this huge issue that you cannot get your arms wrapped around. This is a data problem. We do a monthly live show through Trucksafe Where we bring on guests in the industry to talk about hot button issues. Our second show that we ever did was called Drinking From a Firehose, the idea being that fleets are being inundated with so much data that they are almost in shock. They don't know what to do with that data. So they don't do anything, they put their head in the sand. That's just not that that's, that's a bad idea, you need to be doing something, you need to understand what data you have available to you, you need to have a plan in place to deal with the data, even if it's a matter of saying, recognizing that we're not going to be able to do something with every piece of data that we get. But we're at least going to prioritize it, we're going to figure out which data is most important for us to look at, and which we have the capacity to look at. And then we're going to do something about that.
Hunter Yaw 40:29
Data is a weapon, it sounds like to me, or at least your HLS your hours of service data as a weapon, right? And you can use it to have a super tight operation and to reduce your risk, as solve a problem or it can be turned against you. It sounds like I mean, I'm imagining I'm a fleet owner, I'm in court, I don't even know my ELD was calling my drivers. And suddenly someone's putting in front of me a list of all my F grade drivers asking me why did you keep employing these guys? And I'm asking what do you mean, they were upgraded? I'm not gonna look great.
Brandon Wiseman 40:58
Yeah. Well, it's kind of one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" because the thing I don't want carriers to get the impression is that I'm saying okay, well then just turn off all of that functionality and become completely blind to that issue. I think that swings too far the other way, because now when you go to court, you're having to explain why you had that functionality available to you, that could have identified problematic drivers, but you chose, you deliberately chose to turn it off. And your only explanation is, well, we couldn't manage it. And so you're going to be the jury or the judge is going to be tasked with deciding whether you acted reasonably under the circumstances in that particular lawsuit. And they're going to be shown by the plaintiff's attorney evidence about what your peers are doing, what other motor carriers are doing to make sure that the roadways are safe. And they're going to hear about all of the carriers that are using this data effectively to keep unsafe drivers off the road. And then it's going to be suggested to the jury that you acted unreasonably under the circumstances by choosing to turn it off. So all that's to say is you need to find kind of a happy middle ground where you're using the data that's available to you to target unsafe drivers in and if you can't manage all of that data, then you at least have systems and processes in place to prioritize the most pressing data.
Hunter Yaw 42:19
Manage your data. Don't have to look at every single line of every single report, know where to focus, know how to use it, use it as a tool to your advantage, otherwise, it's going to be turned against you. That's right. All right. Brandon Wiseman from Trucksafe. This has been absolutely insightful. You're shedding a light on some key issues, some blind spots that I think a lot of folks have, we really appreciate you sharing your insight. If you want more, dial into some of those Trucksafe podcasts dial into their content, be listening in, of course, if you want Brandon to help you out with this for your trucking company, just reach out I'm sure he and the Trucksafe team are at your disposal.
Brandon Wiseman 42:55
Thanks, Hunter.