Profile For Davy A.

Best practices are just that, best practices, they are not necessarily the only way to go, just the ones that have much higher success rates. That's important in this industry where the failure rate for first year drivers is well of 75 percent.

It's great that you found success in a different method, but for most, they need every advantage they can get just to simply stay in this industry.

I'm assuming you're out of reno terminal. Talk with your terminal manager, when I worked for Knight, they had a lot of freight that goes over donner to eastbay n central valley, also a lot of runs down to Vegas and socal. They may have something dedicated there, both Lowes and Sam's club used to have a lot there. If you're reliable, safe and easy to work with they will find something for you.

Im guessing along the lines of what Kearsey said as well. Unless the company is pushing you to somehow run illegally, which is very doubtful, its almost impossible to run without sleeping enough, its the very purpose of our hours of service regulations. But what does often happen is that most people are totally unprepared for the lifestyle of trucking.

Its often said that trucking runs 24/7. Like many sayings in the industry, its both true and not true. The truckers are expected to deliver and pick up virtually any time, any day, anywhere. But the great majority of shippers, especially smaller ones dont operate that way, they are only open certain hours, and you can only pick up at certain times, coupled with totally erratic waiting times. Add in times and pauses due to weather and mechanical issues, it makes for a maddening soup of inefficiency and disfunctionality that we have to wade through on the daily.

The tools for dealing with this mess are learning how to bend your circadium rythm and sleep schedule, become efficient and effective with your truck and clocks, and becoming a master of trip planning. These all take time to develop. A company is not going to bend to your sleep schedule, its your job to thread the needle through and learn how to improvise, adapt and overcome. This process takes time, but given the nature of our job, you dont have much of that luxury.

In regards to hitting things in your yard. Youre a rookie. Its probably in all reality that you just dont have very good spatial reasoning skills and inherent abilities to judge distances. Not everyone does. In fact, most people lack the basic hand eye coordination to drive vehicles this large, let alone back them up. Over time, they build skills based on the abilities they do have. Keep in mind, abilities are innate, while skills are learned behaviors. Again, it takes time to develop skills, even more so if your abilities are lacking. One must use tools to combat the deficiency in ability.

Self honesty in assessing your abilities and skills goes a long way. It doesnt mean that you are not capable of driving successfully, just that you have to work a bit harder and use tools to help yourself in areas that are tough for you. If it sounds like im ripping on you, Im not. Ive earned every mile ive driven and square inch of a race track ive ran on. I was the slowest racer in my class when I started and I was the worst driver in my class when it came to backing, I over analyzed every little movement and really tripped myself up all the time. Where everyone else could simply back it in to a hole, I would spend a month of Sundays trying to calculate the exact angles and eventually frustrate myself to the point screaming. But I used every tool I could, including our beloved GOAL to avoid hitting anything...ever. Failure is not an option. I practiced and practiced until it was fluid and repeated results. Make no mistake, this career is about high performance driving.

There indeed is some crazy interpretation going on here. No one has compared any of the mega corporations to nazis. But for those who obviously need to brush up on their reading comprehension skills, unless they were just being argumentative and misquoting, there are some folks who will attempt to overlook the obviously bad behavior of an entity and instead only herald their good items.

For new readers that aren't aware, I worked for Knight for over 3 years, so I have direct working knowledge of their pay structure, safety devices and policies and how they use said devices to limit driver pay where possible. It's a policy issue, not a person issue. Knight, notwithstanding, in my opinion is a great place to start a career at, but go in knowing what they do and why they do it.

The thing is, we have a responsibility to acknowledge what the mega carriers in conjunction with gigantic corporations are intentionally doing to drivers. There's a reason why there is so much negatively regarding them. While we Excell in combating misinformation about them, we fail in acknowledging their faults and this does a disservice to drivers. The battle for better working conditions, better pay and honorable practices by employers in this industry needs to be fought at every angle and each person can make a difference. When we accept and tolerate bad behavior and policies, we continue to get bad treatment and bad policies.

In the context of this thread, Knight, and many other carriers unequivocally use the cameras to lower compensation to drivers. It's factual. It's a primary design function of the systems. A significant portion of a drivers wages are attached to interpretation of events triggered that a driver has no control over whatsoever. There are completely subjective standards for scoring the events, and they will not produce the parameters and standards that they do use. This pattern is also applied to their fuel bonus, with the exception that they did provide some standards for that.

All of these items won't make much difference to a driver starting out, odds are, they won't be efficient and effective enough to produce enough. Where they do make a difference is after a year or so of experience where a driver starts being able to produce consistent results.

So a fleet can say they're "maintaining the safety of the fleet" all they want, but it's simply a nice way of saying, "were going to reduce driver pay even more if we can"

Thee carriers can because there's a massive driver surplus industry wide. Due in no small part to having entire generations of drivers who lack the self control and judgement to drive without devices making the decisions for them and behavior engineering by proxy through audible and visual alarms, and pay based behavior. These drivers would have been fired out of the ecosystem if the systems weren't in place. Instead they remain in place, recieve lower pay and lower the aggregate skill level and pay of the group. We need natural selection back in the industry.

It's indeed very grave. If, DOGE gets some scrutiny of FMCSA it may start to correct things.

The globalists and leftist coalitions did a tremendous amount of damage to our industry in the last 10 to 15 years.

The solution is simple, we need to bring manufacturing and agricultural processing back, deurbanize and end the consumer addiction to cheap goods, which in all reality are not cheap, the true costs are hidden in national debt and the interest rates. Trumps working on it, but they're still fighting their hail Mary plays against him.

My hope is that the current situation with Canada will curb much of the B1 visa drivers coming in through the back door there, the tightening of the border in the south will too. The more vocal we become about the surplus of drivers and the lack of enforcement of the English speaking regulations can help too. We also need to be vocal and make aware that the ATA is a globalist organization that is designed to benefit the mega corporations and Goliath shippers, not the drivers. We need to support ooid and groups supporting the drivers and small guys.

The group sponsoring the bill in Arkansas needs our help for sure.

I feel for the drivers there. Hopefully this results in large numbers of drivers choosing to leave in order to demonstrate they won't tolerate this kind of nefarious behavior.

Knight bases their bonuses of events. It's an extremely convoluted system that is extremely difficult to overcome. Knights pay structure is relatively low cpm with 8 cpm being available in bonuses. It's significant. When I was there, I frequently had 1300.00 a month or more in bonuses. At that point, it's not a bonus, it's a variable portion of your pay that the corporation is hell bent on keeping.

The problems included many things. Chief among them is the crash mitigation sensors being set dangerously high, they constantly trigger over false flags, sometimes multiple times per hour. These false readings cause triggers such as hard braking, lane departure and such. These then go against the drivers score, virtually eliminating their safety "bonus" and kicker "bonus". There's little or no room to debate it and once applied they won't reduce the score.

Another issue is that there are no objective standards on events, so that a driver can not effectively know if their following distance or braking force is going to result in lost wages or not. I detailed this in the post that blew up on here in regards to their practices.

Having the AI cams and semi driver facing is simply another means to systemically lower driver wages.

To male the argument that these are beneficial to drivers is to make the claim that under the Nazis, the trains always ran on time.

Bummer. As PJ said, there are a lot of dynamics in the real world. A great many of us may not do a pre and post trip exactly by the book, but we have our routines that we do. Just as PJ, coming back from hometime, I do a very thorough pre trip. I also, do a solid post trip and make a list of anything I want to get while I'm out.

Your recent experience highlights why we suggest going OTR to start at one of the larger companies that train. You get the time to develop habits and experience the real world in manageable chunks. They are also far more tolerant of hiccups and mistakes.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The crash mitigation systems, acc and lane tools are extremely unsafe.

At Knight, Their safety depth chose to leave the units maxed out on sensitivity and braking. I've had numerous instances where the vehicle unexpectedly and for no valid threat, applied full braking and exhaust braking on snow, rain, in turns and in traffic resulting in complete loss of control of the vehicle and numerous slides. In addition, when deployed it subjects the driver to unexpected forces slamming them forward with several gs of force resultingin chronic joint pain, whiplash, ptsd from auditory and visual alarms accompanying trauma. It's very akin to being rear ended multiple times a day, sometimes per hour randomly.

It's good grounds for litigation as it's caused many drivers significant harm, pain and suffering.

It's one more instance of people whom have no idea, can not even begin to conceive of what professional drivers must do to operate our vehicles yet make policy and items for the trucks that ultimately only success is making the drivers life hell. I spent most of my days trying to drive despite the "safety" measures of the truck. In fact, it was so onerous to me that it was a primary factor in my decision to go with my present company that allows us to turn off the insidious pieces of fertilizer.

Also, inevitably, most companies simply resort to attaching pay to the devices and use them to lower wages to the drivers as a whole.

Hopefully the op can begin to understand just how many loathe these things. The best thing you can do is actually concentrate on enforcement of FMCSA policies regarding immigration status and the mandate that CDL holders MUST be able to communicate and understand English.

The KW t680s depending on the year, have autostart, using the thermostat in the sleeper, set to auto, with ac on, it will virtually run all night.

23 and later next gens t680s have a high idle switch that will over ride the 5 min idle restrictions. It's done by turning on the cruise, then hitting the accel button on the wheel.

If it's an older one, simply invest in a box of hand warmers, tape two to the sensor on the bottom of the drivers mirror and place a beanie over it, good for 10 hours of idling.

I idled my truck 24/7 at Knight if I chose to.

Part of being a driver is improvising, overcoming and adapting. Most carriers treat repairs like triage and interior comfort is the last on the priority list. It is what it is. You learn to accept it and get on with life. Things like curtains breaking, ac not working are not going to get attention.

As was said, communication would have alleviated any issues. Those it can't, learn to solve yourself.

I know when I started, I was looking for a hard and fast rule, a fixed point to objectively know when to shut down for winds. I think most beginning drivers look for that. It's natural to want something fixed and constant in a dynamic ever changing environment.

It felt at the time that old timers would simply offer cryptic advise like an old temple leader: "Young grasshopper, you will know when to shut down when you feel it's time to shut down because a person is the master of their own clenched sphincter" or something akin to that.

And to be fair, it's a fairly subjective choice, we all must choose our comfort level and make our best guess as to what the best practices for safety are. But even in that, there are objective data and model based decisions that can and should be made.

I'm not telling anyone where they should or shouldn't shutdown at, just what my general guidelines are.

To understand the choices I make, it's beneficial to understand the data that leads to the choice.

1. Constant wind speed/gust speed relationship the higher the constant, the more likely the gust speed is to be sustained and increase in speed.

2. Straight line vs cyclonic vs variable winds. Straight line winds are very volatile and can gust significantly higher than anticipated. Variable winds can change instantly in speed, duration, intensity and direction. Cyclonic involve rotational forces, and you can see the direction change over time.

3. Direction of winds. It's no guarantee but the problem areas of known high winds are historically crosswinds to the road surface. Obviously, wind direction has a lot to do with it.

I use Ventuski and Windyapp for model based forecasts. There are several different models for forecasting. For short range I use the NOAA based High Resolution Rapid Refresh. It's 3 km hourly Refresh model. For linger range plans I use GSF and the other as well as NAM. Both apps have it, as well as automatic model choice and comparison mode.

I also use Driveweather to predict wind speeds along my routes at the given times I'll be there, also NOAA based.

In general, with anything under 15k in the box, I don't like to drive above gust speeds of 30 to 35 mph, irrelevant of constant speed. 15k to 20k I'll ride it at 35 to 45 mph. If I absolutely need to.

It's uncomfortable, stressful and while you probably won't tip over, your chances of evading possible accidents decrease and you possibilities of encountering hazards increases. Also the stress causes production of cortisol in your body which causes fat storage and increased fat retention in addition to a host of other health issues.

30 to 35 is well below several studies which show empty 53' vans seem to tip over around the 60 mph gust speed.it allows some headroom. There are of course variables. Many to consider like geographic conditions, cars on the road, road type, weather, etc. I've ran empties in 40 to 50 mph gusts at times, it's was a very unpleasant experience. Again, that's my choice, I don't feel like rolling miles along at a reduced speed stressing and pushing luck to the edge, especially when my company would rather I take their 200k asset and stay safe with it.

Couple of screenshots of windy app and Ventuski and Driveweather