Carryfast:
Rjan:
ROG:
Returning to the issue of the 10 hour drives …
How daft can it be that a driver can do 4 in a row on sat sun mon tue but cannot do mon tue wed thu
If they really wanted to be sensible then the rule should be - max 2 x 10 drives between weekly rests because the intention is not to have a tired driver and that would have ensured this was the case
I think the overriding principle was that 10 hours driving should be exceptional rather than a daily event.
It’s true that you can do 4 in a row if the first two are done at the weekend, but that pattern cannot be sustained for a single driver on a weekly basis (you would have to have a 12 day gap until the next 4 day stint).
In the end the rules are a compromise with simplicity.
If you want simplicity it doesn’t get much simpler than 12 hours minimum unbroken daily rest 1 hour unbroken minimum break and no seperate limit on remaining driving/duty.
It’s so much better to have drivers driving for up to 10 hours with 9 hours daily rest between shifts possibly including commuting time.That’s not compromise that’s a recipe for disaster.IE the 10 hour drive won’t send a proper driver to sleep but the lack of sleep between shifts will.
The problem is that there are always exceptional circumstances. A crash, a detour, a delay putting you in rush hour traffic. The 10 hours is there to provide some flexibility for those whose working day would normally be under 9 hours driving.
It’s the same with the reduced daily rest. It’s there more to cater for those tramping over 4 days.
The principle of the 48-hour maximum average working week, and the 60 hour maximum in any one week, also seek to provide some overall restraint.
It’s perfectly possible to imagine a variety of working patterns that make legitimate use of any one of the extremes. The agricultural worker who does 0700-1500 M-F, and occasionally a half-day of Saturday overtime, makes legitimate use of the reduced weekly rest. The 4 day a week tramper makes legitimate use of the three reduced rests. The person who encounters the occasional slow traffic, or does the occasional difficult long run, makes legitimate use of the extended driving time.
What probably wasn’t intended by those who first sat down to draft the rules decades ago, was that the bosses in this country - in connivance with some drivers, weak unions, lax enforcement agencies, and the government itself - would constantly be trying to exploit every single extreme as a matter of routine, nor that there would be such a surplus of drivers that bosses could get away with organising most of the industry along Victorian sweatshop working hours without any effective pushback to keep hours within reasonable bounds.
Given that driving time itself is limited to 9 hours as a norm, and driving is what drivers are supposed to do, it also probably wasn’t foreseen that the industry would become so inefficient with drivers’ labour as to often drag the working day out by up to 6 hours more of non-driving time (usually waiting time), or that hauliers would be paying only plain time for those overtime hours as opposed to time-and-half or double time.
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Thank you.