Letters to the Editor: Fuel Prices, N-Viro, Hours of Service

b>FUEL PRICES

When is the bubble going to pop? I personally have not taken a pay raise, and none of my employees or their family members has received one, either. As the price of fuel climbs, so do the prices of goods. Yet no one I have spoken to has been given an increase in pay to combat this issue.

I can only figure that people are lowering their standard of living — or are riding on borrowed credit.

I can only say that now is the time companies need to be shedding bad debt. Clean your act up, or you will be out of business and you will be among many others looking for employment.

This industry needs to look hard at alternative fuel sources for the shorthaul market where there is no real substitution of service, i.e., truck to rail or boat.

Terrence Blackwell

i>President

R Enterprises Corp. of Georgia

ableton, Ga.

N-VIRO’S NEW FLEET

N-Viro has formed a private-fleet subsidiary — Bio-Mineral Transportation — to transport lime and other byproducts. Its CEO said, “As a result of utilizing BMT’s trucks instead of those of an independent third party, N-Viro will become less dependent and less vulnerable to the increasingly volatile trucking and transportation industry, and will avoid unjustifiable cost increases and surcharges.” (Click here for previous coverage.)

This just ain’t so. N-Viro is not going to avoid the transportation problems that exist today. Someone still has to drive the truck. I think N-Viro will soon discover that person is still part of the trucking industry and they will still have to find and keep drivers and deal with the problems and cost of fuel firsthand instead of by collecting surcharges through an independent party.

Ron Hazel

i>Traffic Manager

estfalia Surge

aperville, Ill.

The comments from N-Viro’s executives show they seem not to understand the reasoning behind ever-increasing fuel surcharges.

You basically can look to OPEC for that answer. Once their fleet is in place, maybe N-Viro will see that you can’t just hide the numbers behind corporate jargon.

Fuel prices, driver pay, insurance, etc., are a few of the factors that will determine whether N-Viro profits or not. The surcharges are to help maintain profitability only.

Diesel fuel prices continue to go up, and someone has to do something to keep profitable — just one of the many necessary evils in the trucking industry. N-Viro will see soon enough; good luck to them. They are definitely going to need it.

Name Withheld by Request

i>Trucking Executive

emphis, Tenn.

HOURS-OF-SERVICE RULE

We are a horse transportation team operation and the minimum bunk time of eight hours messes things up because you can’t keep a schedule. You effectively have to do 10-hour intervals to keep the truck rolling.

The biggest problem is, how does the government know what is best for each driver in each situation? By that, I mean before this rule change, you could split your 10-hour bunk time any way you wanted, as long as it wasn’t less than two hours.

Now the government is telling the drivers, “To hell with your schedule; you need to take at least eight hours at one time.”

This rule forces drivers into situations that do not work and are not safe.

Robert Gotwals

i>President

rook Ledge Inc.

ley, Pa.

If the government wants us to be profession truck drivers, it needs to treat us like professionals and give us some rules that say we can drive when it is safe to do so and stop when we need to — and not penalize us when we are forced to stop for whatever reason. The rules that were adopted in January 2004 did that.

The new rules also fail to realize that there are many times the log-book shows we should be safe to drive for 10 or 11 hours, but in reality we are only good for four or five hours of driving. The average over-the-road truck driver gets no more than 48 hours a week at home. What happens is that you get the most out of the hours you have at home and then you leave home tired.

The new rules also don’t take into consideration the problems of traffic. If you get to any side of Houston at about 4 p.m., there is only one good thing to do — sleep until about 8 p.m. Then, what would have taken three hours at 4 p.m. will be done in about half that time or less.

With the current rules, once you start driving, in order to get the most out of the logbook, you must continue to drive until the log puts you in the truck stop.

I also have seen that the current rules make it necessary for drivers to cheat on the logs in order to drive safely.

Please, let us go back to the January 2004 rules. I understand that the accident rate in 2004 was the lowest since records have been kept, if the comparison is made on a per-million-miles-driven basis. The rules allowed us to get more sleep, they allowed us to stop when it was appropriate and within reason and they would not allow us to legally work more than 24 to 36 hours, like the rules of 1948 did.

For the most part, the people who work on the road every day know more about what it takes to drive safely than anyone else.

Gary Hall

i>Over-The-Road-Driver

ennings, La.

These letters appear in the July 24 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.

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