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Comment by Stranger43 | Hacker News Reader

Yep but isn't the problem that his employor demand that he drives right to the limit of his legal limit on corporate time and leaves no buffer for say getting home.

The limits on time is not meant to be "norms" but extreme cases so if they are hit daily thats an indication the the culture in the industry is rotten more then anything else.

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From what I recall, it was a fixed route. Like drive to a factory, pick up goods, drive back and deliver at docks.

Sure, an edge case. But inflexible rules lead to more edge cases.

I suspect the issue was a variable amount of detainment while loading or unloading - sometimes the dock was fast - as soon as you bump the dock there is a fork truck in the trailer moving the shit out, sometimes you'd wait for four hours to be loaded or unloaded. All of that is out of the control of the driver and the company. The current structure of the industry has little market pressure to force the shippers to be better behaved.

So what it means is that if he could, he would have exceeded the allowed time every single day just to get home? That's not great either. Also you need to decide what flexibility is ok - is doing extra 20 miles fine? How about 30? How about 60? At which point do you say ok, now you're just taking the piss and this isn't ok.

Indeed, that is the problem. If he drove this route once or twice a week it would probably be fine. Every day, perhaps not? Then again, he argued he sleeps much better at home...

And yeah, adding flexibility is very difficult, simple rules are better as such.

And of course, if they add an exception for drivers to get home, I'm sure the companies would exploit that in their route planning.

Not easy either way.

> But inflexible rules lead to more edge cases.

Or alternately a normal working day is 8 hours, and a 10 hour daily limit allows a supremely flexible 2 hours of overtime :)

It's rare to hit your driving hours while driving, but you'll often run out of on duty hours first. Often those issues, detainment at shippers, whatever - is beyond your employers control.

Many truckers are paid by the mile and have total discretion, but need to push the limits to make a decent wage.