The Power of Proper Trip Planning For the Professional Truck Driver

The key to becoming a successful professional truck driver is trip planning. In the present economic environment with the skyrocketing price of diesel, trip planning has gained an added importance. To be successful as a truck driver, you'll always want to carefully plan out your trip so that you can get the required rest and arrive early. The biggest factor to making the trip plan work for you is to arrive early enough at your pick up or delivery point to get your rest so that once you're finished getting the freight loaded you can start a fresh work day.

There are several key factors involved in proper trip planning. The driver must calculate time to travel the required distance for the load to include all dead head miles. Dead head is the term for pulling an empty trailer. Most companies try to limit the dead head miles to as few as possible. Some companies pay a lesser mileage rate for dead head miles. The driver must also calculate his available hours to drive so that he or she can complete the load legally within the DOT (Department of Transportation) regulations. Several other factors to consider are the times for the pick and delivery of the load, traffic patterns through major cities as well as the weather to name a few.

Trip planning involves taking the entire miles for the trip and dividing it by a reasonable mile per hour rate. Different companies recommend different mph rates to factor in the unforeseen events which may present problems during the trip. As a base mph rate we'll use 50 mph. This speed should be used as a maximum speed when trip planning, because it only provides a very small margin of error. Depending on the state in which you have to travel during the run, note that the speed limits for trucks is not the same as it is for cars. Also a driver will not be able to maintain the maximum speed limits in most states due to geographical limits. If you're running a load in California for example you average speed in going to be determined by the posted speed limit as well as the terrain. California is a 55 mph state for commercial vehicles.
Another factor that has to be considered for over the road truck drivers is time zones. If you're traveling west from the New York to Los Angeles, Ca. you'll actually gain three hours because of the time zones. Likewise traveling back east you'll loss three hours. And you thought driving a truck was just sitting on your rear all day and watching the world go by. Truck driving is really one of the toughest jobs around and it takes a special breed of person to do the job.

So to properly trip plan a load you'll have to include all of these factors and along with several others. Distance, time, weather, speed, traveling conditions and most importantly rest. Yes considering how much rest you've had or need is another thing you must factor into trip planning if you plan to succeed. Fatigue is one of the major problems that effect truck drivers, especially when it comes to performing their jobs in a safe and successful manner.

Now the bare bones about trip planning, to give yourself a ballpark figure as a base for planning your trip you'll need to take the total miles divided by 50 mph to determine the total number of hours you're need to drive the distance for the trip. Here's an example, for a 2000 mile trip. 2000/50 equals 40 hours. Naturally you're not going to try to drive 40 hours straight. And again that would be against the HOS (Hours of Service) rules established by the DOT. The rules are rather complex and here I'll just use the standard rule without going into detail about what is known as the sleeper berth provision. The 11 hour rule is the primary rule for the hours a truck driver may work in a given 24 hour day. The 11 hour rule states basically that no driver may continue driving once they have been either "on duty" or "driving" or a combination of the two for more then 14 hours total. Of these 14 hours, only 11 of those can be "driving" hours.

I'll explain what that means in regard to our sample. Once a driver has started his work day, which should begin with a pre-trip inspection of his equipment, the driver then has 14 hours available to work until they have to take a 10 hour break. So if the driver in our example starts his day with a fifteen minute pre-trip and then begins driving, he has thirteen hours and forty five minutes left available to work. The original 14 hours will include time to stop for meals, rest breaks and fueling the truck. Remember we're just looking at a very bare bones example. So with his total of 40 hours to complete the trip, our driver is starting his trip. After the 15 minute pre-trip inspection he drives for six hours and stops to fuel the truck and get a bite to eat. For our example we're say this takes ½ an hour. Once continuing on his drives for five more hours, that a total of 11 hours. He can not "drive" anymore until he's taken the 10 hour break.

Once he stops he will also need to complete a post trip inspection of his equipment. The pre-trip and post trip inspections are required by DOT regulations, note some states however do not require the pre trip, but the post trip is required by all the states. So once our driver has completed the required post trip inspection, he can go to bed or eat dinner or work on logs and paperwork so long as he logs the activity. If he spends 15 minutes on the post trip and then goes to bed he will have used 12 hours and 15 minutes of the 14 he had available to work. The trip requires a minimum of 40 hours to complete at 50 mph. The driver has completed 11 hours of driving and will now have to rest for 10 hours before he can continue. These sleeping hours have to be accounted for when making out your trip plan. So with 11 hours of driving out of a 40 hour trip our driver now has another 29 hours to drive to complete the run. The driver will have to continue to work within the DOT regulations to finish the trip.

Every day on the road is different and no one set of guidelines can cover every possibility. To be successful as a professional truck driver you'll want to always be on time for both your pick ups and deliveries so you don't have to waste valuable time sitting.

Be safe and keep the sunny side up.