At a rough point in my life, I was a truck driver for CR England and Knight Transportation for a few days short of 7 months. You don’t start at 80,000 a year. That’s such a lie. You make about 600 a week to start, roughly, depending if you get enough miles. You don’t get the good routes, staying in well populated areas like the i5 corridor, at first. You stay in the middle of no where Arizona, North Dakota, etc. You…
> simple math To be fair to the logistics people, predicting demand is difficult. Also, long supply chains suffer from the "bullwhip effect" which can cause extreme misprediction at the tail (source) of the chain.
Roughly 1100 mile haul. Industry standard base time is 55 mph. Some states limit trucks to 55mph even if it's a 70mph interstate. Also, you aren't driving 55mph going up a mountain with a full load. There's a reason why there are truck lanes on mountain passages going up hill. You're going 30mph sometimes (Grapevine and Siskiyous for that particular route).
That's about 20 hours, of straight driving (in theory). Figure in some food stops and 2 refueling stops (100+ gallon tanks, takes a while to fuel up). So that's a bit more than 20 hours. Oh, also you can only drive 11 hours within a 14 hour window. Then you have to not drive for 10 hours to reset your clock. Government regulations.
It was 9:35am when I had possession to leave. Official pickup was 9:15am, but the lumpers were behind schedule. I was to drop that trailer in a yard in LA by midnight, same day or I was fired. Yes, I was told fired.
You're welcome to try that math. 14 hours to do a 20+ hour load, if you don't count gov regulations. It doesn't take a liberal arts degree to figure that one out.
But surely this must be a fluke mistake! No, this was not the only time with this piss poor math skills. There were about 2 dozen occurrences of stupid load times because, yes, they can't do simple math because it was on their bill of lading. It's not like "Oh, this load was to be picked up a week ago and no one has". It was scheduled that way when it was first ordered.
These shipment orders are made weeks in advance. Not on demand. A lot are actually "standing orders" with big companies because they have consistent loads to send out and get a better rate if they guarantee ahead of time that they'll have one.
So don't believe the bullshit, cop out rhetoric they try to pull.
It was however the first and only time I was told I was going to be fired for it though.