Are truckers being victimised ?
Discussion
General roadworthiness on cars is done by cops, if they see a car which is dangerously overloaded, or unroadworthy, they give it a pull.
Checking commercials for weight, tacho etc is a bit more specialist so tends to be taken care of by DVSA.
How many police cars do you see compared to DVSA vehicles?
Checking commercials for weight, tacho etc is a bit more specialist so tends to be taken care of by DVSA.
How many police cars do you see compared to DVSA vehicles?
They sometimes, and I mean once in a blue moon, pull cars with caravans/trailers into Carlisle, probably because they have the space there to park up a few at a time.
Last week I got pulled into Wetherby and it's tiny, so I can't see them them having a blitz there.
BTW, they did a quick check of the truck/trailer and then downloaded my card. No problems and I was on my way in 15 minutes.
Last week I got pulled into Wetherby and it's tiny, so I can't see them them having a blitz there.
BTW, they did a quick check of the truck/trailer and then downloaded my card. No problems and I was on my way in 15 minutes.
The places trucks are pulled into are designed specifically for good vehicles. Anyone can look over a car on the side of the road but an artic needs to be taken somewhere off the road when it can be looked over, weighed, and if required impounded. There's also plenty of room for other agencies to work alongside the Police and DVSA
Some truckers have been caught out having a means to bypass the tachtograph or what ever you call it.
One stopped in Ireland was found to by pass the speed limiter at the same time, police tested it at many leptons.
So not a bad thing, mind you I would like all those bloody motorists pulled for headlights stuck on full beam.
One stopped in Ireland was found to by pass the speed limiter at the same time, police tested it at many leptons.
So not a bad thing, mind you I would like all those bloody motorists pulled for headlights stuck on full beam.
I see far more trucks pulled than I ever see cars , at Dartford they seem to have set up a permanent check site complete with full size weight scale .
In 43 years of driving I have never been pulled for a car check but it must be nearly a dozen times in a truck , never recieved any tickets or warnings except for the new mirrors in London .
But see faulty cars , vans and motorbikes on a daily basis .
Every summer we see grossly overloaded people carriers getting away with offences , how many cars with bike carriers loaded are actually legal ?
Down here in Kent seeing police on the motorway apart from op stack or attending accidents is rare but there are spots where I can guarantee seeing DVSA , they even have a site in Dover docks .
In 43 years of driving I have never been pulled for a car check but it must be nearly a dozen times in a truck , never recieved any tickets or warnings except for the new mirrors in London .
But see faulty cars , vans and motorbikes on a daily basis .
Every summer we see grossly overloaded people carriers getting away with offences , how many cars with bike carriers loaded are actually legal ?
Down here in Kent seeing police on the motorway apart from op stack or attending accidents is rare but there are spots where I can guarantee seeing DVSA , they even have a site in Dover docks .
I guess one of the reasons may be the view that commercial vehicles are more likely to be deliberate repeat offenders who put the lives of others at risk for financial gain. However, I have seen quite a few VOSA vans round Devon recently and a lot of anecdotal evidence from owners of older and/or modified cars getting pulled over and issued tickets for previously tolerated stuff like wrong size tyres on rims, excessively low etc etc. But still don't hear much about people getting pulled for being in unroadworthy s
tboxes though.
tboxes though. It does seem that trucks are monitored far more than any other road users , given the damage they can do if it all goes wrong things do need to be up to standard .
We do seem to receive a lot of attention , every motorway every day has patrols just looking at trucks , even the counties without motorways will target more trucks than cars .
I feel it seems to reinforce the attitude amongst the motoring public that any incident involving trucks must be the trucks fault .Yet most truckers will tell you of constantly having to aviod wayward car, van, motorcycle and bike riders or drivers .
I am told that we are suffering a shortage of drivers in the industry which will only get drastically worse over the next 5 to 10 years as my generation retire or loose our entitlement to drive because of medical reasons .
We do seem to receive a lot of attention , every motorway every day has patrols just looking at trucks , even the counties without motorways will target more trucks than cars .
I feel it seems to reinforce the attitude amongst the motoring public that any incident involving trucks must be the trucks fault .Yet most truckers will tell you of constantly having to aviod wayward car, van, motorcycle and bike riders or drivers .
I am told that we are suffering a shortage of drivers in the industry which will only get drastically worse over the next 5 to 10 years as my generation retire or loose our entitlement to drive because of medical reasons .
The extensive checks on trucks are not just road safety related. Much of it is compliance based. The rules and regulations around drivers hours and vehicle weights are not there only to ensure the drivers and vehicles are safe but also that each and every vehicle operator has to adhere to the same standards and should not be able to obtain an advantage over his competitors by failing to comply with these rules.
Well, DVSA are able to keep the revenue they raise so its in their interest to find defects, I find the definition of a defect is subtly changing, also DVSA can increasingly fine you for infringing a rule that may have little or nothing to do with safety.
Everyone here ought to be aware of the OCRS score, this rates how an operator is complying in terms of red (bad) amber(average)and green (good) we were consistently in Green, always have been because of the way we operate, mostly local, light weights and drivers not pushed to work more than 48 hours in a wekk with every weekend off.
We were stopped recently and one of the needles in the tacho head (old style) was found to be less than 1mm off on its preferred trace location, not a fault that would have been seen or noticed by a driver nor one that made any difference to the trace or hours, no benefit or advantage could have been had and the tacho had recently been checked at MOT by a DVSA operative and this fault missed.
We received 200 points for this, it put us in the red, we now get stopped at every wayside pull in if there is room for them to get us in.
Yet, when those checks are found to be perfect, its marked down as a routine stop that has no effect on our OCRS score, so we cant get out of the red because the positive encounters are not logged.
The latest one was a DVSA pull-in with many other agencies who all took our drivers ID and checked him out, we don't know which agencies because they wouldn't tell us. So the DVSA have the power to stop but all these other white vans can look at you on the back of that. Who were they and what did they want ?
Daily/6 Weekly checks, fine, I am ok with this but the onus is being put on us to do these even if the vehicle might be garaged and do less than 1500kms between 6 week periods.
I understand its a one size fits all policy of making sure operators are doing a proper job but we seem to fall between the cracks all the time and have loads of extra compliance work that is not needed, our gear is spot on, low miles low use yet we are treated like a huge fleet with multiple drivers all hot seating so the truck is never still.
I would be out of this in a heartbeat if I could, too much control and red tape and no recognition that we
are small operators with none of the problems associated with large fleets.
One of our trucks does 26kms every Monday, wed and fri morning, total driving time of less than half and hour, the walk round check we do takes minutes, yet we have to show 15 minutes on our tach, half of the time the vehicle is on the road. For this time the driver is sat there waiting, we know the vehicle is good, it is empty, with a bloke sat there wasting time.
We waste a good hour a day each like this as one driver might use 3 or 4 trucks in this way. We run goods to or from our yard for the docks, freight is odd stuff that might be furniture, building supplies, cars, food. It takes longer to do the 15 minutes than the drive to the docks.
All for nothing because the trucks are super tidy. Then we get a red ocrs score that we could never have forseen in a million years that even the dvsa tester missed a week or so before yet that's our fault.
Everyone here ought to be aware of the OCRS score, this rates how an operator is complying in terms of red (bad) amber(average)and green (good) we were consistently in Green, always have been because of the way we operate, mostly local, light weights and drivers not pushed to work more than 48 hours in a wekk with every weekend off.
We were stopped recently and one of the needles in the tacho head (old style) was found to be less than 1mm off on its preferred trace location, not a fault that would have been seen or noticed by a driver nor one that made any difference to the trace or hours, no benefit or advantage could have been had and the tacho had recently been checked at MOT by a DVSA operative and this fault missed.
We received 200 points for this, it put us in the red, we now get stopped at every wayside pull in if there is room for them to get us in.
Yet, when those checks are found to be perfect, its marked down as a routine stop that has no effect on our OCRS score, so we cant get out of the red because the positive encounters are not logged.
The latest one was a DVSA pull-in with many other agencies who all took our drivers ID and checked him out, we don't know which agencies because they wouldn't tell us. So the DVSA have the power to stop but all these other white vans can look at you on the back of that. Who were they and what did they want ?
Daily/6 Weekly checks, fine, I am ok with this but the onus is being put on us to do these even if the vehicle might be garaged and do less than 1500kms between 6 week periods.
I understand its a one size fits all policy of making sure operators are doing a proper job but we seem to fall between the cracks all the time and have loads of extra compliance work that is not needed, our gear is spot on, low miles low use yet we are treated like a huge fleet with multiple drivers all hot seating so the truck is never still.
I would be out of this in a heartbeat if I could, too much control and red tape and no recognition that we
are small operators with none of the problems associated with large fleets.
One of our trucks does 26kms every Monday, wed and fri morning, total driving time of less than half and hour, the walk round check we do takes minutes, yet we have to show 15 minutes on our tach, half of the time the vehicle is on the road. For this time the driver is sat there waiting, we know the vehicle is good, it is empty, with a bloke sat there wasting time.
We waste a good hour a day each like this as one driver might use 3 or 4 trucks in this way. We run goods to or from our yard for the docks, freight is odd stuff that might be furniture, building supplies, cars, food. It takes longer to do the 15 minutes than the drive to the docks.
All for nothing because the trucks are super tidy. Then we get a red ocrs score that we could never have forseen in a million years that even the dvsa tester missed a week or so before yet that's our fault.
Getragdogleg said:
Yet, when those checks are found to be perfect, its marked down as a routine stop that has no effect on our OCRS score, so we cant get out of the red because the positive encounters are not logged.
Positive encounters should be logged and count towards your average, the idea being that every positive dilutes your previous negative score.markmullen said:
Getragdogleg said:
Yet, when those checks are found to be perfect, its marked down as a routine stop that has no effect on our OCRS score, so we cant get out of the red because the positive encounters are not logged.
Positive encounters should be logged and count towards your average, the idea being that every positive dilutes your previous negative score.I actually appealed the tacho thing because the DVSA agent told me that they were not going to log it down because I had had a recent MOT. Also, we left the stop check and went straight to the main agents and had it fixed there and then.
When we looked at the online OCRS and found that we had been charged 200 point I was surprised and angry at the duplicitous agent, they had put us down as having a defective/not operational or tacho not fitted as the offence. Despite the thing working and recording fine except the trace on one of the mode recording things being .5mm off the base line. The discs themselves are not accurate anyway and can be 10 minutes off from each other if you line the egg shapes up and compare the 12 o clock positions so how .5mm is an offence I have no idea.
I hate the one size fits all fine/revenue approach to this, its beyond safety now and into self funding.
markmullen said:
Positive encounters should be logged and count towards your average, the idea being that every positive dilutes your previous negative score.
I'm told to always get the "all clear paperwork" when i get out of a roadside check. But they really do seem to try avoid handing it out. Its as if they're in trouble if they don't find something. But i find this difficult to believe given that they're in a government job.When I was pulled last January (2014) at Ferrybridge on suspicion of being without O 9licence and being over weight they were very pissed off when no offences were found .
Five times they ran me over the scales !
Total lack of humour, the only comment on completion of my examination of my card "you don't take any chances do you"
I'm paid to drive not break the law .
Five times they ran me over the scales !
Total lack of humour, the only comment on completion of my examination of my card "you don't take any chances do you"
I'm paid to drive not break the law .
Its a game to them, they are out to take money and you are the wallet.
In the early days there were blokes with brown coats and hammers looking at if anything was going to fall off, now its uni graduates in hi-viz looking at infringements in arbitrary rules.
I have zero respect for them, they are technicality traffic wardens.
In the early days there were blokes with brown coats and hammers looking at if anything was going to fall off, now its uni graduates in hi-viz looking at infringements in arbitrary rules.
I have zero respect for them, they are technicality traffic wardens.
I told one that if I was carrying high value goods I would not stop until it was confirmed by the police that they were legitimate. That went down like a turd in a pool.Most impersonated officials in hijacks are vehicle inspectors .
Had the same conversation with a traffic cop and he said it's not a problem and he totally understood , just a downside of running unmarked trucks , DVSA don't know if the company are on their hit list without sign writing.
Had the same conversation with a traffic cop and he said it's not a problem and he totally understood , just a downside of running unmarked trucks , DVSA don't know if the company are on their hit list without sign writing.
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