Local RunGrand Island, NE11 posts · joined Aug 2025
runs a 2014 Pinnacle with hoppers · grain, central Nebraska
#1
harvest starts for me in about three weeks and for the first time i am hiring a second driver instead of doing it all myself and sleeping four hours. he is a retired fellow with a clean CDL who wants eight weeks of work a year, which is exactly what i have to offer.
what i run: farms inside about 90 road miles of my yard, corn and soybeans to two elevators and a rail loader at Doniphan. one customer a week sends me 180 miles out toward Red Cloud and back, which is the only trip that goes any distance.
i have never run an ELD. i have never run a log book either, honestly, because i have always been back in my own driveway in ten hours and somebody once told me i was short haul and exempt. now that somebody else is driving my truck with my name on the door i would like to know whether that was true.
so what is the 150 air mile thing really, does my new man need an ELD in that truck, and what am i supposed to be writing down. i would rather spend a saturday setting this up right than explain it to an officer at the scale on 281 in october with a loaded hopper behind me.
M
mod_terry_k
ModeratorCasper, WY112 posts · joined Aug 2025
runs a 2018 T880 and a 2015 Granite · gravel and oilfield, Casper WY
#2
this was most of my job for nine years so i will lay it out the way i used to lay it out for new drivers, and then you go read it yourself at fmcsa.dot.gov rather than taking a stranger's word for your authority.
the short haul exception has three conditions and you have to meet all three on a given day. the driver stays inside 150 air miles of the location he reported to work at. he comes back to that same location and is released from work inside 14 consecutive hours. and the carrier keeps a record of his time.
air miles, not road miles, and that trips people up in both directions. 150 air miles is about 172 road miles if the road ran straight, and it never does. draw a circle with a 150 mile radius on a map with your yard in the middle. your Red Cloud trip is 180 road miles round trip, so you are nowhere near the edge of that circle. you are a short haul operation and so is your new man.
if the day meets all three conditions, the driver does not fill out a log for that day and the truck does not need an ELD for that day. he also does not owe the 30 minute break. what he still owes is the 11 hours of driving limit, the 14 hour window, and the weekly hours. the exception gets you out of the paperwork, not out of the hours.
the record is the part everybody skips. the time he reported for duty, the time he was released, and the total hours on duty for the day. a clipboard sheet or a notebook is fine. you keep it for six months and you have to be able to produce it. no sheet means no exception, and then he was supposed to have been logging.
one more thing to know before october. if a driver blows the exception more than eight days in any 30 day stretch, you are in ELD territory. an occasional long day you can log on paper. a habit of them and you are buying hardware.
I
intermodal_since_04
RegionalMemphis, TN58 posts · joined Aug 2025
runs 3 day cabs · intermodal out of Memphis since 2004
#3
all three of my trucks qualify for the exception every single day and all three of them have an ELD in them anyway. here is why, and it is not because i love paperwork.
the one day a year a customer asks me to run a box to Little Rock and the driver gets back at hour fifteen, i do not want to be reconstructing a paper log in a parking lot from memory and a fuel receipt. the device already has the day.
it is 19 dollars a truck a month on my plan. that is less than one load of fuel a year per truck. the device also gives me the engine hours, the idle time and a date stamped record of where the truck was when a warehouse tells me my driver showed up at 11 and he says he was there at 9. that last one has paid for the whole thing twice.
i am not telling you that you have to. terry's answer is correct and you can run a clipboard legally and forever. i am telling you what i would do with somebody else driving my truck in my busiest eight weeks.
F
fleet_of_three
Local RunAllentown, PA19 posts · joined Aug 2025
runs 2 Cascadias and a VNR · beverage and general freight, Lehigh Valley
#4
beverage work, all of it short haul, and i have been doing it this way for six years.
the way it was explained to me by the outfit i used to drive for is that short haul drivers run on the 14 hours and that is the whole limit. so if a man is inside his circle and he comes back in 14, he can drive as much of that 14 as the day needs. that is how our dispatch wrote the board, anyway, and we never had a problem with it.
on the record keeping, our time card was the payroll sheet. you punched in, you punched out, and that was the record. if that is all the rule wants then most of the beverage and food service companies in this valley are already fine without knowing it.
M
mod_terry_k
ModeratorCasper, WY112 posts · joined Aug 2025
runs a 2018 T880 and a 2015 Granite · gravel and oilfield, Casper WY
#5
fleet_of_three wroteshort haul drivers run on the 14 hours and that is the whole limit
that part is not right and i want to correct it in the thread rather than in a private message, because it is the single most common thing people in local work believe.
the 11 hour driving limit applies to your drivers exactly the same as it applies to a man running Denver to Chicago. 14 hours is the window the driving has to happen inside of, not an allowance to drive for 14. if your man is on duty 14 hours and 12 of them were behind the wheel, he is over, exception or no exception, and the fact that he was inside his 150 mile circle does not help him at all.
it almost never comes up in beverage work because loading and waiting at stops eats the clock long before the driving does, which is probably why your old dispatcher never had a problem. in grain it absolutely can come up, because a hopper driver in october can genuinely drive eleven and a half hours out of a fourteen hour day, mostly in a straight line, and nobody waiting at an elevator is going to stop him.
on the payroll punch card: that is most of the record and it may well be enough, as long as it shows the time he reported, the time he was released and the total for the day, and as long as you can lay a hand on six months of them. the one i would check is whether your payroll system rounds to the quarter hour, because a rounded punch is not the time he was released.
D
dump_and_flatbed_jr
RegionalHattiesburg, MS26 posts · joined Aug 2025
runs a 2016 Pinnacle and a 2019 567 · gravel and flatbed, south Mississippi
#6
my sheet is a half page on a clipboard that lives in the door pocket. date, truck number, time in, time out, total, and a line for notes where my driver writes down the pit tickets. i photograph the sheet with my phone at the end of the week and the paper goes in a folder in the office. that is six months of records in about four minutes a week.
got asked for it once, in 2023, at a roadside stop on 49 south of Hattiesburg. the officer asked my driver what time he came on duty, my driver told him and showed him the clipboard, and the officer wrote the number down and asked for the office phone. he called me, i answered, and that was the end of it. the lesson i took from that is that the sheet matters less than somebody answering the phone when they call the number on the door.
one thing i would add for harvest. put the truck number on the sheet. when you run two trucks and one driver moves between them in a day, a time card with no truck on it is not much of a record.
G
grain_haul_seasonOP
Local RunGrand Island, NE11 posts · joined Aug 2025
runs a 2014 Pinnacle with hoppers · grain, central Nebraska
#7
three weeks into corn, so a report before it gets busy enough that i stop typing.
i printed a sheet like jr's, truck number on it, and i had a local print shop run 200 of them for 38 dollars. my driver fills it out and so do i, every day, including the days i am the only one in a truck.
we have had two 13 hour days and no 14s. the one that got close was a wet morning where the pit at Doniphan backed up and i sat two and a half hours with the engine running, and that is the day i understood what terry meant about the window. the driving was six hours. the day was thirteen.
i did not buy an ELD this year. i wrote down what the Memphis fellow said and if i put a third truck on next harvest i will, because at 19 dollars he is right that the argument is not about money.
and the circle thing turned out to be the useful part. i drew the 150 mile radius on a paper map with a pencil and a bit of string and pinned it in the shop. the Red Cloud run is well inside it, and so is everything a grower has ever asked me to do. i had been worried about a rule that was never going to touch me, which is a very normal way to spend august.
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