Texas Injury Lawyer Blog
During the twenty-five years that I have been handling truck accident cases I’ve run across a number of truck drivers who had exceeded the maximum allowable driving time. Department of Transportation regulations limit a truck driver to a maximum of eleven hours driving and fourteen hours on duty before he must go off duty for a ten hour period of rest. Yet I’ve never seen a set of truck driver’s log books that accurately showed the number of hours that the driver had been on duty when he had in fact exceeded the maximum allowable on duty hours. Proving that a truck driver has actually been driving for more than eleven hours or on duty for more than fourteen hours requires a comprehensive investigation and analysis of many different factors. The investigation starts with the hours that the truck driver will admit that he was driving or on duty. The “on duty” and “off duty” times thereby set the alleged starting and ending point of the day’s driving. Then the investigation moves to the identification of activities which can be documented as to time and place. Good examples of this documentation include fuel tickets, traffic citations, toll tickets, toll booth videos, fuel station security videos, delivery receipts, GPS data and cellular phone records. This information is combined with the distance traveled and the posted speed limits along the route traveled. By using this documentation and information to determine the trucker’s location along his designated route at various known times it can often be established that the driver necessarily must have been driving in excess of the maximum allowable time. With this information you can prove that the trucker falsified his log books, exceeded the maximum allowable driving hours, and probably committed perjury.
For more information contact a Tyler Truck Wreck Lawyer today.