Dear readers,

I feel that I must apologise once more for the lack of posting on this blog but I feel that there are only so many times that you can read about and look at pictures of dodgy loading. In this respect I believe the phrase is Same S*** Different Day

This time I feel the need to sound off about route planning.

On the whole my routes seem to run in a fairly logical order now that they’ve been re-arranged and had drops taken off to make them achievable even if the timing leaves a lot to be desired. As a company we operate on timed deliveries. Every unit has a given delivery time and a delivery window e.g. 0700 – 0800, 0800 – 0900 etc etc. Well that’s how it used to be all those years ago when deliveries used to run on 1 per hour unless you had 2 in the same place.

These days however we seem to be on the principle that we don’t need to drive through heavy traffic from one to the other as we now seem to be 0700 – 0800, 0715 – 0815, 0745 – 0845 etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind working for a living and the job is physically tiring but there’s only a level of fatigue that can be reached before we all start getting dangerous on the road. Yes we have breaks that we’re supposed to adhere to after a certain amount of time driving and a certain time working but try finding many of my colleagues adhering to those and they are in the minority. We have to work them to keep up with our delivery times.

A couple of my friends are airline pilots and have both commented that with the hours we work and how tired I appear when I see them that if I was working with them they would be telling me to report sick with fatigue.

The trouble is that the lorries only earn money when they’re fully loaded and working. Our planners have managed to do this and cram extra drops onto the vehicles but only by using data from our quietest time of year when there are light loads on the vehicles. Come our busy periods, school holidays, Christmas etc. then we seem to be struggling to keep up. Drops get failed, drivers run out of time and have to be collected, not all the routes can be loaded onto the vehicles, we even at times run out of vehicles so we have drivers waiting for 4 – 5 hours sometimes to take out their routes. Our maximum working day is 15 hours from start to finish. If you have a 12 – 13 hour route you have problems because anything you fail has to be added to the loads for the following day.

Even the weather can play a factor with the recent snow that we had. On the first day London came to a virtual standstill and all drivers were told to get back to the yard under their own steam regardless of what drops were failed. It took us two weeks to recover from that week of disruption.

From now on I shall try to enlighten you more about the life of a UK HGV driver rather than continually moan about how bad it is.

Until the next instalment…