Operators have been gearing up for today’s EU drivers’ hours changes. As with anything to do with drivers’ hours, it has taken a while to understand and plan. One interesting feature is that regular passenger services over 50km* hitherto exempt from tachographs (provided the driver held his timetable and roster board equivalent) will henceforward need them. Vehicles don’t need retro-fitment at once. Minibuses up to 17 passenger seats used in the UK will now only be exempt from drivers’ hours if not used for hire or reward. I’ll leave it up to readers to consider whether the exclusion of non-commercial driving is a good thing or not. But the most significant cost is having to roster drivers under EU rather than Domestic hours. This will potentially have a crippling effect on marghinal inter-urban mileage. Crippling.
* that’s c.31 miles in old money
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
Tachos Change Today
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4 comments:
Here in Cornwall, one of the side affects of the driver hours change has been that Western Greyhound has truncating many of its longer services by building in connections. Passengers can no longer travel through on these servics. This cannot be good for passengers, who may now need to change! Any comment?
Regarding voluntary sector transport operations, I wonder how many are longer distance? Even if this sector comes under the new regs, would VOSA have the resources to be able to check on voluntary sector drivers in any case?
Wasn't there a time when lomng distance buses could be split over two or more registrations? This overcame the 50km thing. I think that you can't do this workaround any more.
The Northumbia case, of course, saw off the workround wherein bus routes could be registered in sections - it also determined, (or so we all think, because the judgement isn't quite explicit), that what defines the length of a bus route isn't so much what the driver or bus does, but what the passenger can do...
Whilst the current definition in PSV375 is...
OK... someone run that past me again?
Thank you for these helpful comments. See post on WG. Northerner’s right insofar as multiple registrations are no longer acceptable, for whatever reason.
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