--- title: "The driver runs out of hours 40 km from the dock" url: "https://edriq.com/blog/the-driver-runs-out-of-hours-40-km-from-the-dock" description: "A plan that ignores remaining driving time produces loads that cannot legally arrive on time. Treating hours as a constraint gives the customer a real ETA instead of a hope." --- # The driver runs out of hours 40 km from the dock October 22, 2026·4 min read·EdrIQ It is a quarter past five on a Wednesday. The dispatcher has just confirmed a delivery for seven the next morning: the truck is loaded, the route is clear, the distance works. The customer’s warehouse has a slot at seven and the dispatcher has promised it. At twenty to seven the next morning the phone rings. The driver is on a lay-by with the warehouse in sight, forty kilometres short, and cannot drive another metre. The daily driving time ran out, the rest cannot be shortened, and the slot is gone. The customer hears about it from the dispatcher at ten to seven, which is to say after the slot has already been lost. Nobody made a mistake on the road. The mistake was made the previous afternoon, when the plan counted kilometres and hours of clock time but not the hours the driver had left. The route was feasible for a truck. It was not feasible for the person driving it. ## How plans ignore the one constraint that cannot bend **The plan is drawn for the vehicle.** Distance, average speed, loading time, tolls. Everything in the calculation belongs to the truck. The driver’s remaining daily and weekly time belongs to a different system, usually a different screen, and often to nobody’s screen at all until the next tachograph download. **The dispatcher plans from a guess about the morning.** The driver started Wednesday at some point, took some breaks, and had some time left at loading. The dispatcher knows roughly, or asks and gets a rough answer, and rough is enough until it is not. **Rest is treated as a pause, not a wall.** A daily rest is not a delay that can be trimmed if the customer is important. It is a fixed block of time that lands wherever the driving time ends, and if that is forty kilometres short of the dock, that is where the truck stops. **The weekly limit arrives without warning.** A driver who has had a heavy week hits the weekly ceiling in the middle of a run that would have been fine in a normal week. Daily hours looked sufficient; the week did not, and nobody was looking at the week. **The customer is given a time that was never real.** The ETA in the confirmation was the time the truck could arrive, not the time the driver could. The customer planned a shift around it, and the first correction they receive is the one that comes too late to do anything with. **The hours tool and the planning tool do not talk.** The company often has software that reads the tachograph and warns about infringements. It is a compliance tool, used after the fact. The plan was made in a spreadsheet or on the board before that tool was opened. ## Planning with hours as a constraint **Put the remaining time on the load, next to the driver.** Not a separate report. When a load is being assigned, the dispatcher should see how much daily driving time, daily working time and weekly time that driver has before the assignment is confirmed. Where this comes from is the tachograph software or the driver; the point is that it is visible at the moment of deciding. **Let the rest fall where it falls, and plan around it.** If the route needs a rest before the dock, the plan should say where, how long, and what the arrival time becomes. A seven o’clock slot that is really a nine o’clock arrival should be booked as nine o’clock, or given to another driver. **Give the customer the arrival the driver can make.** The ETA sent in the confirmation and in the status updates, as the [earlier article on load status](https://edriq.com/blog/where-is-the-truck-is-the-most-expensive-question) described, should be built from the driver’s hours, not from the map. It will sometimes be later than the customer wanted. It will almost never be a surprise. **Flag the loads that cannot legally make it.** Before confirming, the system should be able to say that the assigned driver cannot reach the dock by the promised time within their remaining hours. That is a warning for a person to act on, by changing the driver, the slot or the plan. **Keep what happened.** When the truck does stop short, write it on the load: how far short, why, what the customer was told and when. The next plan on the same lane with the same timing starts from that record rather than from the same optimism. ## A test to run this week Pick ten deliveries from the last month where the slot was missed or moved. For each, go back to the plan as it stood when the load was assigned and write down two things: how much driving time the driver had left at that moment, and whether the dispatcher knew it. If the answer is mostly “enough, and yes”, the misses were the road and the weather, and this article is not your problem. If more than a couple come back as “not enough” or “nobody knew”, the plans on those days were promises the driver could not keep, and the customer’s ETA was never an estimate. It was a hope. EdrIQ is not a tachograph or a driver-hours tool, and does not analyse working time. It keeps the load, the driver and the plan as [one object](https://edriq.com/), so that the remaining time your company already receives from the tools that do analyse it has a place to sit when the dispatcher decides. The sibling article on [fuel cost per load](https://edriq.com/blog/the-fuel-invoice-does-not-know-which-load-burned-it) covers the other number that lives in a separate system until it is too late. - driving time - planning - ETA - dispatch ## Keep reading - [A forwarding agent works all night. What may it write alone?](https://edriq.com/blog/a-forwarding-agent-works-all-night) - [The fuel invoice does not know which load burned it](https://edriq.com/blog/the-fuel-invoice-does-not-know-which-load-burned-it)