Germans smashing hours regs
Page 5
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
A SEVEN man team from the German transport union OTV has been investigating the "horrifying" driving habits of German lorry drivers.
It has found that some drivers are spending more than 100 hours a week at the wheel — and the record is held by one man who spent 547 hours driving in a month according to his wages slip.
Tachographs are not proving to be any help to the West German police who say that the drivers are changing the disc and claiming that another man had been driving but he had now left the vehicle when their driving time had expired.
Police say that the hauliers are in league with the drivers and it is almost impossible for them to catch the tired drivers.
Nine out of ten drivers in Germany are said to be committing hours offences and the union general secretary Gerd Bergmann was surprised how bad things were.
Spot checks by the Bavarian police show that in one case alone 43 per cent of the drivers were driving over their eight hours — and these were only the ones that were detected.