The analyzed acts were in force during different periods of time, often in parallel. As a result, between 2000 and 2010, 6 different legal statuses regarding drivers’ working time and driving time can be identified. The date of entry into force of a subsequent legal status constitutes the end date of the previous one, with the exception of the last legal status, for which legal acts up to August 15, 2010, were taken into account (this is the latest legal status included in the article). A summary of the legal statuses along with a list of legal acts regulating drivers’ working time and driving time is presented in Table 3.
Principles of regulating drivers’ working time and driving time in Poland and their changes over the last 10 years
During a driver’s workday, several types of activities are distinguished. From the point of view of the currently applicable regulations regarding driving time, these are:
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driving periods,
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breaks from driving,
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daily and weekly rest periods.
From the point of view of regulations concerning drivers’ working time, these are:
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working time,
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on-duty time – “time during which the driver remains available to perform work outside of normal working hours”,
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periods of so-called “other work” – these are periods of time when the driver performs work other than driving the vehicle,
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breaks,
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rest periods.
In both cases, the permissible (maximum) or required (minimum) time for each driver activity, as well as guidelines on when they should be taken into account, were regulated over the years by relevant legal acts appropriate to a given legal status (Table 3). However, almost every introduced legal regulation assumed a number of exceptions that the driver could use under specific conditions and in situations defined by the regulations.
Tables 4 and 5 present the basic legal regulations concerning, respectively, drivers’ working time and driving time for each of the six previously indicated legal statuses.
A solution that allows for accelerating the transport process by eliminating the need for the vehicle to stop during statutory breaks is the use of intermodal transport, which consists of transporting cargo using at least two different modes of transport (most often road, rail, water), using one and the same loading unit (for example, a container, BDF swap body) or the entire vehicle, without reloading the goods themselves along with the successively changing modes of transport. It is difficult to plan and – more importantly – execute transport so that, for example, the vehicle’s arrival time is almost equal to the start time of ferry check-in or boarding a railway wagon. As a result, the driver often has to wait even several hours for the opportunity to board a ferry/wagon, which is why the law relating to driving time allows the driver, while waiting for the opportunity to continue transport, to start a daily rest period and interrupt it for the time of boarding and disembarking from another means of transport, with the proviso that the time required for boarding and disembarking plus the time required to complete all transport formalities cannot exceed a total of 1 hour. It is important that during a ferry crossing or train journey, the driver must be provided with a sleeping berth. As a result, the intermodal solution allows, in a way, to include the driver’s rest time during the transport operation, and during the ferry or rail transport itself, not to stop the movement of the cargo for the duration of the rest period.
The article comes from the “Logistyka” magazine 1/2011.