Geotab Personal Conveyance: How to Set It Up and Stay Compliant

Personal conveyance is the movement of a commercial motor vehicle for personal use while the driver is off duty. The rule exists because a driver who has finished a shift still has to eat, sleep somewhere, and sometimes get home, and the truck may be the only vehicle available. Logged correctly, that movement is off-duty time: it does not count against the driving limit or the on-duty window, and the driver does not have to be back on the clock to make it.

What it is not is a way to extend the workday. The test in both countries comes down to one question: is the vehicle being moved to advance the load or the business? Driving from a delivery site to a motel is personal conveyance. Driving from that motel toward the next delivery, even to a truck stop ten minutes closer to it, is work, and logging it as PC is the single most common way fleets turn a legitimate provision into a violation.

On an ELD, personal conveyance is one of two special driving categories the device supports alongside yard moves. The device still records that the vehicle moved, so the data is there for the carrier and the inspector; what changes is the duty status it is recorded under and, in the United States, the precision of the location stored in the log.

The FMCSA's 2018 guidance sets the US framework. Personal conveyance is off-duty time, the driver must be relieved of all work responsibility, and the vehicle may be laden or unladen — the 2018 change was to drop the earlier requirement that the truck be empty. There is no federal distance limit. Instead the guidance lists the kinds of movement that qualify, and the movement has to be reasonable for the personal purpose it serves.

The examples FMCSA gives as acceptable include travelling between lodging and restaurants or entertainment, commuting between a terminal and home, moving the vehicle at a safety official's request during off-duty time, and moving to the nearest reasonable safe location to rest after loading or unloading once the on-duty window is exhausted. That last one is deliberately narrow: nearest reasonable, not the rest area two hours down the road in the direction of the next stop.

The examples it lists as not personal conveyance are the ones that get carriers into trouble. Moving the vehicle to enhance the operational readiness of the carrier, driving to a customer or a fuel stop because it is closer to tomorrow's work, bypassing available rest to get farther along the route, and any movement after a driver has been placed out of service, other than as directed by the officer, are all on-duty driving regardless of what the driver selects on the screen.

One technical detail matters for anyone reading a US log: while personal conveyance is active, the ELD records vehicle position at reduced precision, to roughly a ten-mile radius rather than the usual one mile. That is by design in the ELD technical specification, to give the driver some privacy while off duty. It also means the ELD output file will not show an inspector the street address a driver stopped at, though the fleet's own telematics map still does.

Canada's Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations take a different approach and are stricter on every axis. Personal use of a commercial vehicle counts as off-duty time only if the vehicle is unladen, any trailers are unhitched, the total distance driven for personal use is 75 kilometres or less in a day, the driver records the odometer at the start and end of the personal use, and the driver is not subject to an out-of-service declaration.

The 75 km cap is a hard limit, not a guideline. A driver who logs 80 km of personal use in a day has not made a partial mistake; the personal-use provision no longer applies, and the time becomes driving time under the daily and cycle limits. The unladen condition is equally absolute: a loaded truck cannot be on personal conveyance in Canada at all, which surprises drivers used to the US rule.

For a fleet operating on both sides of the border, this is the practical trap. A driver who crosses into Canada with US habits — laden, no distance cap, no odometer note — is non-compliant from the first kilometre of personal use. The ruleset assigned to the driver in Geotab is what enforces the difference, which is why confirming it is a step in the setup rather than an afterthought.

The two rule sets are easiest to hold side by side. Everything in the Canadian column is a hard condition: fail any one of them and the time is driving, not personal use. The US column is a judgement standard with no numbers in it, which is more flexible for the driver and harder for the carrier to police.

Personal conveyance is off for every driver until an administrator turns it on. In MyGeotab, open Administration, then Users, and select the driver. In the user's HOS settings there is a Personal Conveyance option; enabling it makes the special driving condition available in Geotab Drive for that driver only. Yard Move is a separate option on the same screen and is worth deciding at the same time, since the two are often confused.

The HOS ruleset on the same user record decides which rules the app enforces. Under the Canadian rulesets, Geotab applies the 75 km daily limit to personal use; under the US rulesets there is no distance enforcement, because the regulation has none. A carrier that wants a stricter internal policy than the regulation, say a 30 km cap for its US drivers, has to enforce it through review and reporting rather than through a device setting.

Because the setting is per user, it is also a permission you can grant selectively. A fleet that lets its long-haul drivers use PC to reach lodging but sees no reason for local drivers to have it can enable it for the first group only, and the second group simply never sees the option.

In Geotab Drive, the driver changes status to Off Duty and then selects Personal Conveyance from the special driving conditions. The order matters and so does the timing: the selection has to be made before the vehicle moves. If the truck is already rolling when the driver taps the option, the ELD has already recorded the start of that movement as driving, and the driver will be editing a log rather than annotating one.

The app asks for an annotation, and the driver should give a real one: 'terminal to hotel', 'hotel to restaurant', 'home for the night'. FMCSA's guidance expects the reason to be documented, the Canadian regulation requires the odometer readings, and in practice the annotation is the first thing an officer reads when a PC segment appears in a log. A blank or generic note invites the question a specific one answers.

When the personal movement is over, the driver ends personal conveyance. If the vehicle is switched off, Geotab Drive will prompt about the special driving condition on the next ignition, which prevents the common mistake of starting the next morning's first work trip still in PC.

The carrier's exposure is not the driver's intent but the pattern in the data. MyGeotab's HOS logs show each PC segment with its distance and its annotation, and the personal conveyance reporting lets a safety manager see, per driver, how much PC is being logged and where those segments begin and end. The pattern that should trigger a conversation is easy to describe: PC segments that are long, that run in the direction of the next job, or that consistently end at a customer, a shipper or a fuel stop.

Reviewing this regularly is what makes the provision defensible. A carrier that can show it enabled PC deliberately, documented its policy, and reviewed its use is in a very different position at a DOT audit or a Canadian facility audit from one whose drivers discovered the button on their own. Personal conveyance abuse is a recognized audit finding and, in the United States, a false log entry, which carries consequences well beyond the hours involved.