Personal Conveyance Rules and MyGeotab Setup: Staying Compliant

Personal conveyance is the movement of a commercial vehicle for personal use while the driver is off duty, and in MyGeotab, the platform High Point GPS sets up, you enable it per driver in the HOS settings. Staying compliant then comes down to selecting it before the truck moves and keeping each trip personal. 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 go back on the clock to make it.

PC cannot be used to stretch the workday. The test in both countries comes down to one question: does the move 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 that trip as PC is the most common way fleets turn a legitimate provision into a violation.

On an ELD, personal conveyance and yard moves are the two special driving categories the device supports. The device still records that the vehicle moved, so the carrier and the inspector both have the data. What changes is the duty status attached to the movement and, in the United States, the precision of the location stored in the log.

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 dropped the earlier requirement that the truck be empty. No federal distance limit exists. The guidance lists the kinds of movement that qualify, and each move has to be reasonable for the personal purpose it serves.

FMCSA's acceptable examples 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. Read that last example narrowly. It means the nearest reasonable spot, and a rest area two hours down the road toward the next stop does not qualify.

The examples FMCSA lists as not personal conveyance are the ones that get carriers into trouble: moving the vehicle to improve the carrier's operational readiness, driving to a customer because it is closer to tomorrow's work, driving to a shop for maintenance, bypassing available rest to get farther along the route, and any movement after the driver has been placed out of service, other than as the officer directs. Each of these is on-duty driving, whatever the driver selects on the screen.

Anyone reading a US log should know one technical detail. While personal conveyance is active, the ELD records vehicle position at reduced precision, roughly a ten-mile radius instead of the usual one mile. The ELD technical specification does this on purpose, to give the off-duty driver some privacy. As a result, the ELD output file will not show an inspector the street address where a driver stopped, 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 point. Personal use of a commercial vehicle counts as off-duty time only if the vehicle is unladen, any trailers are unhitched, total personal-use driving 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 under an out-of-service declaration.

The 75 km cap is a hard limit. A driver who logs 80 km of personal use in a day loses the personal-use provision for that driving, and the time becomes driving time under the daily and cycle limits. The unladen condition is just as absolute: a loaded truck cannot be on personal conveyance in Canada at all, which surprises drivers used to the US rule.

For a fleet running 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 the High Point GPS platform enforces the difference, so confirming it belongs in the setup from the start.

The two rule sets are easiest to compare side by side. Every item in the Canadian column is a hard condition, and failing any one of them turns the time into driving. The US column is a judgment standard with no numbers in it, which gives the driver more room and makes the carrier's job of policing it harder.

Personal conveyance stays off for every driver until an administrator turns it on. In MyGeotab (the High Point GPS platform), open People, then Users & Drivers, and select the driver. The HOS Settings tab includes a Personal Conveyance option, and enabling it makes the special driving condition available in Geotab Drive, the driver app, for that driver only. Yard Move is a separate option on the same screen. Decide it at the same time, because drivers often confuse the two.

The HOS ruleset on the same user record decides which rules the app enforces. Under the Canadian rulesets, the platform applies the 75 km daily limit to personal use. Under the US rulesets it enforces no distance, because the regulation sets none. If you want a stricter internal policy than the regulation, say a 30 km cap for your US drivers, you can set it in MyGeotab as a maximum personal conveyance distance per day, database-wide or per driver. The app warns the driver and flags the trip, and review and reporting do the rest.

Because the setting is per user, you can grant it selectively. If your long-haul drivers use PC to reach lodging and you see no reason for local drivers to have it, enable it for the first group only, and the second group never sees the option.

In Geotab Drive, the driver changes status to Off Duty and then picks Personal Conveyance from the special driving conditions. Order and timing both count: the driver has to make the selection 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 ends up editing a log instead of annotating one.

The app asks for an annotation, and the driver should write 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 an officer who spots a PC segment in a log reads the annotation first. A blank or generic note raises the question that a specific note would have answered.

When the personal trip is over, the driver ends personal conveyance. If the vehicle was switched off, the driver app prompts about the special driving condition at the next ignition, so the driver doesn't start the next morning's first work trip still in PC.

Your exposure as a carrier comes from the pattern in the data, whatever the driver meant. The platform's HOS logs show each PC segment with its distance and annotation, and the personal conveyance reporting lets a safety manager see, per driver, how much PC gets logged and where those segments begin and end. Three patterns should prompt a conversation: segments that are long, segments that run in the direction of the next job, and segments that keep ending at a customer, a shipper or a fuel stop.

Regular review is what makes the provision defensible. At a DOT audit or a Canadian facility audit, a carrier that can show it enabled PC on purpose, documented its policy and reviewed its use stands on much firmer ground than one whose drivers found the button on their own. Personal conveyance abuse is a recognized audit finding, and in the United States it is also a false log entry, with consequences well beyond the hours involved.

Complete these steps, in order, before the first driver sees the option. Each one is a setting, a document or a routine.