Personal Conveyance and Yard Move
Why and how to use them?

FMCSA allows property-carrying drivers to use the privileges of Personal Conveyance (sometimes referred to as Personal Use) or Yard Move. However, not many drivers fully know what they are supposed to do to use them and which cases are perfectly suited for these statuses.

Both of the statuses were designed to avoid over-using the Driving time and allow drivers more flexible ways of moving the CMV.

Personal Conveyance is used for legal tracking of your driving for personal reasons (including getting to the shop or restaurant for food or getting to the motel/home for a night). This status is considered for the total HOS counting as an Off-Duty status. You may see it on your graphs as a red or purple horizontal dotted line.

To enable it, you should switch your status to the Off-Duty, and then you will see an option for Personal Use. However, if there is none - you should contact your Fleet Manager as they are the ones to permit using this feature.

The same works for the Yard Move as well, it may be enabled only if you are currently on the On Duty status and only if your Fleet Manager gave you the permission.

Yard Move is a type of the On Duty status that is mainly used while the truck is moving on the yard. The requirement of a yard is that the vehicle cannot be operating on what is defined in §390.5 as a “highway.” A highway is any roadway, public or private, that the public can operate a four-wheeled vehicle on that is not restricted by signs or gates.

Basically, you can move on your customer’s territory, motor vehicle garage, or else. The Yard Move will be displayed on your graph as a yellow dotted line.

After you have used any of these statuses, you would have to set the PC Clear or the YM Clear event. It will be highlighted with red on your statuses wheel and you will not be able to change the status until you have cleared the PC or YM. Once cleared, Yard Move will change to the On Duty event and PC will be changed to the Off Duty event.

In the USA there are no restrictions for using the Personal Use or Yard Move. Canadian rules though prohibit using the Personal Conveyance for more than 75 km per day.

Your fleet managers have the ability to set you personal limitations for each driver. Overcoming these limits will automatically switch the PC to Off-duty and YM to On-Duty.

In the conclusion, though using such features as Yard Move and Personal Conveyance may seem pretty convenient, we do not recommend abusing these statuses as it will be noticed and questioned during the road-side inspection.