It defies belief how the boards have been updated. They went out of their way to complicate the simple, and where intelligence and effort were actually needed, they took the path of least resistance. They consolidated the boards without any real regard to where they freight comes out and without regard to board geographical boundaries. Oh, they will deny this and say just the opposite, but that dog won't hunt. Case in point, we have a Paris, KY board.
Paris, KY is not a hotbed of expedite activity, but that's where the computer will send you when you drop off in Lexington. Newbies and other people not familiar with the area will waste time and fuel running up to Paris only to find little or no freight coming out of there, not to mention no place to layover for a load. That's a serious problem if you log and are about to run out of hours. They end up wasting more fuel and time to come back to Lexington or Georgetown. It's stoopid. Call a spade a spade and rename that board as the Lexington board.
If you plot the KY boards you will see that they have no correlation whatsoever to where freight comes out. Instead, the nine Kentucky boards are distributed nearly evenly across the state. This is not a board redesign with the primary goal of positioning the fleet for freight. It is, however, stellar example of gross incompetence.
Get rid of Auburn and call it Bowling Green. Get rid of Sandy Hook and call it Morehead, 'cause that's where the freight is! Get rid of Gradyville and Hindman and combine them into a single London board. Get rid of Maceo and call it Owensboro. Get rid of Smithland and call it Paducah. The only one they got right was Louisville. No doubt, by accident.
Examples of the boards, and their boundaries, not making sense with regard to the freight is having Walton, KY, where there is a popular Flying J, being geographically on the Paris, KY board, when Walton is in the shadows of Florence, KY and Cincinnati. You're sitting in Walton, #1 on the Paris board, and a load is coming out of Richmond, 85 miles away. #8 on the Paris board is sitting at the Love's in Richmond. Guess who gets the load? Board position doesn't mean much when the boards are not properly defined geographically based on where the freight comes out.
Another example is the super board of Brownsville, Laredo and Corpus. Freight comes out of all three of those locations, but those towns are too far apart to logically combine them into a single board. The whole purpose of the boards, and their redesign, is to place trucks where the freight is. Combining these three boards into one goes against that goal. The three towns combined may be averaging 5 loads a day, yet 4 of those may be in Laredo, and with the boards combined, you nor the computer will know if it's better to go on over to Brownsville or Laredo when delivering to, say, Kingsville, or is it better to stay up there near Corpus because there are no other trucks up there? If you make a mistake, it's a 200 mile mistake that costs you 3 or 4 hours. No exactly what I would call the most efficient way of positioning the fleet.
We have a Tallassee/Montgomery board. Well, no we don't, either. We have a Montgomery board that someone couldn't bear to remove Tallassee from the name because that particular location is geographically between two boards. It's a town of 4000 people and has no business in the name that defines a board location.
Same with Mount Hope, AL, which is a thriving metropolis that consists of the intersection of Country Road 23 and County Road 32. It's 20 miles from Decatur, so call it the Decatur board and be done with it. Sheesh. That way, people won't drive over to Mount Hope to find the only spot to layover is a cool spot in the middle of a corn field, and then have to drive to Decatur to get a load or Huntsville. Don't get me started on Huntsville. It doesn't exist anymore, and looking at the boards there's no way to tell what board you are on if you are in Huntsville. I guess you can go there and do a Macro 32 to find out.
Instead of Jackson, TN, we have the Yuma, TN board. Yuma is nothing more than the Parker's Crossroads Truck stop. That's it. No freight there. The freight on that board will come out of Jackson, Milan, Ripley, Paris and Henry. And Yuma is about as far away from those places as you can get and still be on that board. Yeah, that's efficient use of time and fuel.
I could go on, but I'm too busy laughing at the Barnhart, TX board, and the Spout Spring, VA board, and every single board in West Virginia. Whoever did West Virginia should be right proud how they got all the boards so evenly distributed around the state. That is, if that was their goal.
They could have given the task of the board redesign to the Driver Council, and locked them in a room until it was finished. The Council would have emerged the same day with a redesign that not only works, but one that is infinitely more efficient than what we have now.