Northeast Freight Time one clock, four readings

Measuring Without Cooperation

Sometimes the facility has no gate system, or has one and will not share it, or has no interest in the question. You still need a record, and you can build a usable one entirely from your own side. For a software-oriented reference on recording work time, this analysis.

It will not be as strong as a shared record. It is considerably stronger than an assertion, and it is what most carriers actually have. For broader transportation and measurement context, see U.S. Energy Information Administration.

What you can record unilaterally

Geofence entry and exit. From a telematics system or a phone. Set the radius deliberately — tight enough to mean the property, wide enough to catch a street queue if that is what you intend to claim. Document the radius, because the other side will ask.

ELD location and duty status. The vehicle's position and stationary duration are engine-derived and hard to dispute. The duty status is a declaration, so use the location, not the status, as your evidence.

Photographs with metadata. A picture of the gate sign, the queue, the dock number, the clock in the guard house. Timestamped and geotagged by the phone. Cheap, and surprisingly persuasive because it is checkable.

Timestamped messages. A message to dispatch at arrival and at departure, sent through a system that records send time. And a message to the facility at free-time expiry, which is the single most valuable record you can create.

And a signed sheet, where anyone will sign. A gate guard initialling a time is a facility record, however informal.

What makes a unilateral record credible

Consistency. A carrier who records every visit at a facility, including the fast ones, has a dataset. One who records only the bad ones has a complaint. The fast visits are what make the slow ones believable.

Independence. Two of your own systems agreeing — geofence plus ELD location — is meaningfully better than one, because it removes the "your driver said so" objection even though both are yours.

Contemporaneity. Recorded at the time, not reconstructed at invoicing. This is what a dispute turns on more than anything else.

And a stated method. Geofence radius 300m, arrival recorded at first entry, departure at final exit. A method the other side can evaluate is far harder to dismiss than a number.

What it is worth

Enough to support a charge that would otherwise be refused outright. Half of detention invoices fail on documentation, and most of that half have nothing at all.

Enough to establish a pattern. Three months of consistent records at one facility is a stronger commercial argument than any single claim, and it is the basis for repricing the lane honestly rather than quietly.

Not enough to win a contested claim on the merits against a facility with a gate system, if the contract does not say which record governs. That is a contract problem, not an evidence problem, and it is fixed before the load rather than after.

Building the pattern

Record every visit, not the bad ones. See above.

Log the four segments where you can see them: street queue, gate, check-in, door. Even partially observed, they show where the time goes.

Note the mode. Live load and drop-and-hook are different operations and mixing them makes your own data uninterpretable.

And keep it in one place with one format. A spreadsheet with six columns beats a system nobody fills in.

Presenting it to the facility

Not as an accusation. As information they do not have.

Over sixty visits since March, our median time from your gate to gate-out is two hours forty, with the slowest ten per cent over five hours, concentrated on Monday mornings. Here is the method. Does that match what you see?

Two things happen. It is checkable, which makes it hard to dismiss. And most facilities genuinely do not have this number, because their system starts at check-in — so you are offering something rather than only complaining.

Occasionally they will produce data contradicting yours, which is the good outcome: now there are two records and a conversation about definitions rather than about blame.

The short version