The rules were relaxed if you were carrying food to fill shortages they are not relaxed for routine scheduled runs. If a trucker is back to carrying on his regular scheduled deliveries he is not exempt from the hours requirement during that run. Nor were the rules implemented so you could get to a destination four hours earlier, they were implemented so that if it took more hours than they are allowed to drive to get to a destination they were able to do so. I don't know how many hours they are allowed to drive but lets say it's ten hours at a time, if it was going to take twelve hours to get there then the exemption is allowed. They can't just say to themselves this is a regular scheduled run but I am going to violate the hours rule in hopes I can get back home early. There's still a safety net built into the rules requiring a ten hour lapse before they can go out again once they return to home base. Most of the emergency food runs has subsided now that the panic buying has settled down, I think he needs to re-evaluate that a scheduled run does not equate to an emergency run under the declaration.

https://www.truckingtruth.com/news/Article-196/hos-exemption-coronavirus

Maybe the low amount of truckers who do carry guns are the ones doing runs into area's where there is no gated area's for them to stop and rest at. Most of your large cities has security area's with high fences that truckers pull into to rest so their loads can't get hijacked. I was surprised to learn that several years back that driving trunk into some area's of the country could be dangerous enough that truckers needed protected designated safe zones to pull over in. I guess it's the far contrasting realities of life at times. Like many years ago when I went over on the other side of state where my kids dad was from. It was like entering a different world with stores that had bars all over their windows and doors and people enclosed behind glass inside. We, at that time, never had that going on in our side of the state. Even now years later it depends upon which side of town as to if any have bars up, plus the aesthetics of un-penetrable glass doors and windows have improved over the years so many have gone to that instead of using bars. Most of the locations who use inside barriers here are the twenty four hour operations.

As far as his other question is it that people don't care or they just aren't being paid enough to care? If what a person is making working forty hours a week still leaves them dependent on getting assistance from the government then why would they feel compelled to put their lives on the line during a crisis? I would assume there is a limit to the extent of going the extra mile required to survive but when that extra mile may equate's to having a hazard attached that's where people draw the line.

This brings me back a conversation I had with someone once when I was telling them that someone who we had both known at one time over the years as rather stable had seemed to have lost it. I told them I had run across her recently and she was living in the back of a run down house infiltrated with hundreds of cockroaches and barely any food in the house. He said people who are hungry don't think right because they are to consumed with being hungry all the time. During the times of crisis the last thing we would really need in this country is a whole lot of people not thinking right because they are overwhelmed by being hungry and whatever actions they deemed necessary to quell that hunger would not only endanger their lives but other lives in the process of whatever actions they would contemplate taking. People aren't going to be worried about a virus if they feel they are being left in isolation struggling to survive. Just like our friend, once we went out and got her some groceries are a couple of times she got back that piece of her that died inside of her somewhere along the line. Sometimes that's all it takes whether individually or society as a whole, when people aren't consumed by hunger they can think beyond being hungry.