No quarter for truckers

April 7, 2016
A burden the industry bears­—but cannot control

You can analyze all the data a truck can send, train drivers and help hone their skills, and tweak operations and safety protocols in a multitude of ways, but there’s one huge variable out there you can’t account for: the often oblivious, often unsafe motoring public. 

Discussions of safety and preventable truck crashes tend to center on trucks and their operators—and more must be said about how passenger car traffic can make driving a truck unnecessarily difficult. I got a reminder of that recently when my wife returned from a trip to Costco aghast at what she’d just witnessed.

The store has a busy main entryway with multiple lanes coming and going. The exit lanes are staged with two stop signs creating crossways for incoming traffic to turn into side lots and access ways, including the Costco loading dock. As she was driving to the exit and one of those partitions, my wife spotted a big tractor-trailer turning in and she stopped right then so as not to move any farther forward, even though she was second in line approaching the stop.

Not one of the other cars exiting did. The lead cars overran the stop lines, cutting into the partition space the truck needed to turn and get to the loading dock. Some drivers sped by, cutting off the truck as it swung wide and attempted to make the sharp turn. A big SUV in front of my wife’s car was more than halfway over the stop line, seriously cutting into the truck’s already tight turn space.

“I was sure the truck was going to hit that SUV—looked like it had to,” my wife told me. She even backed up more leaving the SUV over a full car length to reverse and get out of the truck’s way, but the SUV didn’t budge. The truck driver inched meticulously, very slowly forward, and the tractor and trailer ultimately missed the SUV and other cars by the very narrowest of margins.
“I wanted to get out and give him a round of applause,” my wife said.

How can all the burden and responsibility for safety be on truck drivers when this is the sort of environment in which they must operate? That same topic came up in a panel discussion on safety at the Omnitracs user conference in February.

“It’s not just the trucking industry, but the burden always seems to be on us,” commented an attendee who identified himself as a 40-year trucking veteran. “The thing I struggle with is when you see car manufacturers promoting their cars doing donuts and all kinds of stupid stuff, and young kids get in those cars and think that’s the way you’re supposed to drive them.

“And we have to drive amongst them,” the gentleman continued. “When does the burden of responsibility fall on that industry, and not just on our shoulders?”

Steve Page, vice president of safety at Transport Distribution Co., noted the growing problem of distracted driving, pointing out that many cars today come with built-in WiFi or have things like touchscreens and DVD players. “It’s getting scarier out there instead of the other way around,” he said.

But while Page said there’s “no one fix” for the situation, he suggested that truck drivers, for their part at least, be courteous. “If you promote that in your company and really take that on, it can make a difference,” he emphasized. 

Maybe—just maybe—there’s hope that leading by example and common decency will inspire the masses of four-wheeled vehicle drivers to wake up and act in kind. 

About the Author

Aaron Marsh

Before computerization had fully taken hold and automotive work took someone who speaks engine, Aaron grew up in Upstate New York taking cars apart and fixing and rewiring them, keeping more than a few great jalopies (classics) on the road that probably didn't deserve to be. He spent a decade inside the Beltway covering Congress and the intricacies of the health care system before a stint in local New England news, picking up awards for both pen and camera.

He's written about you-name-it, from transportation and law and the courts to events of all kinds and telecommunications, and landed in trucking when he joined Fleet Owner in July 2015. Long an editorial leader, he's a keeper of knowledge at Fleet Owner ready to dive in on the technical and the topical inside and all around trucking—and still turns a wrench or two. Or three. 

And he's never without a camera, or so rumor has it.

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