Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913

Drivers Formerly Known as the Knights of the Road

As in most of the stuff you hear on Thanks for Listening, today’s story will deal with something foreign to most of us in this sparsely populated part of the Big Sky Country. Oh sure, we’ve seen it when we make trips to Billings or Great Falls where there are more cars and trucks on the streets in three city blocks than there are in the whole town of Glasgow!

I’m sure most of you listeners have had the experience of having a semi-truck crawl up your tailpipe and ride your bumper. I know I have and it makes me madder than a wet rooster. It’s not only rude but it shows the insanity and inexperience of the trucker doing the deed.

But, in defense of the truckers, they have a tough job to do and it’s costing them money to have to sit behind a passenger car going ten mph under the truck speed limit. See, most truck drivers earn money, not by the hour worked but by the miles driven.

It’s not the best job in the world for a married man or woman. If you want to make decent money you are on the road at least 270 days of the year. You eat all your meals in truckstops where you also shower, do laundry and shop for T-shirts and road junk food.

The truckers “bible” is a book 5 1/2” x 4” and an inch and a half thick filled with thousands of trucker rules and regulations. A driver is expected to know 99 percent of them by heart!

Most long-haul drivers don’t get per diem. They spend their own money for food, laundry, showers and log books.

But I don’t want to bore you. I’ll just say the life of an over-the-road trucker isn’t all wine and roses.

Anyway, I hear ya’ asking, “If it’s so tough why didn’t you just quit?”

Well, I did. Sixteen years ago. Right after I got a ticket in Ohio for an “unsecured load.” The load was a Tonka toy bulldozer strapped down to the bed of my flatbed trailer. See, I had this toy secured with two heavy duty bungee cords hooked to the rub rails of my trailer. This idiot Public Commission Officer said he wouldn’t have written the ticket if I had had the toy strapped down with four bungees instead of just two! This toy didn’t weigh a pound and I had been transporting it for eight years and nearly a million and a half miles without incident.

It was merely a $360 revenue hunt by the Ohio PUC and that kind of ticket in Ohio cannot be argued or protested in court. Crooked buggers!

What I’m saying is, trucking is, for the over-the-road trucker a poor paying job with someone telling you how to do your job, when to eat, when to sleep, when to take a 15 minute break, when you have to take a day off, how far you can drive today and how many hours you can drive in the next eight days.

But I can see your point (and mine) about what is perceived as unsafe driving by truckers when they tailgate you or pass you on a double yellow.

This stupid fad of sitting waaaay down and waaaay back in their seat so no one can see them or maybe just see a ball cap on sideways and couple eyeballs peering out around the steering wheel is the number one dumbest thing to hit the highways and byways in many moons. It not only looks really ignorant but it causes the motoring public to muse “when did they start allowing 12 year olds to drive semis?”

Semi trucks are NOT designed to be driven sitting on the floor. They have air-ride seats for comfort. Seats that are designed to set the driver up straight like in a straight-back chair where he or she can see the road and be alert to anything amiss. Getting all slumped down and way back is conducive to taking a nap and I would strongly suggest against dozing off while driving an 80,000 pound tractor/trailer rig.

In defense of the truckers however, I must add that in the 45,000 + traffic deaths recorded each year just 9 percent involve trucks and of that 9 percent only 4 percent were caused by truck driver fatigue. And lookie here folks, in 75 percent of all traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles with big rigs the passenger car or pickup was at fault … not the trucker.

The reason truck wrecks get the press and TV coverage is that most of them are of a spectacular nature with crumpled-up tin and fiberglass in abundance, freight scattered all over the place and the occasional body covered up with a white sheet for emphasis.

In 1896 there were four automobiles registered in the whole United States. Two of them collided with each other in St Louis, Mo!

Back in the day truckers were called “Knights of The Road.” If you broke down they would always stop to see if they could help. Travelers looked for truck stops where the parking lot was filled with trucks indicating good meals or just a piece of coffee and a cup of pie.

Without truckers this country dies in three days. No gas at the stations, no food in the stores, no Burger King, no Walmart. Literally … no nothing! More on that in a later column.

Let’s all drive defensively and share the road courteously. The life you save by doing so could be your own.

That’s it for now folks. Thanks for listening.

 

Reader Comments(0)