Diary of a Truck Driver

I was just listening to ABC 702′s Breakfast show with Wendy Harmer and Angela Catterns a show that is usually good value and a bit of a laugh, almost a ‘Blondes Eye View’ of current happenings (no offence girls). But today I got wound up…

One of the topics was the horrific accident at Urunga in which an 11 year old boy, sleeping in his holiday home was killed by a B-Double when it left the road after an accident. The driver of a ute was also killed after being involved in the initial accident and the occupants of the truck were both seriously injured.

The main sentiment in the reporting of this incident is that it’s a TRUCK accident and to some degree it is, had the truck been a smaller vehicle it would have had less momentum but as yet no announcement has been made as to who or what was the cause of the initial accident. Two main points appear to be at the forefront of the people minds and that’s that the trucks are to big and the roads are crap!

I’ll agree with the second part, the roads are crap for what they do and while the Pacific Highway has improved greatly over the last decade, it lags behind the Hume Highway in a big way. Bottle necks through small towns, such as Urunga, a bridge you can hardly get two trucks across at Macksville, constant flood issues and all it’s other vagaries have left it a “squirrel track”, white knuckling all the way as you think about your nuts!

If you’re hauling a load to Brisbane out of Sydney, there is little option, Pacific or New England Highways are the only choice and sadly the New England is even worse than the Pacific.

What works me up the most though, once we move on from the tragedy of these accidents, is the ignorance of people and no, I’m not talking exclusively about drivers for once… “Why don’t they move the freight by rail?” was the call of Wendy Harmer and many of the callers. I’ll tell you why… because of the consumers!

You want it yesterday right? There was a time when a trip to town for supplies was a once a month or once a week affair, depending on how far town was and refrigeration was a luxury with deep freezers unheard of, yet we’ve become lazy and impatient with little ability to plan and an insatiable desire to consume.

Our evolution to “Human Locusts” has driven freight away from rail. We need a supermarket just around every corner so it’s never more than a few minutes away, not located at the rail head like it use to be and if you buy it on eBay it better get around the world quicker than Phileas Fogg or you’ll be dialling 1800 WERE THE HELL”S MY STUFF! So don’t blame the trucks for being there, blame yourself… Spend your time boiling down left-over soap, buy loose tea instead of bags so you can buy a tea-chest full and start growing your own vegies and eat what’s in season, no more winter Mangoes or fresh OJ; getting my point yet?

Rail can’t supply our demands and even if it could, how many utes does it take to deliver 34 tonnes of freight to it’s final destination? The suburban roads would be plagued by courier vans and small deliver vehicles with erratic routes, demanding schedules and no fatigue management. Making the trucks smaller won’t help either, for every two B-Doubles you take off the road, you’ll need three semi-trailers… More vehicles means more exposure to potential risk events. Of course the registration costs for lead trailers is in dire need of overhaul as the sky high costs are forcing many to park the double in favour of more profitable single trailers. B-doubles are also required to have higher specifications for safety  than a prime mover pulling a single trailer… Front under-run protection, spray suppression and ABS on the truck are all requirements for a B-Double permit along with more highly assessed drivers and this has driven the fleet toward modernisation leaving less safe vehicles to tow single trailers, often around our more urbanised regions. New trucks are also cleaner trucks.

While the Government response at all levels is to promise improvements and to roll out more and more ‘safety measures’ that target the road freight operators the bottom line is that if all drivers were better trained there would be few accidents, seldom if ever do two parked vehicles cause an accident, it takes driver to stuff things up.

More common sense should be used in developing road rules to address speed disparity, a major contributor to aggressive and impatient driving. Get drivers to keep left, turn off their fog lights and use basic equipment like mirrors and indicators instead of iPhones. Standardised rules would probably help too, if you did nothing else to the road rules other than unify them at least all the crappy drivers would driver in a similar crappy way.

Education is what’s required and possibly the cheapest solution as users can pay for it themselves and how about some media coverage on how to share the roads with heavy vehicles. I see heaps of ads about how to be safe near trains and at level crossings but nothing about how to play nice with trucks. Let’s address the problems for what they are and stop throwing stones without better consideration of the real problems.

Keeps it Safe!

Mat

 

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 7:14 am and is filed under Truck driving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.