The environment and longer, heavier trucks

I don’t know where the proponents of longer-heavier trucks get their environmental statistics from, but perhaps the greater mystery is why some agencies and lawmakers take the bait.

Large carriers and a certain prevue of lawmakers and agencies continue to say that putting longer, heavier trucks on the highways will conserve fuel and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A single tractor would replace two tractors hauling two trailers on major highways, but let’s remember that the single tractor is going to work harder and burn more fuel with a double than with a single. And we haven’t even gotten to the logistics yet.

Longer, heavier trucks would still be prohibited from traveling on secondary roads, and everybody knows they can’t make deliveries, so guess what? That second tractor would be put right back into commission to haul the extra trailer for delivery or pickup.

That first truck, the one configured to pull doubles, would not be spec’d to pull a single trailer, thereby poking another hole in the efficiency argument.

Creating new infrastructure and staging areas and terminals for hookups is not a silver bullet for the environment, and the replacement of prematurely worn-out roads and bridges can’t possibly be green.

Proposals that would allow longer-combination vehicles, or LCVs, are flawed because all they do is put road trains on already congested highways – long, slow road trains.

We should be finding ways to mitigate congestion, not forcing motorists to merge and navigate around double or even triple trailers. What about the fuel the four-wheelers burn as they slow down and speed up to get around the road trains? That isn’t exactly green either. And it’s another argument against the speed-limiter agenda. But we’ll leave that for another day.

Mega carriers want doubles and triples so they can haul more freight without paying drivers more. You know, more axles, fewer drivers. It lines their pockets while suppressing freight rates and driver pay.

The stuff about longer, heavier trucks saving fuel and greenhouse gas emissions is a smokescreen … a large, slow-moving smokescreen for the real agenda.

Recommendation to MRB: use your heads

The Medical Review Board is a tricky group to follow.

The MRB, a panel of appointees that make medical recommendations to FMCSA, didn’t meet for most of 2010.

They followed that up, however, with serious action late last year, and look to make 2012 their most aggressive year yet.

Appointed by the U.S. Transportation Secretary, board members make sweeping announcements, yet they still can’t regulate or mandate anything. Their recommendations are forwarded to FMCSA, which may adopt, ignore or amend anything forwarded their way by the MRB.

As Land Line pointed out in December, the Medical Review Board’s members appear to be in a hurry to implement serious changes that unnecessarily affect the livelihoods of tens of thousands of experienced truckers.

Now the MRB wants FMCSA to crack the whip even harder on truckers.

The changes they’re poised to consider for formal adoption include automatically disqualifying drivers who a) report excessive sleepiness “during the major wake period while driving” OR; b) experience a crash associated with falling asleep, OR; c) experience a single-vehicle crash.

“With a single vehicle crash, there should be a presumption the driver experienced fatigue at the wheel,” notes from an MRB subcommittee meeting state.

That’s right – hit a deer, bump into that illegally parked truck or dumpster in the dark corner of a truck stop or shipping yard and the MRB wants you outta trucking. That’s how aggressive and out of line the MRB has become.

These recommendations will be examined in upcoming MRB meetings, maybe even as early as February.

At the MRB’s joint meeting with MCSAC in December, several doctors guffawed over the lack of sleep doctors often operate under. They may have laughed about the high number of hours they work at a time, and how much doctors rely on coffee – but this isn’t something to joke about.

As Land Line has pointed out, medical errors by physicians and hospitals kill a minimum of 40,000 Americans annually – eclipsing fatalities involving commercial trucks.

Yet these doctors – even ones who serve on the MRB – don’t log any sleep schedule, or turn over their work schedule to police officers.

Though the MRB’s sleep apnea recommendation to FMCSA is just that – a recommendation – let’s hope the board’s doctors use their heads when making suggestions about just who should or shouldn’t be behind the wheel of commercial vehicles.

Because, let’s face it: recommending FMCSA treat truckers as sleep deprived maniacs is starting to look pretty hypocritical for Medical Review Board members.

A chicken in every pot and a longer, heavier truck on every interstate?

When it comes to Big Trucking’s claim that trucks with more axles will be the future of trucking AND save the nation, it’s not hard to kick all the glittering claims to the curb and ask some stumping questions.

One consideration that is being overlooked but can’t be ignored in the debate is how your everyday motorist – your wife, your mom, your next door neighbor – are going to safely interact with longer combination vehicles on the highways we all share.

We have asked truckers if they think the average four-wheeler knows the difference between an 80,000-pound truck and a 100,000-pound truck. In one unscientific but revealing web poll we did, a overwhelming 98 percent said NO. Then we followed up with another poll that asked if truckers thought four-wheelers are savvy enough to drive differently round LCVs. It, too, was a resounding NO.

Now that all may seem to be a “duh” to the inth degree, but those responses say a lot. They say that truckers are convinced that we’ve got a long way to go before the “civilian traffic” can handle going up and down the road, side by side, with longer, heavier trucks.

Let’s face it. You pro drivers out there might be able to pilot twin 53-footers as slick as Cousin Carl Edwards handles the #99 car – but it’s still not likely that the people in four-wheelers will know how to safely share the road with you.

Now that’s scary.

The wordsmith’s lament

It’s funny how hard we try to constantly reinvent our language, always searching to replace the words we use. Some are totally serviceable words and we should keep them. Others make my head explode and should be on one of those “Words That Need to Be Banned” lists.

In covering the trucking industry, it’s easy to get sucked into using certain words. When so many topics stubbornly stick on trucking’s radar screen, but your job is to write fresh new copy everyday about it, you spend a lot of time with your fingers hovering over the keyboard, trying to avoid using worn-out phrases.

As we move into 2012, I hope somebody comes up with some new ones.

I am a wee bit tired of regulatory overload, race to the bottom and second-class citizens. And thrown under the bus – as in what the EPA is doing to trucking – can be retired, too. And when we are talking about the FMCSA website, we need a replacement term for having to drill down to a certain part? Or go deep in the weeds? That was kind of fresh last year but outlived its cuteness, sort of like carmaggedon.

Then there’s the corporate mumbo jumbo. When you hear what a major OEM or some major trucking company is going to accomplish in 2012, why is it always that they are well-positioned? The company is always – if nothing else –forward-thinking. These corporate PR people make themselves sick coming up with a word that does not reveal how precarious the company is in these tough times. They’ve told the trucking press that so many times when it was clear there was trouble, those words designed to be positive now make me suspicious.

And speaking of positive – let’s lay off positivity for a while. And I think we are getting close to exhausting our use of the aha moment, too.

In the past couple of years, if something went wrong in a real big way, it was an epic fail. This was OK for a while but let’s retire that one, too. And by the way, it’s OK to use big. Why why why do we have to keep looking for words like ginormous and humongous? Maybe a pet peeve, but I’m tired of those two words.

In describing some fabulous truck design or chrome and light show accessory, we need to implement restrictions on wow factor. Maybe Land Line only uses it once a year.

Guys, I am calling for a ban on tighty whities. You women who work in the trucking industry, I have one for us, too. Let’s vow to quit saying we have to put our big girl panties on when it’s time to take on a challenging or unpleasant task.

It’s not just trucking words. I have said “I’m jes’ sayin’” for the very last time.

I’m also swearing off three A words in 2012. Yep, I am done with absolutely, awesome and amazing.

I like Anderson Cooper, but he has said amazing enough times in 2011 for all of us.

Same with “bad actor.”  That term was clever at first, describing people in trucking that are a black mark on the industry. The feds really glommed on to that phrase. I think it put a label on people that the government did not know how to describe in a PC way.

DC fatigue was a clever way of describing how tired we are of Washington’s crap. But that’s so 30 seconds ago. Oops. Strike that last line; surely I can do better …

Playing politics with highways

We’ve heard promises of a new surface transportation bill for years, but lawmakers have kicked the can down the road a number of times. And now, with this being an election year, we can expect a healthy dose of party politics in debates over roads, bridges and transportation jobs.

As in generations past, Republicans and Democrats still seem to agree that transportation is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy, but the two parties are worlds apart on issues of policy and funding.

The rift has widened in the past few years even with the two sides saying the same things sometimes about highway safety, jobs, public transportation and good roads. In recent months – and we’ll see this throughout 2012 – the election will elevate the rhetoric to the point that the torrent could seem impassable.

Many hot-button issues are spurring the debate. One that comes to mind is the Republican-controlled House of Representatives favoring new oil and gas drilling to help supplement the transportation bill. House Democrats are saying “no way” to the drilling proposal and are hoping to win favor by offering “made in America” provisions for transportation raw materials. In return, the Republicans say the current “buy American” rules are good enough.

Democrats and Republicans in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee applauded themselves for drafting a bipartisan transportation bill last fall, and to some degree deserve a pat on the back for that. But their jurisdiction and the provisions they drafted have led to somewhat status quo language without breaking much in the way of new territory. The EPW Committee seems content to let other committees draft the fire starters.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has tacked on a few fire-starter provisions in its offering to the bill. And once other committees add their two cents, lawmakers could very well be scrambling for their pokers so they can stoke the coals some more.

That’s the way the system works, and it seems to heat up even more during election season.

House and Senate leaders say they’re close to finishing their respective bills. But the closer they seem to get, the more election-year politicking we’re likely to see.

On the upside, transportation is on the tips of their tongues, and somewhere down the line the kicked can will come to rest. Eventually, whether before or after the election, lawmakers will find at least some common ground for transportation and we’ll have a new bill.

Something is rotten in Fort Dodge

Years ago, I worked the city council beat for a local newspaper. Some of those nights can be pretty boring. There are the reporters lounging around on the back row, pencils poised for a worthy development or sparkling quote.

Having been there, I always appreciate a lively city council story where “the people” speak up. Here’s such a report from the Fort Dodge Messenger News in Iowa. It was sent to us by OOIDA member Les Yaw of Mason City, IA.

Some people were at the council meeting to address erroneous speeding tickets generated by the mobile traffic camera system in Fort Dodge. Messenger reporter Bill Shea made a quick pounce on a story.

Those tickets, he writes, suggest that “there are some lead-footed drivers behind the wheels of school buses and other large vehicles traveling through the city.”

But something appears to be rotten in Fort Dodge and Shea quickly clarifies: “That’s simply not true, said a handful of drivers who took their case to the City Council Monday night.”

Shea reports these drivers – including a truck driver and a couple of bus drivers – claimed that they were not speeding when the traffic camera snapped photos of their vehicles. They also made the point that that “it would be impossible to get their large machines moving as quickly as the traffic camera evidence suggests.”

According to Shea’s story, the police chief said, after hearing the complaints, that the camera system was constantly checked and calibrated to the same standards used for all of the Iowa law enforcement cams.

Nevertheless, the trucker told the council he got three tickets after his truck was clocked going 50 to 55 mph in a 25 mph zone. He told them it was impossible for his big truck to hit 50 mph or more in the block and a half.

One driver for Dodger Area Rapid Transit was at the meeting, too. His bus was ticketed twice in one day. Another bus driver from the school district said he got three tickets in one day and was “going to lose his job.”

As far as paying the tickets, I’m not clear if the trucker and the bus drivers have paid the tickets, if they are pending or what. The trucker said he didn’t think he should be held accountable.

The chief and the council reacted sensibly. They’d heard of this happening in other towns although they couldn’t recall where. They decided if the traffic cam isn’t working, they will stop using it until the questions about the tickets involving large vehicles are totally checked out.   

It’s always good to hear a positive story where people take the time to go to a city council meeting and stand up for themselves in the face of some ridiculous charges. In a world of surveillance, constant tickets, citations, warnings and fines, it’s heartening.

Get involved: Your state lawmakers are back at work

Only days into the New Year and state lawmakers around the country already are converging at statehouses to address issues of significance to their state. By the end of this week nearly 20 states will be back at work.

                                                 

This is a great time to open up the line of communication with your elected officials. In the months ahead, much discussion is expected to take place about changes affecting transportation, and the trucking industry, in statehouses around the country.

States are not easing back into the swing of things either. Lawmakers from coast to coast are scheduled to be back at work by the middle of this week. In all, more than two-thirds of the nation’s state legislatures will have convened their 2012 sessions by mid January.

This is a huge election year. In addition to the presidential election, more than 80 percent of elected officials at the state and federal levels of government will be on ballots this November. It is likely to create some increased urgency among lawmakers to reach out to their constituents as they work to secure votes for the fall.

This year’s legislative labors are certain to be especially critical to the way you conduct your trucking business – an opportunity to use to your advantage. Issues likely to receive attention in state legislatures across the country include fuel taxes and fees, highway tolls, and privatization, to name a few.

It would be nice if we could rely on lawmakers to look out for our best interests, but for the most part they have no idea what those issues are. As a result, it’s your responsibility to clue them in.

There are several ways to educate your lawmakers: Make a phone call to their offices, send them email, write a letter or meet with them in person. Also be sure to connect with them on social media sites.

Each method of communicating with your elected officials is important. The preferred method of communication depends on the office. Be sure to call their office and ask for the best way to correspond with the lawmaker. This also serves as a good way for you to introduce yourself to the lawmaker and their staff.

You can monitor the Web sites at ooida.com, landlinemag.com and landlinenow.com or tune in to “Land Line Now” on Sirius-XM for daily updates on legislative action in your state. For in-depth coverage and a state-by-state accounting of action that relates to your business, read “OOIDA’s State Watch” in every issue of Land Line Magazine. And the most complete roundup of state legislative efforts can be found here.

Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Contact your elected officials and express your concerns.

Editor’s Note: If you become aware of a new law proposed in your home state that would affect trucking, call Land Line at 800-444-5791 and ask State Legislative Editor Keith Goble to place it on the Association’s watch list. You can also e-mail the information to mailto:state_legislative_editor@ooida.com.

Land Line’s top 10 blogs of 2011

Many of you read our daily news, listen to our Sirius XM show and read our magazine. We also deliver several thought-provoking and popular commentaries each week in the way of blogs.

It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t even know what a blog was. This year, we posted 84. Our entire Land Line staff writes blogs, as does our staff from our OOIDA satellite radio show “Land Line Now.” Several OOIDA staffers contribute blogs regularly to the OOIDA website, as well.

Land Line Associate Editor Dave Tanner banged out the top blog of 2011 on the magazine website, catching readers’ attention with a “Farewell to Willie’s Place.” It is, of course, a comment on the end of that famous truck stop at Carl’s Corner, TX. There was the rumor that Willie Nelson won the truck stop in a poker contest. And that’s true. Willie actually told “Land Line Now” host Mark Reddig that was the truth – and I heard him say it.

Number two this year was a blog written in November by Senior Editor Jami Jones. A pig is a pig. You can dress it up and put some lipstick on it, but underneath it’s still a pig. That’s what you’ll hear Jami say every time someone says Mexican trucks are as good as U.S. trucks. That claim is just not true and in her blog – “Lipstick on the pig” – she put a sharp point on it, backed up by facts. Ouch!

Our most prolific blogger was Bob “Cowpoke” Martin, a Land Line columnist who died on Oct. 11 from liver cancer. His style was inimitable. The third most popular blog of 2011 was one by Bob called “End of the trail” and it’s Bob’s farewell to his readers. How many people get to do the “by the time you read this I’ll be gone” blog?

Here is the entire top 10 list, based on number of readers.

1. Farewell to Willie’s Place
2. Lipstick on the pig
3. End of the trail
4. Now we’re footing the bill too?
5. So I walk into the Midway Truck Stop …
6. On the Travel Channel: ‘Truck Stop, Missouri’
7. HOS? Where’s the respect?
8. TWIC: Where’s the pot of gold?
9. Five feet high and risin’ …
10. Entering the border zone

A call from the North Pole

Two, four and nine. Those are the ages of three kids in one of the trucking families who would have had little under the tree if not for a surprise gift of $700. The cash came from an unlikely benefactor.

Calling themselves the “Christmas group,” a small troop of volunteer truckers raise money for other truckers in need. The effort has now has grown into an extraordinary group called Trucker Charity Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization with its main office located in Summerfield, IL. While Trucker Charity works all year to help needy drivers, the Christmas effort is the traditional heart of their charitable work.

Tuesday night they set up a conference line and methodically went through the process of calling 10 families and surprising them with a generous, no-strings attached gift of cash. With every call, it was announced that they were “calling from the North Pole …”

Secretary of the Christmas group is OOIDA Member Eldon McFarling.

“Words cannot describe the feeling you get when you hear the joyful, emotional response from the family members,” Eldon said later. “It’s something you have to experience firsthand.”

Eldon and Trucker Charity president (and OOIDA Life Member) Lance Wood invited me to sit in on Tuesday night’s mission. I told them later I was glad I had a box of Kleenex handy. The spirit of Christmas was shining bright last night as they gave away $7,000 worth of MoneyGrams.

“I never knew there were so many people who cared,” said one tearful woman whose husband has ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. She accepted the gift on behalf of her husband, a former expediter whose disease has progressed to the point he can’t talk.

The couple had been nominated by OOIDA Members Bob and Linda Caffee, who are Fed Ex Custom Critical owner-operators and who just happened to be home in Silex, MO. Linda Caffee joined the conference call during the presentation as she navigated downtown St. Louis.

“It was one of those moments when the true meaning of Christmas really smacks you upside the head,” Linda said later.

OOIDA Member David Gilland of Nettleton, MS, was driving across the Pennsylvania Turnpike last night while tapped into the Christmas group’s conference call. He was asked if he wanted to make the call to the couple he and some trucker friends had nominated.

“Sure,” said David, aka Bullwinkle.

Trucker Charity’s Greg Manchester explained that this couple had really been struggling. He was an ex-Marine and didn’t like a handout. But the company he was leased to had cut his miles back, there were bills to pay, and the house needed repair. Christmas was virtually non-existent for them and their three kids. The couple was speechless. She was sobbing.  

“They don’t think drivers do anything for each other anymore,” said David, who was tooling down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, connected via his Bluetooth device. “This is proof that that is just not true.”

Like David, most of the truckers who were on the conference call were doing business. Occasionally one would say something like “Hold on, I got to catch a ride to the yard.” Or “Thanks to that call, I just walked through a warehouse with tears running down my cheek.”

The group called one driver and his wife and happened to catch up with them at a West Memphis truck stop.

The family was really having a tough time of it, said Greg, and the family included a 15-year-old boy who was being home schooled in the truck.

The wife said tearfully that they really hadn’t had anything good happen in the past couple years. We talked to the couple’s son, too. He was 15 and a well-spoken kid. He told us he’d rather be on the truck with his parents than home. The boy thanked the group, saying that Christmas had not been good for the past few years. His dad chimed in, saying he’d been out on the road 40 years and never had to ask for a handout. He promised when he got back on his feet, would “pay it forward.”

I heard that “pay it forward” phrase a lot Tuesday night.

OOIDA members Debbie and Jeff Zehrer, Sauk Centre, MN, are owners of Cubby Buddy toolboxes for semi truckers. They are drivers and also sponsors of the Christmas Group. Debbie was there to get the information from each family to get the money to them in the most convenient way. You could tell she was no newbie to the process.

“Where are you gonna be tomorrow? Tennessee? Will there be a Wal-Mart close by? We’ll send you $700 in a MoneyGram or put it on your Green Dot, whatever is best for you.”

One of the last trucking families that the group contacted was a couple who happened to be talking to each other on the phone when we called. She was at home; he was on the road. They were hitting bottom, overrun with truck repairs. Within seconds, we had them both on the conference call.

“If you only knew,” he said, clearly astounded and hugely relieved by the $700 gift. “Getting this at the last minute? If you ONLY knew. I was just saying to my wife, what the heck are we gonna do?”

He was going to stay out and work Christmas, but after getting the call, he said he’d be thinking about that.

“We are all truckers, too,” the selected families were all assured. “We understand what you are going through.”

The Christmas Group trucker volunteers have been doing this for four years. In those four years, Trucker Charity Christmas Group helped 59 families and dispersed over $37,000. This year, they raised $7,000 in three weeks.

They raised the funds by selling items on the Trucker Charity Christmas Group Fundraising website and via donations.  On Dec 19, a panel of volunteers, including OOIDA Member Kerry Mullins of West Lafayette IN, and OOIDA Life Member Ralph Acocella of Hickory, NC, waded into about two dozen applications and made their way through a selection process, which is done by a secret vote and based on a point system for an unbiased treatment of the families. Out of two dozen nominations, 16 were determined viable and then came the hard part – choosing the final 10.

“It was tough choosing 10, so many truckers need help right now,” said Lance.

“We are a group who cares,” was the simple explanation.

“We are all truckers and we are from – well, all over the place,” said one participant.

On Tuesday night, though, they were all from the North Pole.

Related article: Trucking charity dedicated to helping fellow drivers during holidays

Shorts, flip-flops and reindeer games

You think Wal-Mart jumps on Christmas early? Let me tell you, sugar plum, they don’t hold a motorized multi-hued LED candle to Land Line.

The editors and designers start sweating deadlines long before the temps at Grain Valley fall below 90. Sunset’s still about 8:45 CDT when “Land Line Now” news anchor Mark Reddig starts testing his permanent outdoor Christmas light display. And we contributors have to pretend it’s chestnuts, not hot dogs, roasting on an open fire.

I was still in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops when they reminded me my “cracked carols” column was coming up like January bills.

Writing parodies isn’t easy, or everyone would be Bob Rivers, a Seattle radio jock who is the fallen angel atop the Christmas song parody tree.

His classics include “Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire,” “Wreck the Malls,” and the irresistible “Walking Round in Women’s Underwear.” I am not worthy.

It’s even harder to write parodies when it’s not the season, but my friend and ace gearjammer Rufus Sideswipe helped by humming his favorite Christmas song – “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” – to get me in the right frame of mind. (That’s a tough tune to write new lyrics to, by the way.)

About half the time, a tune will prompt me to replace a few words with something trucking related, and that cranks the creative engine. Other times, I’ll think about something in trucking and hum until a tune sounds like it will fit.

And it has to fit. Because Senior Editor Jami Jones thinks tune is something you do to an engine, Associate Editor David Tanner checks the songs to make sure my lyrics more or less follow the same pattern as the original. I’m glad he does that, since neither Rufus nor I could carry a tune in a tanker. But I’ve had to do some deadline rewrites, counting syllables on my fingers while trying to sing new lyrics.

But these hashed-up hosannas must be popular, since I’m still invited to do them after six – or is it eight – years? And they kinda make me miss being closer to the gang in Grain Valley and to the other Land Line stalwarts like Perfessor Paul Abelson, Suzanne Stempinski and Jeff Barker and his Bionic Burrito. It’d be a great Christmas if we could all spend it together.

So, here’s hoping you enjoy the latest installment. Maybe Bobby Boofay will video one of them for YouTube.