I love to use this next quote for truck driving safety material. It has to be one of the most valuable tips I ever learned.
“You can take a road too slow every time, but you can only take it too fast once.”
Think about this for a minute. A typical passenger car driver usually travels about 20,000 kms/year (12,500 miles). A truck driver can travel 16,000 to 25,000 kms/month (10,000 to 15,000 miles). The distance from the earth to the moon is 384,403 kms (238,857 miles).
I’ve driven on icy or snowy roads the equivalent of the distance to the moon and back again and then some. Even with this experience, I’d still be considered a rookie to some of the drivers I’ve met in my career.
Winter in northern Canada can start in October and run through until as late as May, with November to mid April being the most challenging conditions. I’ve actually seen snow in every month of the year here. Snow in July or August may be rare, but can and does happen.
After a number of years of driving in eastern Canada, the Canadian Rockies, the Alaskan Highway and about 10 years off road on northern oilfield and ice roads, I’ve seen a lot. I was fortunate to have no accidents, because I didn’t drive like a professional my whole career.
Snow didn’t bother me and I was quite comfortable driving high speeds on through bad weather. You build an immunity to it, but my comfort level was far too high for the conditions, and the other traffic. Now I look back and realize how dangerous It was seeing others driving the way I once did.
Trucking driving safety. Safe and professional driving is not just a skill. It’s an attitude.
Do what you think is moral and right when it comes to truck driving safety, and not what others do.
My Ice Road trucking experiences on the rough roads of the Northwest Territories are a great example of the problems I see with unsafe driving.
The speed limit on the Ingraham Trail was 70 km/hr with many of the bends marked at 50 or 60. There was also an S-curve section marked at 40 called the “Snake Pit” and other sections with loose gravel and rocks. I saw no value in traveling any faster than 60. There were only a few straighter smooth sections that you could roll along at 70 or higher.
The problem I had throughout the season was keeping up with an overly aggressive convoy leader. It was easy to fall behind by as much as five or ten kilometers when you had a reckless leader pushing the convoy. I just let them go and catch up to them at the Meadows which was the first security checkpoint. What really concerned me was how new drivers would respond to this kind of pressure?
There were too many drivers acting like they had something to prove instead of respecting the road, their equipment and the other users. From talking to other drivers, I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. The majority of these complaints came from owner operators that respect their equipment mostly because they pay for the repairs.
Your truck is your income. If the truck is down for repairs, you don’t make any money. Pushing your equipment to the limit will eventually catch up to you; costing you time, money or worse.
So, having the knowledge from driving experience helps these drivers to stay safely on the road and protect their equipment from possible damage. They’re driving safely and efficiently, or using luck (Labouring Under Correct Knowledge) to make the right decisions at the right time. I told you in the last section when I mentioned luck that something was still missing. This led me to research life teachings and philosophy, which in turn led me to Aristotle and Practical Wisdom.
Continue reading Truck Driving Safety
Making Decisions
A professional truck driver always does something for the “Right” reasons. This is because one of the attributes of practical wisdom is having “Moral Intelligence”.
“Moral intelligence is the capacity to understand right from wrong; It means to have strong ethical convictions and to act on them so that one behaves in the right and honourable way.”
Dr. Michelle Borba
This is where much of the trucking industry drops the ball with truck driving safety. We fail to teach people all the reasons why we should be making the decisions we make behind the wheel.
So from my experience, Aristotle’s philosophy, and the observations of others, I put together four basic fundamentals to help ensure my conduct was that of a professional truck driver. I call it “SEEM”. (Safe. Efficient. Ethical and Moral.) A whole philosophy captured in four simple words.
Truck driving safety means protecting other users on the road. Slowing down on a gravel road to protect them from being showered with rocks is the right thing to do.
The case of Ingraham Trail is a good example of why you make the right decisions.
I mentioned driving slower to protect your equipment and stay safely on the road was safe and efficient. Alone, these two reasons may be selfish and self-serving which isn’t necessarily a negative thing. However, when your view is constrained to self, it can be limiting in your attention to the needs and interests of others.
Adding ethical and moral to your conduct is what makes you a professional. The ethical and moral reason for prudent driving was to respect other drivers and the local residents. This meant slowing down to avoid showering someone’s windshield with gravel and turning off a loud engine brake passing residences.
Now you’re doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons. This is what Practical Wisdom is all about.
I started this chapter with a quote I’ve heard and seen a number of times in my life. I like it, but it’s also easily misunderstood and can sound like a Catch 22.
“Good judgement comes from experience, but experience comes from poor judgement.”
It doesn’t necessarily have to be your “poor judgement” where you gain the experience. Just make sure you aren’t the one suffering from someone else’s poor judgement in the process.
Remember that experience comes from what you’ve observed, encountered or undergone. It’s not just about learning from your own mistakes as this quote suggests. Defensive driving courses do this. You learn from the experience of others, but defensive driving courses still don’t make you a professional truck driver.
So as far as trucking goes, professional drivers always do the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons. I’ll get into more of this later with the basic philosophy of practical wisdom, but for now, back to the Ingraham Trail.
The Ingraham Trail was pretty rough in places with what I called “suspension breakers”. Reckless driving could easily lead to busted air bags, broken springs, tire blowouts, or even ditched trucks. These bad experiences from poor judgement happened to both rookies, and aggressive experienced drivers.
Truck driving safety is all about making professional driving a virtue.
Unfortunately, an off-road rookie’s problems can easily come from trying to keep up to an aggressive leader on the ice roads. It’s easy to say they should know better, but that kind of undue pressure is difficult for a rookie to handle. There’s a lot of pressure put on ice road rookies trying to gain experience and prove their worth. The kind of experience you get from poor judgement (whether your own, or someone else’s) can easily end your career.