Quote:
Originally Posted by Chingas
There are too many new drivers on the road that quite frankly have no business being behind the wheel of a big truck. I had an encounter with one such driver that had no idea how to connect, disconnect or operate the jack on his trailer yet he was free to cruise down the highway along side cars full of families in a big truck doing 110 km an hour.
Really Scary stuff.
There are also plenty of good/experienced drivers as well so I don't want to paint them all with the same brush but our licensing system is broken at best. It is too easy to get a class one in Canada and there are numerous examples of corrupt licensing companies as well. Just recently a company that's name has escaped me was hit with large fines for basically selling licenses to fast track drivers into the road.
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All classes of licenses are way too easy too attain, but I can't believe how many terrible truck drivers I've encountered since moving east of the city, near the CN rail yard. Some of them are complete strugglers or else complete dickheads. I'll be cruising down the highway at the speed limit (trust me, you are unwise to speed around here) and a truck with a sea can will pull out right in front of me regularly.
Stuff like that is frustrating and dangerous. Most of the time when I'm on my little highway, there are very few vehicles. If I'm literally the only car coming, why the F do you pull out in front of me, causing me to brake hard, and proceed to take 90 seconds to get up to speed?
I guess I know the answer to that. They don't make money if they're slow, so to hell with everyone else; gotta get paid. There is one intersection I go through daily, that I slow right down for, because there are trees blocking the view from where the trucks are coming from. I often see rolling stops from these guys coming from the direction of their yard at that intersection, where the highway has no stop, but they have a stop sign.
I feel bad for the safety-first drivers when I say this, but automated trucking or hyperlinks can't come soon enough. People need to make money to survive. I get that. And the trucking industry is tough. So once you remove the person that needs to hurry up for the sake of getting paid, you're left with autonomous vehicles that DGAF what time they arrive, they simply follow the rules, and get there when they get there.
But for every bad truck driver I've encountered, I have shared the road with 100 of them that were driving just fine. This isn't about all truckers, it's about the dangerous ones that are unqualified and/or reckless.