Quote:
Originally Posted by 4X4
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.
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Ever profession has its bad eggs and it's pros. I will say this about trucking:
1) It doesn't require the slightest high school or post secondary education
2) Investment into the career is cheap (ie, less than 5 grand in most cases)
3) It's appealing to those want a "gravy" job. New drivers think it's not physically demanding relative to roofers or concrete finishers or military personnel.
The combination of these factors give you a worker who is often uneducated, relatively lazy, and looking for quick and easy cash. Now, I've met a lot of good truckers and it takes a special breed to face the chaos of Granny's on the road who cut you off on a regular basis, so I hate depicting all drivers in this manner.
But I've rarely met a driver who wasn't fully understanding of the Traffic Safety Act and Commercial Vehicle Regulations. The class 1 program briefly touches on it nowadays in the written exam, but for ol'time truckers that wasn't always the case. Even today's written exam is very watered down version of what is needed to know.