by Linda Sunkle-Pierucki

Created on: January 01, 2009

The key to increased road safety from a trucker's perspective is more training. By that, I don't specifically mean truck driver training, but training for ALL drivers. The cold, hard fact of life is that the vast majority of car/truck accidents are caused by the car driver.

Life has changed for the majority of the population in the last fifty years: kids no longer learn to drive on the farm, or on back country roads under the watchful eye of Dad or Uncle Harry. Instead, our young people are classroom and highway trained by a "professional" with few qualifications other than the fact he himself had a driver's license. Most states require drivers training for prospective licensees under age eighteen, but there is little to determine exactly what will be taught in those classes. My personal observation is someone has left out the chapter in the manual that deals with turn signals, among other things!

Lines on the pavement are there for specific reasons: a vehicle should never cross a solid line, white or yellow unless turning or exiting. Stop lines at intersections are set back from the corner for a very good reason: that extra space is needed for turning trucks and their wider turning ratio. Toronto has a good system for assuring vehicles don't tailgate: chevrons are painted on the lanes and signs warn drivers to stay two chevrons apart-traffic moves more smoothly and the incidence of rear-end accidents is reduced. Unfortunately, I am beginning to see more and more incidences of incorrect line painting that encourages people to change lanes where they shouldn't and doesn't indicate where they should move to another lane.

Yield signs on exit ramps have been removed and many merge signs are no longer there. The old system of the main road having the right-of-way has been abandoned in favor of chaos-theory: people yield to on-ramp traffic when they can and face accidents when they can't. Whose brilliant idea this is I'll never be able to figure out, but some states have tried to change traffic laws to say people entering from ramps have equal right of access to the main lanes. This is a lot like your unemployed son and his garage-band: sounds good, doesn't work!

Again, perhaps because we have moved from an agrarian society to an urban one, many drivers never contemplate the fact that larger vehicles don't maneuver or stop as quickly as a car. This leads to the commonly-held belief that a truck can stop faster because it has more wheels and thus, more brakes. Would you

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