The Arizona Transportation Education Foundation recently announced receipt of a $24,150 grant from the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety for the current fiscal year. That grant allows ATEF to continue its ongoing efforts to educate the public about safe on-highway behaviors around trucks. If we’re to judge by the I-24 stunt I wrote about earlier this week, not to mention the myriad of conversations with drivers I’ve had over the last year dedicated to the subject of professionalism, safety, and the need for such education, ATEF’s and other similar efforts are well-appreciated.
Darryl Schwarz, owner-operator out of Pennsylvania hauling cross-country produce and more, called recently about this very subject, partly in response to Overdrive Extra-contributing owner-op Clifford Petersen’s exhortation to his fellow driver to bring a level of personal professionalism to the work and interactions with one another on the long road — one of the biggest benefits, as Petersen saw it: “If truckers do not appreciate other truckers, how on earth can we expect Joe Public to appreciate what we do to make their lives easier or to ever learn by our example to operate safely themselves?”
That sounds nice, and at bottom makes perfect sense, Schwarz noted, but “there’s quite a bit more to it than that.” He believed professionalism had reached record-level lows among truckers — “it’s practically nonexistent,” he added, and with such a decline has followed motorists’ on-highway practices as well.
“I don’t see anything being done with the average citizen’s traffic,” whether highway patrol enforcement, media reporting or efforts to educate like what’s happening in Arizona, Schwarz said. “It’s like bedlam out here.”
The Arizona effort, replicated in some other states, presents an opportunity for some correction, however small. Better, Schwarz said, might be not only the example of professional drivers who really live the professional label but perhaps coordinated efforts/better relationships with states’ highway patrolmen to do what Schwarz has only seen happen once in his decades trucking: “bother people in cars for doing unsafe things around trucks.”
The exception wasn’t in Arizona but on one of Oklahoma’s toll roads.
Schwarz was approaching a toll plaza when a motorist coming around his left and attempting to get to the far right lane to pay his toll did what Schwarz describes as others doing “all day every day. … The guy cut me off” within three feet of his front bumper at relatively high speed thought beginning to decelerate. In this case “a cop was sitting right there” and saw the whole thing, pulling over the offending driver.
