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2nd Rather report * USA - Panelists continue to examine driver training land other issues
Low pay, trucking as a business being at odds with safety and deficient entry-level training and what some carriers are doing about it were just a few of the topics covered
Dallas,TX,USA -The Trucker & Land Line Magazine, by David Tanner -11 Nov 2009: ... Earlier segment featured Desiree Wood, a driver for Covenant Transport of Chattanooga, Tenn., discussed in detail her education at The CDL School in Miami and her training at Covenant, and Thomas Hansen, a former trainer at CRST Van Expedited in Oklahoma City, who discussed his experience in driver training at his former company... Some in the industry thought the show, titled, “Queen of the Road” and which aired Oct. 20, painted trucking with too broad and too negative a brush and left out trucking’s positive safety stats... Meeting at Willie’s Place truck stop at Carl’s Corner, Texas, some 60 miles south of Dallas, Rather moderated a round table discussion with Derek Leathers, chief operating officer for Werner Enterprises; Tim Dean, a Werner driver and two-time Nebraska state truck driving champion; Miles Verhoef, an independent owner-operator from Wisconsin and life member of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA); Todd Spencer, OOIDA executive vice president; and former trucker Michael Belzer, who now is an economics professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and the author of “Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation”... Rather’s prior controversial segment on trucking, which dealt with unscrupulous driver training schools, was recapped and part of it re-shown before the panelists got down to fielding Rather’s questions... “My personal experience is we need more training for entry level drivers. It is almost nonexistent,” Verhoef told the panel. He also shared insight into the daily life, revenues and expenses of a true independent operating under his own authority... Spencer said OOIDA has advocated for federal driver-training standards, but even despite a lawsuit against regulatory agencies in the early 1990s, “there is no training whatsoever required”. “It’s sheer idiocy, lunacy to think that you could take somebody off the street, turn ’em loose in 40-ton vehicles, and they can navigate on our congested highways with every kind of very nonprofessional driver in every kind of traffic situation in every kind of weather and do it safely without a lot of training,” Spencer said. He was grateful for the opportunity to shed light on important issues, particularly that it’s rarely the truck driver’s fault in fatal crashes that involve trucks... If trucks are involved in 5,000 fatal crashes per year, 1,000 of the fatalities are truck drivers and 62 percent of those crashes that kill truck drivers involve a single vehicle – the truck... To move the discussion forward from this point is going to require participation from policymakers, regulators and lawmakers, Spencer added... “We need members of Congress and state legislatures involved in this,” he said... (Photo courtesy OOIDA: “My personal experience is that we need more training; we need more training for entry-level drivers,” said driver Miles Verhoef (green shirt), while OOIDA Vice President Todd Spencer (blue shirt) said lack of driver training like that reported earlier was “all too common across the industry. Rather is at far right) Labels: truckers' discussions
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