Overdrive

December 2017

Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info

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Voices 8 | Overdrive | December 2017 The hundreds of thousands of anti-ELD mandate tweets and re-tweets to the Commander in Chief of Twitter have gone unan- swered. Someone got in trouble for threatening bodily harm, but no one has gotten any correspon- dence from the actual @ POTUS account. I got an Arkansas rep to talk about his hair, but even after hundreds of tweets, messages, emails, phone calls, smoke signals, pleas, vaguely disturbing thoughts and a probable place on the "no-fly" list, I still can't get a guy we voted for twice here in Ohio to respond to me about the ELD mandate. The Trump administra- tion, meanwhile, desper- ately needs a check-mark in the "win" column, but it seems to have chosen to ig- nore one ripe for the pick- ing, along with the block of voters it represents. It's like we don't exist. You know, kind of like every single day. I try not to be bitter, but it's difficult when I read the comments on mainstream news articles about the in- dustry – by people who have absolutely no idea whatso- ever about the supply chain methods used to provide them the iPhone they use to make their stupid comments like this: "So what if there aren't enough drivers? Put the stuff on trains." Holy crap, Einstein! Why didn't we think of that? We shall call you Brainy McBrain, and you can tell all the homeowners who don't want truck stops anywhere near their entire cities that there will be multiple railroad tracks running 24/7 through them. You better get on it, son. Take a shotgun with ya, yer gonna need it. It must be nice to be so simple. Honestly. I almost wish I didn't know there weren't weeks' worth of stock in the "back" of grocery stores. People still think there's "more in the store rooms" – they absolutely don't get the space allocations in these vast grocery/cloth- ing/jewelry/automotive/ craft/pet food/furniture/ you-name-it stores. They don't have room to keep much of anything "stocked in the back." What you see is a rotating mass of things brought by trucks, every day of the week, to relatively small storage spaces that serve as a brief staging area for fluidly moving stock. I'm preaching to the choir here, so I'll stop. I will mention that even choir members have friends and family who don't sing, so passing information on to them like this is really important. I know a lot of people I have told had no idea how any of this works. You start telling people about just-in-time freight and the three-day rule, and they start paying a little closer attention to those trucks. We desperately need education about things that affect our everyday lives. We need a "School- house Rock" version of the supply chain. We need to have driver's education specifically about sharing the roads with commer- cial vehicles, and we need people to understand that autonomous trucks are not going to magically solve all our freight problems. We've got to stop treating professional drivers like they don't exist. They do. And they move the bulk of the freight in this country. And someone should listen to them. Trucking's needs once again meet ignorance Wendy Parker chronicles her journey on the road with her owner-operator husband, George, in the George and Wendy Show blog on OverdriveOnline.com. Testing … 1, 2 … Is this thing on? E-LOG ANGST FROM AN UNLIKELY PLACE | " The HOS should be re-evaluated and the ELDs should be used as a bad boy item for carriers that have been found to need help with compliance issues! " — One Indiana trooper, via Facebook, on the ELD mandate, delivered after posting the meme shown here to Indiana truck enforcement's Facebook page, which he moderates: Facebook.com/ISPCVED. As with many truckers, state enforcement personnel likewise have expressed much frustration with the mandate.

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