Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/805422
VOICES April 2017 | Overdrive | 11 I'm a million-miler, a CDL trainer and a state-certifi ed CDL evaluator. And I'm a realist. No one learns at the same rate. Some folks get pretty good fairly fast, and some will not be good enough after many years and miles. That's proven most every day with "seasoned drivers" who weren't up to the task of avoiding a crash. Thirty hours of behind-the-wheel training, even for the most intuitive student, is marginal if for no other rea- son than they can't possibly encounter enough varied situations to be adept at handling the next one. Under the best of circumstances, 30 hours will add up to only 500 or 600 miles. Thirty hours is less than a week. If you fi gure a couple of days in town, in traffi c (very low miles), you've got a clue, but that doesn't allow much time for on the road. And that means no time for dealing with the rest of the normal driving condi- tions met by all but the single-purpose LTL in-town driver or the strictly line-haul on-the-highway drivers. It took how many years to get to this point? And they still don't have the basic issue covered adequately. Entry-level drivers should be required a minimum of 40 hours and/or 1,000 miles. Yes, that's arbitrary, but at least it's more exposure and training. A skills-based performance test also should be required. And that should be with a qualifi ed, certifi ed trainer, not Uncle Bill, who passes along all of his bad habits. – Dan Tucker, program manager, Northern Industrial Training Bulldog Hiway Express driver Guy Pippin was northbound on Interstate 49 in Louisiana, approaching an ac- cident scene on the southbound side. Just as Pippin eased past a roll-back wrecker stopped in the left lane, a "brown Toyota pickup was barreling up through there and locked up the brakes and hit the trailer." The pickup is barely visible in the driver-side mirror in the still shot from Pippin's video of the incident. He says there "was no reason the guy couldn't have seen" the roll-back that was "blaring with his big light bars." Hauling an oversize piece for a windmill turbine, Pippin says he "had all my lights fl ashing, too." The pickup's driver "told the police offi cer he didn't see anything," period, "though his pickup was torn up." The force of the collision with the open-deck trailer wasn't suffi cient to trigger his truck's SmartDrive dual camera to record an event, but Pippin says he was lucky to have had the presence of mind to hit the manual record button right after the collision, capturing the crash video before it was erased. "I told the offi cer there was a vid- eo," Pippin says. "I don't know if he ever got to see it. It was a pretty clear case, but without that video, there could have been questions about fault." Pippin says the freight needed a "few thousand dollars' worth of repairs," but his "tough old trailer" was just fi ne. No one was hurt in the accident. Catch the video via Dashcam Cen- tral, where you also can upload your own clips, at OverdriveOnline.com/ dashcamcentral. Rear-ender by a distracted four-wheeler Alaska-based driver and trainer Dan Tucker wrote in response to recent coverage of the lack of a behind-the-wheel minimum number of hours in FMCSA's entry-level driver training rule. Search "the weak arguments for skimping on behind-the-wheel training" on OverdriveOnline.com for more. Training: 'Arbitrary' hours minimum better than none