OT Idiot lights-out drivers

There are three things you can see when you look ahead:

Incorrect, I activate ABS all the time. It means I'm fully utilising the ability of the car.

I don't have that fitted, but if I did, I'd be inclined not to bother braking for anything, and let the car do it for me.

I wonder, do those things activate if you change lanes on a motorway without indicating? Or is it clever enough to work out how quickly you're changing lanes? Surely sometimes you might change lane fairly slowly, in which case how would it know you hadn't done it in error?

I wish they did activate if you didn't indicate, that would stop all those morons who don't know what an indicator stalk is. Car will not allow lane change without indication!

I cut in if 15 cars in a row don't bother letting me out. I usually wait for the one with the brightest DRLs. If he ever gets out and moans at me, I'll say "but you flashed me.... no? Why did you leave your full beam on then?"

So the so called safety feature of logging times actually causes loss of life. For goodness sake.

Work of art as in easy to fiddle?

A decent newsreader like mine shows each poster in a different colour, aswell as indenting it, so it's clear which is hers.

A similar thing happened to me. A trucker was heading the wrong way for where I was going, but was dropping something off and returning in 20 minutes. He deliberately went past me on the way back to see if I was still there, and picked me up.

I wonder if there's any truth in the rules that most truckers are forbidden by their companies from picking up hitchhikers? I have had a few hand signals from them driving past which looked like "sorry I can't".

In the UK, most car drivers don't pick up hitchhikers, which I think is ridiculous. I always pick them up.

Typical cop.

Truckers also tend to be going further, so you make more distance before having to find another ride.

I don't know how truckers manager to drive safely.

And in that 14 hours if you were stuck in raffic the clock was still running. I know drivers who would get off at the first possible opportunity and book some "rest time" untill the traffic cleared - giving them a couple extra hours of good driving later in the day.

How fast does your car do 70 to 100? That's the usual passing maneuver around here. Granny is doing 70 on a 75 mph road. Pull out and you'll be there forever if you just accelerate to 75 so you nail it and keep it nailed. Usually you're doing 90+ by the time you get back in your lane. With someone coming at you at 80, you close fast.

Sunrise and sunset are particularly bad. I avoid driving into the sun wherever possible.

It's gotten better but middle of the night appointments to load or unload and other irregular times can really destroy your circadian rhythm. Tired? Keep driving. Sick? Keep driving. Bad weather? Keep driving. Given the millions of miles driven truckers have a good safety record overall.

Still it's not a job for everyone and the turnover rate is high. The grass is always greener someplace else. Part of that is the nature of the job. A driver isn't a key employee and is replaceable. Deliver the load and get the rig back to the terminal and that job is done. Many times I would quit in November, spend the winter in Arizona, and hire back on in the spring. Get the keys to a truck, throw you're stuff in it, and you're good to go. Quite a few retirees fall into that pattern too. Team drivers are a premium because they always have hours. Husband and wife teams are particularly good since the odds they can live together in a truck without killing each other is better than with two guys.

At least in the states logs were checked that closely. I would log a half hour inspection, five hours of driving, half hour break, and five more hours of driving. We could log a 60 mph average speed so I'd drive

That's assuming I was going someplace like across country. Loading and so forth would break the pattern. Unloading always took half an hour. You might have spent 4 hours quality time in some crappy grocery warehouse pulling skids with a pallet jack and restacking the goods to their pleasure, but it took half an hour.

I don't know how it is today but that's how you played the game 20 years ago. Like a lot of things they system worked and nobody really wanted to look too hard at how it worked.

Damn, I'm glad you're in Scotland.

Possibly. At least in the US it is an archaic system laid down in the '30s. If you can find the 1940 film 'They Drive By Night' with Bogart, that's what the laws were written for. Not quite the same as driving down the interstate with the cruise control set to 65, the air conditioning cranked up, and good tunes on the mp3 player.

Very. The logbooks we used were tablet size books with a carbon. The original was turned in with the trip envelope and the carbons were your record. The books were not bound, just conveniently held together with two common staples. It was simple to unbend the staples, take out some pages, and do a retroactive version of what you'd been up to. You'd always grab a handful of logs before setting out so you had a supply of spare pages. Or even staples. Sometimes the damn things would break if you unbent and bent them too many times.

In the short term you could just use another book that could be a complete work of fiction.

Very much so in this country. We have 30 million lawyers in search of work and they would have a field day if an unauthorized passenger was injured. For most larger companies you're fired if you're caught.

It's a shame he doesn't also fully utilize his air bags!

My youngest brother spent 8 days at home one year. Not terribly good for a marriage. Gor a couple years he and his wife co-drove. When he hired on he told the bosses they were hiring a professional tourist. He had 2 kayaks strapped to the back of the sleeper - if he took a lood to California or Oregon or whatever and didn't have a return load right away they'de go for a kayak trip for a day or two.

That was in his owner/operator days

I think all of North America and half of great britaiin is glad the idiot is in scotland.

Sounds like a parallel life of the average mom or dad raising kids. Tired? Feed the kids. Sick? take the kids to soccer practice. Bad Weather? You still stuck with car pool.

I bet it takes a particular type of person to do OTR for any length of time. Hubby did it for a while, but couldn't stand being away from the family for long periods of time, so he found local work for a while driving.