The Trucking Industry: High Risks And High Rewards
Michael Babboni
Trucking Accidents
Tractor-trailers are the real backbone of the shipping industry throughout America’s heartland. Ocean freighters can carry an immense amount of goods on the cheap from one coastline to another, but they can’t reach any deeper than a port town. Barges still ply the rivers and canals we built nearly 200 years ago, but they don’t penetrate far into the American West. Railroads continue to haul long trains of grain, coal, and other resources, but our railways haven’t seen a major update in decades. And there’s a simple reason why: it’s because all our transportation money has gone into the highway system so that trucks and cars can visit every last corner of the nation.No matter what state of the Union you’re in, trucks are everywhere, delivering goods to every store and home. There’s a lot of competition in the trucking industry, and so there’s a constant struggle to get goods from point A to point B as fast and as cheaply as possible. This includes competition between the big public providers like FedEx and UPS, but it also includes the trucking companies who cater to businesses who need to move a lot of cargo as fast as possible. Even major corporations who maintain their own fleet of trucks want their goods to spend as little time in transit as possible.
Unfortunately, this push for results means that a lot of truckers will cut corners when they think they can get away with it. That can mean going against federal and state regulations which are in place precisely because of how dangerous trucks are. Every regulation has a very specific reason to exist:
- Weight limits and weighing stations. Weighing stations exist mostly to tax truckers because of the amount of wear and tear a heavy load causes to highways and streets, but there’s another reason for weight caps: inertia. An overloaded truck can’t slow down or speed up as quickly, and that could spell trouble if there’s an accident.
- Improperly secured cargo. Making sure everything’s tied down nice and tight can take up time a trucker might not have, but unsecured cargo will not only damage the goods, it can also make the trailer move around unpredictably as its contents shift every time it changes speed or direction.
- Poor Maintenance. One fairly obvious way to cut corners is to avoid maintaining the truck as often as the manufacturer recommends. Not only does this make a dangerous failure more likely, but it may even void the manufacturer’s warranty.
- Insufficient break time. Driving for the long haul can be surprisingly exhausting, even if you haven’t been awake for very long, and so truckers have to log the hours they spend driving and take breaks at certain intervals. If they don’t, they could fall asleep at the wheel or else get hypnotized by the road and lose track of their surroundings. However, if they’re in a hurry, truckers may cheat on their log or else fail to keep one entirely.
- Reckless driving and excess speeding. Another way a trucker might try for a quick delivery is simply by driving like the trailer is on fire and going dangerously fast is the only way to put out the flames. This is a dangerous idea for fairly obvious reasons.
A truck’s problems are everyone’s problems, because trucks are the biggest and most dangerous vehicles on the road. With all that mass moving at highway speeds, any collision is not going to leave much of the smaller vehicle behind, and that’s bad news for anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in a truck accident.
If you or a loved one has been involved in a collision with a truck, you should hire a truck accident lawyer who can investigate whether the trucker was following all proper regulations. Even just one oversight could mean that the trucker was at fault for the accident. You owe it to yourself and to your insurance provider to make sure.