CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK
« Traffic Safety Film of the Week
What’s the Effect of Rubbernecking on Traffic Flow? »

Every Driver’s Nightmare

Don’t know the whys or whos of this video (and has this driver been canned yet?) But it goes without saying that Romania is among the least safest places to drive in the European Union.

[UPDATE: See comments for further developments...]

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Drivers, Trucks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Every Driver’s Nightmare”

  1. Pavel Says:
    March 9th, 2009 at 9:14 pm

    What is that you find so horrible about this video? Teenagers of the world perform the same antics every second in cars and small trucks that respond to input from the steering wheel by actually changing direction. The modern tractor trailer is probably the safest vehicle to pull off something similar.
    That fat troll Charlie Boorman pulls wheelies on public roads throughout both of the “long way” videos, but as far as I know he is yet to be “canned”.

    Truck drivers is the last reason for Romania being the least safe place to drive. Blame the soviet era cars that are plentiful in countries of the former Warsaw Pact. How do Poland or Hungaly score? Should be reasonably close to Romania.

  2. Chick Whitten Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 2:30 pm

    From La France Profond, HE IS ONE CRAZY TWAT! It is good his mobile phone did not perform during that stupid stunt. We have drivers of 18wheelers going around tight corners with mobile phones clamped to their earholes. With modern technology there should be some kind of jamming device to prevent this. Hands free? Why bother! While the engine is running, no calls possible. Is that too difficult to install?

  3. Kris Peeters Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    I’m sad to say so, but this dit not happen in Romania. Although it is a Romanian trucker, the video was recorded in Belgium, on the highway to the north.
    Today ‘De Standaard’, a Flemish newspaper, published an article about the scandalous clip. A spokesman of the Union of Professional Transporters and Employers in Logistics said he was shocked and asked for more enforcement. The Union is worried about this kind of road cowboys blaming all truck drivers. It is told that Easteuropean truckers meet on (Belgian) parkings, build parties and after some hours continue on their way.
    Meanwhile the Belgian secretary for traffic affairs has ordered the identification of the trucker and the withdrawal of his driver’s license.

  4. Tom Vanderbilt Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    Thanks for the update, Kris — I should have studied the road signs more carefully, but the resolution was terrible. And yes, one cannot or should not tar all Romanian truck drivers with this one bad brush. But this guy’s clearly going to be looking for a new job — perhaps something in viral video?

  5. Fritz Says:
    March 11th, 2009 at 11:44 am

    I had a similar thought to Pavel in that teens and other young drivers also behave similarly while driving, but by focusing on the truck’s stability but misses the whole point — the driver WASN’T PAYING ATTENTION TO THE ROAD as he pilots his thousands of kilograms. Teens in their smaller vehicles don’t necessarily crash because they bumped their steering wheel, they crashed because they weren’t paying attention.

    When teens do it in their small cars, they kill themselves and maybe a bystander or two. When truck drivers do it, they collapse bridges, close major freeways, and kill dozens of people.

    The truck drivers I know seem like reasonably safe drivers, but it only takes a moment of inattention by a single individual to screw things up for a lot of people.

Leave a Reply

Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

Amazon | B&N | Borders
Random House | Powell’s

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
U.S. Paperback UK Paperback
Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

Upcoming Talks

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
Twitter
March 2009
M T W T F S S
« Feb   Apr »
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031