Archive for the ‘Trucks’ Category

I’m slow to get to this, but this incredible case of a sideways high-speed shunt in the U.K. is about as dramatic a case you can imagine of how divorced a motorist can be from the world around him.

Via the BBC:

In a bid to release her vehicle, she said she pulled on the handbrake and flashed her hazard lights to try to catch the driver’s attention, as well as that of other road users, but she said it took the lorry driver nearly a minute to notice her.

When he did he was “all over the place”, Mrs Williams said, and finally managed to bring both vehicles to a stop on the hard shoulder.

Though I didn’t see the above fine specimen represented, my pal Phil Patton’s treatise on the graphic design of truck warning stickers is well worth a read. Unlike so many other segments of road safety, it is utterly unstandardized, and filled with interesting variation.

That raises an interesting point, how warning someone about the same hazard can involve different strategies. One way is to simply say DON’T, without further explanation. Graphically, this is represented by the classic circle and slash over an icon representing an activity. But another way is to show the consequences of an act. You can warn people away from a behavior by depicting its results. Think of the dramatic arched back of a person in the throes of electrocution in some signs. Verbally, a famous case of this approach is the mother’s classic warning about the Red Ryder B-B gun her son dreams of, in the 1983 film A Christmas Story: “You’ll shoot your eye out!”

The New Scientist reports on an often-overlooked topic: Truck fuel efficiency, and some efforts to improve it:

While the average fuel efficiency of the US car fleet has almost doubled in the last 40 years, today’s heavy trucks guzzle the same amount of fuel - roughly 30 litres per 100 kilometres - as they did in 1969 (see graph). In 1990, America’s truckers burned the equivalent of 1.6 million barrels (254 million litres) of oil per day, about 10 per cent of the nation’s total consumption. By 2007, this had risen to 2.5 million barrels.

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...]

The National Safety Council calls for a full ban on cell phones while driving, a position I in principle agree with (I’d rather it just became the norm rather than a law but sometimes the former requires the latter):

“There is a huge misperception with the public that it’s O.K. if they are using a hands-free phone,” said Janet Froetscher, the council’s president and chief executive. “It’s the same challenge we had with seat belts and drunk driving — we’ve got to get people thinking the same way about cellphones.”

And to give you a little nudge in that direction, here’s a piece from today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch on a truck crash that killed three people:

“Authorities have only described Knight as being inattentive, but a Missouri Highway Patrol report has revealed he admitted to an investigator that he was distracted by a cell phone.

In the report, Knight is quoted as saying, “I reached across the dash to get my cell phone. I flipped the phone open, looked back at traffic, and I was there right at the last car (in the line of cars stuck in traffic). I didn’t see any brake lights or emergency flashers. After I hit the first car, I just remember holding the steering wheel and seeing cars going to my left and right.”

(thanks Jack!)

From an interesting piece in the Australian Herald Sun:

“The reason I finally quit the job I loved - driving big trucks - was that I didn’t want to kill someone. I realised that times have changed and the dangers were too great.

I realised, to my horror, that I could be held responsible for the death of someone else, just because another driver had not been paying enough attention on the road. It can happen just like that.”

Full story here or after the jump.

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