Truckload Authority - August/September 2018

By Klint Lowry
Doesn’t it sometimes seem like people in trucking
are constantly asking, “What direction is this industry
headed?”
That’s a complicated question that encompasses a
lot of long-range topics. Who can see that far ahead?
For now, Eddy Mullins is more concerned about
drivers who can’t tell what direction their own trucks
are headed.
Mullins has been training truck drivers for J.B. Hunt
since 1999, shortly before GPS and smartphones
exploded onto the market and changed how drivers
navigate, or rather how they let themselves be navigated.
“When you sit up high in a truck, you can see people,
those GPS’s everywhere,” Mullins said. “I see people
who look lost, like they’re just waiting for that voice to
say, ‘turn right in 500 feet.’
“Don’t get me wrong, I love my technology,” he
added. “I’ve got my phone, I’ve got a tablet, I’ve got a
bunch of electronic gadgets. But some things, you still
need to do it the old way.”
But in the last few years, Mullins has noticed his job
getting tougher, as new drivers are coming to him
lacking skills that would have been almost taken for
granted a generation ago.
“I started driving in 1995,” Mullins said. “When I first
started we spent three whole days in class learning
how to read a map and trip plan.
“Nowadays, they just say, ‘put the address in the GPS
and go.’ I’ve trained some fairly new drivers and they’re
like, ‘map? What’s a map? They never taught us that.’”
Along with not knowing how to read maps,
young drivers are also coming to him lacking basic
navigational skills, having never had the experience of
being in situations where they’ve had to visually scan
the surroundings, read street signs and spot addresses
on buildings in order to find their way around.
Maybe even more disturbing is that many new
drivers seem to lack skills that are even more basic.
“I’ll ask them, ‘OK, the way we’re standing here right
now, which direction are we facing? No, no, put the
phone down. Which direction are we facing? If the sun
rises over there, what does that tell you about what
direction we’re facing?”
Part of Mullins’ job has become convincing new
drivers not to be GPS dependent. “I tell them, the GPS
is only a tool,” he said. “You still need to plan your trips
and don’t blindly rely on that thing. It can and will get
you in trouble.”
Mullins isn’t alone in this observation. Carriers
everywhere are having to assess new drivers’
navigational skills when they’re brought aboard. Leslie
Stout, director of safety at CalArk International, Inc.,
said some drivers come to them with well-rounded
navigational skills but most do not. And it isn’t just the
raw beginners they have to watch out for.
“We have to look at experience very closely,” Stout
said. “For instance, even if a driver has 10 months to a
year of experience, if they ran for a company who has
GPS in their trucks then the driver often has no map
reading skills.”
Use it and lose it
Nearly anyone who’s used a GPS with any frequency
has experienced some kind of snafu — the instruction to
turn when there isn’t a road there; being taken around the
block for no apparent reason; the sudden, unannounced
recalculation; or the loss of signal at a most inconvenient
time.
Yet people still hand navigational responsibility to
their GPS, sometimes over their own senses and common
sense. Occasionally, drivers who’ve taken this behavior
to the extreme make the news after driving or almost
driving into lakes, over cliffs and off roads and bridges
that were closed for construction.
Mullins collects these stories along with pictures to
show his trainees of trucks whose drivers allowed a GPS to
lead them into embarrassing and sometimes dangerous
situations.
“They’ll say, ‘what’s he doing on that walking path?’ I’ll
say, ‘he was following his GPS.’ ‘What’s he doing on the
[Atlantic City] boardwalk in a truck?’ ‘He was following
his GPS. See what I’m getting at?’”
One common element to these stories is the drivers
try to blame their predicament on the GPS. In many of
these cases, the stories describe how the driver ignored
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