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Perspective February 15-28, 2019 • 10 Letters Reader: Escrow must be returned within 45 days of lease termination [I] just finished reading your article on vetting a carrier for owner-operators. Please ensure you read the federal truth-inleasing requirements about escrow accounts and deductions. This law was written to protect owner-operators from unscrupulous carriers and erroneous chargebacks from the same. The law states that escrow must be returned within 45 days of termination of lease with a full accounting of chargebacks and deductions. Your article is misleading in that you wrote carriers can require double the holding period and that you as an owner-operator can be charged back for any claim without notification, which is also illegal under federal truthin-leasing laws. If you are going to try and help other drivers out here, you should have included this law and the protections it is supposed to provide us. Thank you for your time. — Robert A. Cordeiro Jr., Arpin Van Lines Driver of the Year 1998/2017, owner-operator for 28 years Readers of stories on thetrucker.com were eager to comment on the reasons there is a driver shortage in response to a story by CBS on the subject. Most said it’s because of the way professional drivers are treated: I think there’s a shortage of drivers because of all the regulations and harassment drivers deal with on the road. Now we must run ELDs; that doesn’t make the road any safer, it keeps you away from home and takes away our freedom. Every mistake that you make is stored there for law enforcement to see. The people in congress should ride in the trucks with us for 90 days as well as the DOT. Then they would understand how reality works. — Brian W. Fiddle only to make music and never, ever while driving Lyndon Finney editor@thetrucker.com Eye on Trucking Fiddling can be good. Fiddling refers to the act of playing the fiddle, and fiddlers are musicians who play it. Fiddle is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres including classical music. Violins are more closely associated with orchestral music; a “fiddle” is more closely associated with folk music. Fiddling can be associated with something positive, such as enjoyment of music. On the other hand, fiddling around with a cell phone often results in a negative outcome. Based on the number of Virginia drivers who were observed as part of a 2018 Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) roadside survey, drivers last year were 57 percent more likely to be manipulating a cellphone than drivers who were observed in a similar 2014 survey. The percentage of drivers observed using a smartphone rose from 2.3 percent in 2014 to 3.4 percent in 2018, the IIHS said. At the same time, drivers were less likely to be seen simply holding a cellphone or talking on a hand-held phone than in the prior survey. The finding is consistent with research indicating that drivers are talking on hand-held phones less and “fiddling” with them more often than in recent years. In 2018, 3.7 percent of drivers in northern Virginia were observed talking on a hand-held cellphone, compared with 4.1 percent of drivers in 2014, while 2.8 percent of drivers in 2018 were seen holding a cellphone, compared with 4.9 percent in the prior survey. The problem of distracted driving, especially cellphone use, continues to raise concerns, the IIHS said. A 2018 national survey by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that 64 percent of respondents consider distracted driving a much bigger problem today than it was three years ago. About 37,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2017, the most recent year of data available. Assuming the prevalence of phone manipulation nationwide rose as it did in northern Virginia to 3.4 percent, and assuming, based on the latest research, that fatal crash risk is 66 percent higher when manipulating a phone, then more than 800 of the estimated crash deaths in 2017 could be attributed to phone manipulation. This estimate is based on work by IIHS and other researchers describing how the estimated risk and prevalence of phone use can be combined to estimate the number of crash deaths that could be attributed to phone use in a given year. The 66 percent increase in fatal crash risk associated with manipulating a cellphone relative to driving when other secondary behaviors were present is a finding of a 2018 study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. “The latest data suggest that drivers are using their phones in riskier ways,” said David Kidd, who co-authored the study and is a senior research scientist with Highway Loss Data Institute. “The observed shift in phone use is concerning because studies consistently link manipulating a cellphone while driving to increased crash risk.” Cellphone use affects how drivers scan and process information from the roadway, the IIHS study said. Drivers generally take their eyes off the road to dial, send texts and browse the Web on a hand-held phone — all activities that fall under the rubric of manipulating the phone. Drivers engaged in cellphone conversations tend to concentrate their gaze toward the center of the roadway, but their attention still may be diverted from driving, making it difficult for them to process what they are looking at. Procedures for the 2018 update followed those used in 2014. IIHS stationed observers at 12 locations across four northern Virginia communities on straight stretches of roads, at signalized intersections and at roundabouts in March 2018. Researchers observed nearly 12,000 drivers in the 2018 survey and more than 14,000 drivers in 2014 during the morning, afternoon or early evening on weekdays. Researchers noted if drivers were engaging in one or more of 12 visible secondary behaviors while moving or stopped at red lights. About 23 percent of drivers were engaged in one or more distracting activities: • Talking on a hand-held cellphone • Manipulating a hand-held cellphone (excludes looking at phone in mount) • Simply holding a hand-held cellphone (i.e. not obviously manipulating or talking) See Eye on p11 m Respondents to Driver iQ’s 2018 fourth-quarter Recruitment and Retention Survey indicate that driver compensation will need to reach near the $100,000 mark if the industry wants to cut down on turnover. Do you think this survey will encourage more carriers to increase driver pay? I’m a truck driver and I used to do OTR. The time you spend away from your family and the meals it cost you and being gone three-plus weeks and only one day off for every week out and the pay per miles wasn’t enough. While all the big trucking companies made all the money … . They paid the drivers peanuts. So now I do local driving and am home every night and I only work maybe two Saturdays out of a month and some months I don’t have to work on Saturdays. In the long run, you come out with more money and can be home with the family and friends and that’s the most important thing. — K. Hall There wasn’t a lack, either, of readers commenting on a Road Safe America story in which the group claimed there were more big rig- See Letters on p11 m We’ve lost all of our tax incentives with the new tax laws. We should be making at least $90,000 because although being an owner-operator can come with more money, our industry is over-regulated and there are too many fees, not to mention the tolls and ELD costs. It’s just not good if you don’t start paying more. $3,000 to $3,500 a week for an owner-operator is not enough when you can make the same amount as a company driver after maintenance and other expenses. We need more money. — Jason Bailey That amount still won’t be enough to put up with the crap and lack of a real life. — David Selders As long-term drivers, no. This isn’t a lifestyle for everyone. Pay the ones who are willing to grind and sacrifice. I see so many ignorant drivers out here. Many can’t back up. Weed them out and pay the good ones. — Erick Painter
THETRUCKER.COM b Letters from page 10 b involved deaths recently and calling again for speed limiters on heavy-duty trucks. Make the cars who always pull over to the side of the highway to take their dog to go pee or do that themselves with their flashers on, go to an on-ramp instead. [It’s] common sense. We have to move to the other lane when these idiots pull over on the side of the highway for stupid reasons. Cars are almost always the cause of semi [involved] crashes. No one wants to take someone’s life, so we do what we have to, to avoid that so we don’t have to live our life out knowing we killed someone. The authorities do nothing to keep cars from cutting us off or tailgating us or brakecheck us. The dash cam is the most valuable thing we can use. But yet, we are always at fault. — Judy Ochs The accidents are caused by these commercial truck companies, not by the [truck] drivers or speed of the trucks. These companies hide behind the ELD [with] forced dispatch and abusive treatment of drivers. These companies have a very high rate of driver turnover. The dispatched pick-up and delivery times are always off and short, such as having about one hour left to drive and dispatched for a pickup 90 miles away in heavy traffic, and the driver is fired if he or she doesn’t make it. The trucking companies looking for drivers on The Trucker are part of the commercial companies that are the bad guys, here. Remember, we honor our drivers and get our drivers home, NOT, when they allow you home time after being hired. — Jeffrey B. Duggar I’ve noticed that people who want these [speed] limiters are people who’ve never driven a truck. How many people at the American Trucking Associations have driven a truck and yet they know what’s best for drivers. They say people want speed limiters on big trucks, that’s because they’re only getting one side of the whole story. — Tony Jenkins I feel that more distracted cell phone drivers and “choker chained” drivers on ELDs are stressed out to drive harder. That would be the main reason for the uptake in crashes [rather] than increased speeds. As a governed driver for 25 years, I know what a disaster driving bunched up would be — especially if ALL trucks were limited (example NASCAR Talladaga “big one” crashes). As to trucks needing more room to stop, yes they do but any experienced driver knows this and maintains the appropriate safe following distance. Also, heavier vehicles have corresponding larger braking capacity-disc brakes and tighter stopping distance regulations have been a move in a positive direction. — James Stark 8 Perspective February 15-28, 2019 • 11 b Eye from page 10 b • Wearing a Bluetooth earpiece or headset with mic • Wearing headphones or ear buds • Manipulating in-vehicle systems (touching radio, climate control, touchscreen display or other controls (excludes operating stalks or buttons on the steering wheel) • Manipulating or holding mobile electronic devices other than cellphones • Talking or singing • Eating or drinking • Smoking • Grooming • Other (reaching for object, reading print material, adjusting sun visor, putting on glasses, holding another object). “When people talk about distracted driving, most often cellphones are the focus, but drivers are distracted by other secondary behaviors more often than cellphones,” Kidd said. “Things as simple as drinking coffee or talking to your kids can take your attention away from the road.” About 14 percent of drivers were engaged in nonphone-related secondary behaviors in 2014 and 2018, which exceeded the proportion of drivers seen using phones in both years. Relative to 2014, drivers were more likely to be observed manipulating an in-vehicle system, grooming themselves, or manipulating or holding an electronic device other than a phone after researchers adjusted for community, perceived driver gender and age, time of day and roadway situation. Drivers in 2018 were less likely to be talking or singing while driving alone, smoking, or wearing headphones or earbuds. The prevalence of eating or drinking, talking or singing with a passenger present, wearing a Bluetooth device, or engaging in some other visible secondary behavior wasn’t significantly different between 2014 and 2018. “We didn’t find evidence of an increase in distracted driving overall between the 2014 and 2018 roadside surveys,” Kidd says. “For cellphone-related distraction in general, we expect a continued shift in the way people interact with the devices as the technology evolves.” The percentage of crash deaths related to distraction in recent years has hovered at about 8–10 percent of all crash deaths, data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show. During the past three years, distraction-affected crash deaths have trended downward. The number of fatalities in distractionaffected crashes fell 9.3 percent from 3,490 in 2016 to 3,166 in 2017, representing 8.5 percent of total fatalities for the year. In 2015, 3,526 people were killed in distraction-related crashes. The IIHS said fatality data likely underestimate the number of deaths caused by distracted drivers. Despite efforts to determine cellphone use by drivers in crashes, such data continue to be difficult to collect as they largely depend on people truthfully telling law enforcement officers what they were doing or voluntarily handing over their phones for inspection, the IIHS said. Bottom line: Fiddle only to make music. 8
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Page 17 and 18: Business February 15-28, 2019 • 1
Page 19 and 20: THETRUCKER.COM Walmart aiming to ad
Page 21 and 22: RECRUITING at a Glance Company Driv
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Page 25 and 26: THETRUCKER.COM b Bendix from page 2
Page 27 and 28: After 55 years, MTA Driver of the Y
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Page 31 and 32: THETRUCKER.COM Features February 15

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