TRAILERS, TRAILERS EVERYWHERE

February 16, 2011 Vol. 7, No. 4

Well, my few days in Tampa for the annual TMC gathering have come and gone, and useful days they were even if the weather was mostly crap. Every time I turned around it seemed there was someone I wanted to speak with, someone I could learn from. Time well spent.

A friend of mine on the tech side of things said it’s his favorite event of the year, and it may well be mine too (aside from the Truck Rodeo at Notre Dame du Nord). His reason? There’s an awful lot of trucking intelligence assembled in one place, a concentration of smart people who really are worth listening to for the most part. I couldn’t agree more.

I actually managed to come home with a sunburn despite there being only one sunny day because I got caught outside one afternoon by a happy series of chance conversations with people I hadn’t known before but profited from meeting.

Simply, there was a good spirit in the air, unlike the last couple of years when the mood was somewhere between dreadful and downright depressing. Not so in 2011, and in fact attendance apparently hit a record, indicating that the people of trucking are looking forward with fresh eyes, back in the hunt for progress and good ideas.

First-time attendees hit a record of 175, and overall numbers amounted to 2716. That includes 80 Canadians on both supplier and fleet sides, which strikes me as not enough. Also not enough in my mind is that 423 fleet members were in attendance. That’s about exactly half of the total TMC fleet membership of 854 — out of 2558 — which implies that this is a supplier-run organization. I guess it is, and that’s not a bad thing at all, but I’d love to see a bigger number of actual truck users taking advantage of what the Technology & Maintenance Council can offer.

THIS YEAR’S MAIN TECHNICAL SESSIONS were less than stirring, I thought, one of them covering the usefulness of TMC’s Recommended Practices Manual and how folks can make better use of the RP system. The manual is literally bible-like and the RP system is brilliant, but doesn’t everyone already know that? The other major session was on OSHA compliance. Important but… well, a bit tedious. With respect.

The meat of the thing was in the smaller Study Group sessions and I attended an especially useful one under the ‘S.11 Energy Conservation’ banner. It concerned truckstop electrification and efforts to move beyond the somewhat clumsy things we’ve seen in the recent past. Specifically, speakers were talking about a project to ‘electrify’ U.S. truckstops led by Cascade Sierra Solutions, a non-profit enterprise based in Oregon.