The Highway-Safety Paradox

The various gods of trucking have surely heard our moaning about the sorry state of the Canadian highway system. I’m sure they have, but too often we talk in terms of freight damage and late deliveries and international competitiveness. What we haven’t dealt with very well is the effect it has on the folks at the wheel. About the price that drivers and owner-operators pay with every mile they run.

It’s not just a question of a lousy ride and important bits and pieces falling off the truck before they should. Those things are real, and they certainly have a cost, but in the end it’s about a driver’s personal bottom line and most definitely his state of mind. Yet nobody in highway-funding land — especially at the non-participant federal level — ever seems to examine what actually happens down in the trenches.

Wouldn’t it be good to take Mr. Chretien for a ride in northern Ontario? Or maybe some of the Saskatchewan bits of Highway 16?

For owner-operators, of course, some of those costs are very direct. When bolts drift loose, with consequences mild and otherwise, he pays for the fix. With luck, there’s no accident, no catastrophe.

When he’s paid by the mile but can’t make many miles because the road forces a slow pace, he pays in his weekly statement. And if he runs hard to make the miles, he’s punishing his truck and will pay sooner or later.

It’s even worse for folks paid by the load, of course.

Whether we’re talking about owner-operators or company drivers, they pay for poor roads in the stress they feel on the job. And this may be something they don’t recognize. It’s not as if a switch turns the stress on. Sometimes there’s actually a very real switch, like when a driver’s tired but can’t find a place to park because nobody’s built enough rest stops. Or when he knows he’s holding up a line of traffic on a grade but nobody’s found the dough to give those anxious four-wheelers a passing lane. Or when he’s got to deal with urban traffic at the end of a long day because nobody’s managed to find the funds for a ring road around the city.

Sure, sometimes the stress does have such an obvious cause, but what people can’t see is the way it gradually grows and overtakes them. Bit by bit by bit, the little traffic moments accumulate. They’re maybe exaggerated by disputes at the loading dock and possibly the fatigue that’s felt just trying to keep the rig moving in a straight line on some lesser highways. The mixture of a high crown and a crosswind can make life interesting, for example, especially if the truck’s handling leaves something to be desired.

I remember road-testing one new truck back in the early 1980s that had me begging for mercy within an hour. Couldn’t keep the damned thing pointed in the same direction as the road. It wandered this way and that so badly, so unpredictably, that every correction in the wheel demanded a counter-correction, ad infinitum. Not many trucks will be that bad, but quite a few will have imperfections that require some sort of extra care and attentiveness. They’ll take a toll, even though drivers just sort of slide those peccadilloes into their routine and don’t notice them after a while.

These days, at least in urban spots like Vancouver or Calgary or Toronto, and many more American cities, the big challenge to a driver’s patience is traffic congestion. After waiting a couple of unexpected hours for a load, he may well have lost that narrow but comfortable window of no-traffic time that he was planning on. He may find himself out and about in the middle of rush hour instead, trying to make time against the odds. With no alternate route to be found. Actually, in many places these days, rush hour is an all-day thing, with serious congestion lasting well into the evening, and not just in the city core.

It’s not just the frustration of the traffic itself for drivers and owner-operators paid by the mile. They’re losing money if they’re crawling along the highway at 20 km/h, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

The inevitable prospect of traffic congestion demands some mighty careful planning on the driver’s part, but there’s a limit to how much difference it can make. Delivery-time windows are often pretty tight, sometimes downright weird, and there’s not always — to be charitable — an understanding face waiting at the receiver’s door.

In any case, the total picture can get ugly. Add up all the stresses in a driver’s life and it becomes clear that the state of our roads is often, and maybe always, at the top of a long list.

Yet even the people who advocate spending money on highway improvements usually speak in lofty terms of international trade and global competitiveness.

They’re issues, for sure, but our lousy highways have their sharpest impact right there where the rubber meets the bumpy road. It’s a safety issue, as plain as the nose on my face.