ATA, better pull up your britches – your double standards are showing

It’s not like we don’t know what the ATA is up to, but the fact of the matter is, in the past several weeks, the America Trucking Associations isn’t doing a lot to mask its hypocritical, egocentric agenda.

Mike Card, chairman of the ATA, told a gathering at the Great West Fleet Executive Conference in Las Vegas that over-regulation is killing the owner-operator.

Overdrive reported that Card’s address pointed at “the over-regulation of the trucking industry as a dagger to trucking’s ‘first generation,’ as he calls it, referring to owner-operators and small fleet owners who were able to get their starts after deregulation in the late 1970s.

“For this first generation, Card says, ‘merger, sale or death’ are the only three ways out of the industry, as their business are no longer sustainable as-is.”

This is another verse in ATA’s bemoaning of regulations. One more good one happened last year when Werner CEO Derek Leathers spoke at the annual ALK conference.

“We have been dealing with regulation after regulation,” he said. “I can’t price for crazy. We will not stand behind a price if we are impacted by something coming out of D.C.”

Back the truck up, ATA.

Who’s pushing for more regulations? You are. For the love of all things trucking. It’s the ATA regulatory agenda that’s driving things like speed limiters, electronic on-board recorders, collision mitigation systems …

Cripes, if you hate over-regulation so much, then quit asking for it.

The bridge wasn’t the only thing that collapsed

A view of the collapsed Skagit River
bridge, looking north. Photo courtesy
of the National Transportation
Safety Board

The oversized load that struck an Interstate 5 bridge in Washington state may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but investigators need to consider the other straws.

After a 160-foot section of the bridge collapsed into the Skagit River north of Seattle on May 23, investigators charted an ambitious course to scrutinize the truck, the load, Canadian driver William Scott and his company, Mullen Trucking. They interviewed the pilot car driver and compared everything against the permit. That’s all well and good.

They looked at the bridge, its 60-year history, and its current listing as “fracture critical” and “functionally obsolete.” They measured, took photos, and revealed that the bridge had been struck numerous times by trucks in the past, most recently in October 2012.

They interviewed witnesses, including the unlucky souls who plunged into the river that evening. Thankfully all three of them survived.

Again, this is well and good. But here’s where I think investigators have dropped the ball.

One eyewitness who was rescued from the river told local news in Seattle that there was a second truck that appeared to be passing – or at least drawing even with – the oversized load as the vehicles arrived at the bridge. The witness said the oversized load appeared to be “pinned” over to the right, and therefore had no chance to clear the overhead bridge supports.

We must question why it took 12 days for investigators to put out the word about the second truck, even though eyewitnesses mentioned it on the first day.

State and federal investigators spent the first 12 days concentrating solely on the oversized load and hinting that they’ll throw the book at the company if they find anything. State officials have even said they’ll go after the company for financial damages if investigators find fault.

Meanwhile, the second truck was allowed to skate away and continue operating. Who is this person and who did he or she drive for? And who passes a marked oversized load on a narrow 60-year-old bridge?

Twelve days is an awfully long time to begin the search for a vehicle and its driver who is at the very least a key witness in the collapse of a critical piece of U.S. infrastructure that carried 71,000 vehicles per day.

State investigators announced June 4 that they were looking for an “unknown color semi with a white trailer.” Even with video, they have no other reliable information about the truck or driver.

What started as the straw that broke the camel’s back now involves a needle in a haystack.

She’s a mother of seven and he’s a truck driver

The mainstream media ran to the court of public opinion with the defense of Yanira Maldonado, the Arizona mother of seven, who was recently incarcerated in Mexico on suspicion of drug smuggling.

The 42-year-old woman was with her husband in Mexico for a funeral. She was taken into custody when Mexican authorities found 12 pounds of marijuana taped under her bus seat.

Mexican officials reportedly initially bartered with her husband over the amount of money he would have to pay to secure her release. Those negotiations ceased and eventually she was released without being charged.

She was in jail for eight days before her eventual release on May 30.

Back in the U.S., not a soul seemed to think the woman was capable of drug smuggling. The cries for her release were loud. Politicians were weighing in, watching the situation closely. She was a victim of circumstance. It was open and shut in the court of public opinion.

Flash back to April 2012. Dallas trucker Jabin Bogan took a wrong turn and crossed into Mexico with a load of ammunition.

He was arrested by Mexican customs agents on the Mexican side of the Bridge of the Americas in Juarez. He was originally charged with smuggling, but that was reduced to possession of ammunition – a much lesser crime in Mexico.

Bogan’s family was expected to pay a fine for his release, but that amount never was disclosed.

He was released from the Mexican prison system seven months after his arrest.

The court of opinion did not tilt in Jabin’s favor. It was assumed and wildly speculated that he was taking guns to the cartel.

His boss publicly stated his defense of Jabin. His family defended him.

Yet, the presumption of guilt remained for seven long months. He was up to no good.

In both cases, all the public has to go on is what the news reports. We don’t know every detail of either of the situations that landed Yanira and Jabin in jail.

But the two were certainly handled very differently in the media. If for no other reason, she was a mother of seven and he was just a truck driver.

Public perception, it’s a dangerous thing.

Terry Button gets a seat at the table

OOIDA staff and members currently represent small-business truckers on all kinds of industry advisory and policy panels, including FMCSA’s Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee, the Transportation Research Board, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, DHS’s Highway and Motor Carrier Sector Coordinating Council, and others.

This week, we learned that another OOIDA member has been tapped to serve. Terry Button, Rushville, NY, senior OOIDA member and a member of the OOIDA Board of Directors has been selected to be a member of the newly-created National Freight Advisory Committee.

On Thursday, May 30, DOT Secretary Ray LaHood announced the names of the committee. From James Hoffa to Joan Claybrook, this diverse group has 47 voting members who will serve two-year terms and attend at least three meetings a year. The first one is June 25.

LaHood and company made a good choice in Terry Button. I’ve known Terry for years, and he is a thoughtful, hard-working guy who’s got the trucking chops to do justice to the committee. Let me describe Terry in three words: He gets it.

Terry describes himself as an owner-operator trucker, shipper, receiver, exporter, broker and family farmer. As the owner of Terry Button Farms – a one-truck operation – he says he makes all decisions for his business regarding equipment purchasing, rates and routes, and must constantly adjust to market conditions, fuel prices, and road conditions and weather. 

He hauls hay, agricultural products and produce from the New York/New Jersey region down to Florida. He also coordinates the shipment of hay from the New York/New Jersey region to along the entire Eastern Seaboard and inland to Tennessee and Texas. 

Like most small-business truckers, Terry is a one-man show, but he thinks bigger than that. His mind is not just where that next load of hay is going. He recognizes the important link between economics and safety and how policies at the national level will affect the truckers who are out there trying to move freight efficiently from point A to point B. This is a guy who understands the economic impact of delays and where the inefficiencies lie within the system.

No doubt he’ll bring brains, experience and common sense to the NFAC.

Another example that DataQ doesn’t click for truckers

We get all kinds of calls here at the OOIDA HQ from all kinds of people. Occasionally those calls are cries for help in the “Dr. Phil” sense –e.g., the caller who wanted to warn us about “lizard people” in Congress, the caller who wanted to tell us about a fight they’d had with a motel desk clerk, or another well-meaning caller who wanted to know what OOIDA could do to help “a friend of a friend who won’t use truck-specific maps.”

But more often than not, those calls are from truckers with serious issues who feel they’ve got nowhere else to turn.

Case in point: we got a phone call last week about what sounds like a highly questionable “sting” involving seatbelt violations at a scale in New Mexico.

The caller outlined a scenario in which one of the drivers for the company the caller represented was pulled into a weigh station. The stop seemed pretty routine initially, and the driver’s tandems were overweight. One law enforcement officer asked for the driver’s paperwork.

The caller said the driver unbuckled his seat belt to reach his logbook and other papers, which he then handed to the officer. The officer then instructed the driver to park the rig nearby.

And this is where things start to get weird.

According to this version of events, once the driver put his truck in gear to follow the directions of the officer, a second cop jumped up on the sideboards of the truck and issued him a citation for driving without a seat belt. The company he was working for has a zero-tolerance policy on seat belt violations and was forced to fire him.

But even more than the “Gotcha” tactics at the scale, the issue this driver and countless others face becomes what to do about the penalties that affect the CSA scores of the drivers and the company. Higher scores can have several bottom-line impacts on trucking companies, and are meant to discourage shippers from using “unsafe” carriers.

I reached out to James Mennella, of Road Law, an Oklahoma City-based firm specializing in trucking and transportation legal issues, to see what, if any, recourse there might be for this driver and this company. He said this is a situation that many drivers face on a daily basis. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of options for truckers who want to fight the charges or a subsequent challenge to the CSA score.

“The first way to address the problem is to fight the citation in court,” Mennella said. “The pitfall to the New Mexico citation is the Penalty Assessment section, which we wrote a column several years back. If the driver initials that section and signs the ticket, he/she has just pled guilty to the violation. The ticket is then payable to Santa Fe and not returnable to the court.”

If the driver did not initial Penalty Assessment and the actual court is written at the bottom of the ticket, it can then be challenged, Mennella said.

“The second way to address the issue is to utilize the DataQ challenge through the FMCSA website and challenge the report,” he said. “Winning the traffic citation portion in court does not always guarantee that the records will be corrected by the FMCSA through the DataQ challenge. However, what disputing the citation in court does is to provide ammunition for the DataQ challenge as well and any enforcement action that may take place down the road.”

OOIDA itself has already filed two separate suits against FMCSA over the DataQ challenge, first in July of 2012 on behalf of four members who were charged with violations that were ultimately dismissed by the court. Despite the dismissal of all charges in those cases, the FMCSA continues to report the violations. The lawsuit is still pending. A second suit filed on behalf of OOIDA Member Fred Weaver was filed in May of 2013.

“As we have written, and what OOIDA is concerned about is that CSA is contradictory to our criminal justice system in that you are not innocent until proven guilty,” Mennella said. “It is just the opposite. You are deemed to have violated any and all sections listed on the examination report, and your only recourse is to file the DataQ challenge up an until a civil penalty is issued wherein you will have the right to address the matter before an ALJ (administrative law judge) and the federal system.”

A fast tradition

Five years ago our copy editor made the suggestion at our daily morning news jam that we should cover the “Run for the Wall.”

I know I hadn’t ever heard of it and was intrigued by the effort. I wasn’t the only one. Honestly, collectively as a staff here at Land Line, we were hooked from the start.

The Run for the Wall is a motorcycle tour that runs from California to Washington, DC, in the days leading up to Memorial Day. Many, if not most, then participate in the Memorial Day ride, Rolling Thunder. This year will mark the 24th anniversary of Rolling Thunder on Memorial Day.

The Run for the Wall starts in Los Angeles. The participants then trek across the country on either the Southern route or the Central route. Here at OOIDA HQ, we’re partial to the Central route, because it rolls along Interstate 70 right outside our front door.

That first year we covered Run for the Wall there were some of us who snuck out of the office and waved as they drove by.

There’s nothing like hundreds of motorcycles rumbling by, flags flying, waves and honks. They appreciated our small but supportive showing.

Flash forward five years. In the weeks leading up to Run for the Wall, the chatter starts. There are employees who bring in tons of flags to wave and share with other employees. We have it dialed in and can’t wait for the riders to pass by.

What was a small group that first year has grown extensively. Everyone is angling for a way to make it outside when Run for the Wall riders go by.

The second year we were surprised when one of the bikers pulled out of the pack, slowed down and guided his big blue Honda Gold Wing to a stop on the shoulder – right there where we were standing. The leather-clad rider – complete with a vest covered with patches and badges – swung off his bike and introduced himself to our elated group.

“I’m Krazy Karl, life member!”

One of our own? We screamed and converged on him for hugs. It was Life Member Karl Haartz. He served in the infantry in Vietnam in 1966-67.

So every year we wait to see who might stop by to say hi, swap hat pins (Run for the Wall has hat pins they pass out. A real hot commodity here.), a few stories, hugs and they are off again.

This year we got a whopping surprise. About 15 participants showed up ahead of the main pack. They were Run for the Wall Ambassadors. They work ahead of the main pack and stop at various locations that have shown big support to their ride and all it stands for.

We were blown over. They were thanking us.

“Land Line Now” news anchor and Vietnam vet Reed Black, Editor-in-Chief Sandi Soendker and I all made a beeline for the lobby to greet the group. LaDonna Dempton, who works the front desk greeting members, was already in the thick of things.

It wasn’t a long visit, but it was special. We told stories about Truckers for Troops and how special the men and women who serve in our armed forces are to the membership. I showed some of the wives the wall in our cafeteria that’s filling up with flags, certificates of thanks and gifts from the troops who receive the care packages courtesy of Truckers for Troops.

We all asked at one point or another about Krazy Karl. David “Bounce” Talley, who is a member of OOIDA because of Karl, told us Karl’s health won’t allow him to make the cross-country trek. But I know that in his heart he was riding along with them.

Karl’s absence really underscored the purpose of the Run for the Wall. “We ride for those who can’t.”

Our visit wrapped up with hugs for our new friends. They hopped on their bikes while we grabbed our flags and went to cheer on the main pack.

‘Everything is impossible until somebody does it’

Last month our OOIDA Board of Directors met for the annual spring meeting, and one of our guests was Tom Kearney, freight operations program manager for the Federal Highway Administration in Washington, DC. He traveled to OOIDA headquarters for the meeting. Kearney isn’t just any guy from FHWA. He is the manager of the administration’s truck parking program and has been charged with the congressionally mandated truck parking survey.

By congressionally mandated, I mean in the new highway law known as Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century – or MAP-21 – it directs Congress to do a truck parking survey and comparative assessment. Not suggests. It orders Congress to do it. And the part of MAP-21 we are talking about here is Jason’s Law.

Of course, truckers know who Jason was. He’s Jason Rivenburg, a young trucker from New York who arrived too early at his delivery point in South Carolina and who was turned away. Instead he found a place to park in an unlit, abandoned lot where he was shot and killed for seven lousy bucks. That was March 2009 and what happened to Jason has put a human face on the dilemma of the safe parking scarcity for truckers.

At the OOIDA board meeting, we talked to Tom Kearney about Jason Rivenburg. We spent the whole day offering input that he felt was “vital” to developing solutions to issues that are critical elements to safety. When Kearney was here, he said he was scheduled to meet with Jason’s widow, Hope Rivenburg. And he did.

In late April, Kearney met with her at the Albany, NY, office of U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko, D-NY, who sponsored the Jason’s Law bill. Tonko wants FHWA to move along with their survey “in a timely manner” and partner up to make Hope’s survey the “baseline for future parking capacity studies.” Hope agreed to work with Kearney on gathering info critical to pushing ahead for safe parking. Kearney will pair her results with the research of FHWA. 

The FHWA truck parking survey – and comparative assessment is expected to begin this fall.

Hope’s project is already off the ground. She is urging the truck driving community to complete a 33-question online survey outlining their daily struggles to find safe truck parking while out on the road. Hundreds of drivers have already completed it.

The worth of this collaborative effort must be noted. There are many voices that need to be heard regarding this dilemma and a number of options to consider. The lesson is this: Putting all this together and coming up with reliable input and statistically measurable data is a tough task. Coming up with solutions that will work is even tougher. But it can be done.

As the saying goes: Everything is impossible until somebody does it.

Hey mainstream media … a guy in a pickup is not a truck driver … *sigh*

From TV host Jay Leno to  media criticism organizations, a number of watchers are constantly dogging the daily news for fairness, accuracy, outright blunders and words that are used incorrectly. I’m one of those watchers, but I tend to specialize in mistakes that leap into the mainstream regarding truck drivers and the trucking industry.

This morning I happened upon a story that caught my attention. I wasn’t really looking for a problem, but the headline in a Maine newspaper lured me beyond these words: “Wilton police seek truck driver who offered young girl a ride.”

The Sun Journal, Lewiston, ME, covers Central and Western Maine news. Reporter Ann Bryant of the Sun Journal wrote that last week in Wilton, ME, a truck driver offered an 11-year-old girl a ride when she got off the bus. No crime was committed but they want to speak to the operator of the truck, said the police chief.

The police were called when the girl was approached by a man in a red truck. The driver asked her if she wanted a ride; she said no and kept walking. The truck was reported to have turned around and come back toward her.

OK, here’s a description of the truck, according to the newspaper article – that was posted online and therefore went all over the world.

“The truck is described as a red full-sized truck with a silver toolbox in the back. A gold and white logo is on the side of the truck.” The article notes that “there was lumber in the back that extended beyond the tailgate.”

You can guess where I am going with this. It’s a suspicious situation and obviously the police in this town have a predator they need to check out. I confirmed with Wilton Police Chief Heidi M. Wilcox, who clarified it was a pickup.

So when will mainstream reporters and headline editors punch into the fact that truck driving is a profession and this guy was in no way a truck driver? This improper use of these words has become a pet peeve of mine. And most of the time, a follow-up call or email to the paper is appreciated. Occasionally, the offending news outlet will insist it’s a “question of semantics.”

So, if that red pickup truck had been a VW microbus, would the headline read “Police seek bus driver …?”

They are not looking for a truck driver; they are looking for a possible pervert in a pickup.

Maybe I’m being picky, but the headline insults a whole working community of professionals. The police chief apologized straight away if the description was misleading, but the newspaper reporter was another story.

I called her up at the Sun Journal. Ann Bryant defended the headline, saying the guy WAS a truck driver. We discussed this briefly, but she was dismissive and insisted it was just “wording.” Yes, it is wording and words need to be used correctly when you are reporting news.

The paper no doubt has plenty of trucker readers, not to mention friends and family members of truck drivers.

Get it right, Sun Journal.

Truckers can’t be replaced …

I honestly just about spit Diet Coke all over my screen when I read the following proclamation made in The New York Times:

“The two categories that have shown the biggest year-over-year increases in total compensation are (1) occupations in transportation and material moving and (2) employees at junior colleges, colleges, universities and professional schools.

“So what do truckers and professors have in common? Ms. Swonk observes that their jobs are both hard to either outsource or automate, unlike a lot of other occupations.”

The implication that truckers can’t be replaced by lower-priced labor sources is laughable on its face.

For starters, if a mega fleet could automate truck driving, they would in a second. Hello? They are the ones pushing for speed limiters, collision mitigation systems, electronic logs with GPS. … That list could go on forever. Just wait for the driverless truck.

Second, what lower priced labor pool? Company drivers, generally speaking, are underpaid by so many companies. They find people unqualified, untrained and exploit their need for a job with what mimics indentured servitude when they saddle them with a lease purchase truck.

Time and time again it’s been acknowledged that performance and safety would improve if driver pay improved. Jerry Moyes, CEO of Swift Transportation admitted this fact last year. His comments were so priceless, I had to blog about it then.

“I’ve been in this business for 45 years and the number one problem has always been drivers. It’s not going to change.”

If that’s the first time you’ve read that, I’ll bet that your blood pressure went through the roof. I know mine did.

Now, to be fair, Moyes went on to offer a solution to this problem. (You’ll love this.)

And, I quote: “For us to solve this, we’ve got to give them a lot more money.”

Like that has happened, or will happen, any time soon.

At least The New York Times inadvertently made a legitimate point. Truckers, good quality, trained, responsible men and women behind the wheel won’t be easily replaced. Not with the gadgets and junk the big carriers want.

Try as they might, truckers are and will continue, to be here to stay. And, if we keep standing together against the BS, we could eventually see rates and driver pay go up for more than just the fat cats at the top of the big motor carriers.

Reporter’s notebook: The story behind the story of OOIDA’s beginnings

At less than 90 days into my tenure at Land Line, most people still call me “The New Guy.” In fact, I was introduced to a co-worker’s fiancée as such just the other day. One of my colleagues only recently figured out my name isn’t Chris.

Staff Writer Greg Grisolano with
his first LL cover.
Photo by Nikohle Ellis

 That’s not meant to sound like a complaint. I am The New Guy, in more ways than one. Coming from a newspaper background doesn’t exactly lend itself to being an expert in an industry as diverse and complex as trucking. It can be a little overwhelming at times. So credit and props have to be given to the editorial staff here for trusting said “New Guy” with a story as important as the early history of OOIDA (and a cover story, to boot).

And what a history it is! To understand where this organization is today, and where it’s going, it’s critical to know and understand where we’ve come from. And beginnings really don’t get that much more humble than those of OOIDA.

There’s an old saw in the journalism business that every story you write is really three stories: The story you think you’re going to write, the story you end up writing, and the story that you wish you’d written but couldn’t quite get.

It’s that last story I want to share with you today.

The one that got away

There were a couple of things I wish I could’ve gotten for this piece, but we missed out on them. One of them was an interview with former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole.

Dole, a freshman senator at the time, acted as liaison between a group of disgruntled truckers and the bureaucrats in D.C. during those initial meetings in late 1973 and early 1974.

We reached out to the former senator’s office to see if we could secure an interview, but Dole politely declined. While we weren’t able to get an interview, we were able to get some great information and assistance from the staff at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

The staff at the Dole Institute were able to comb through the archives and find press releases from Dole about the energy crisis in 1973. The press releases helped us flesh out a timeline of those first few pivotal meetings, when truckers like Jim Johnston and Al Hannah thought all they’d have to do to fix the problem was just tell somebody in Washington about it.

They also opened up their photo archives to me, which brings me to my next point…

Photo hunting

Once interviews and background are fleshed out, the challenge becomes finding pictures (“art”) to supplement the story. With a piece like this, tracking down photos from 40 years ago can be a challenge. It’s almost like a scavenger hunt. In the early days of OOIDA, there was no magazine or other organ of record to capture the moments, so we didn’t have anything internally to fall back on. Strike one.

The Dole archives contain thousands of pictures, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to find any of truckers on Capitol Hill. Strike two.

Luckily, we hit a homerun when we reached out to Lou Bernard, the Adult Services coordinator at the Annie Halenbake Ross Library in Lock Haven, PA. Lou was able to round up some photos from the Lock Haven Express of the truck protest that started it all, when a fella by the name of J.W. Edwards (aka “The River Rat”) pulled his rig across the eastbound lanes of Interstate 80 near Lamar, PA.

Edwards’ stunt made national news, and Walter Cronkite himself interviewed him during a segment of The CBS Evening News. That footage actually still exists in the archives at CBS; the only problem is …

The whale

Johnston mentioned seeing the television footage of Edwards, who was also trucking out of the Kansas City area in 1973. Shortly after, he made a run out east, hooked up with The River Rat, and the rest was history.

So how much do you think a two-minute clip of footage from a 1973 interview on The CBS Evening News of Walter Cronkite and a disgruntled trucker would cost to license?

Five grand? Maybe more? We are talking about Cronkite, after all. The most iconic newscaster in American history. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

Try $132 … per second. So a clip of 130 seconds would cost $17,160. Or roughly $10,000 more than what I made in three semesters as a student-teacher in college.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? We thought so, too.

But enough about what we didn’t get. Let’s talk about the story we were able to write. For a new guy coming in, listening to tales of the old days of OOIDA is a bit like being regaled by tales from an age of myths and legends. Dates are vague, and nebulous.

What we’ve done is to try and create as concrete a record as we could of the significant dates and happenings of the early days of the organization. Whenever possible, we’ve interviewed the people who were there (those that are still around, and still remember). We’ve also tried to put the tale of truckers fighting for their rights into the larger context of what was happening in America, and the world, starting in 1973.

We’ve broken the story into two parts – the first of which is our cover story for the May issue of Land Line, which should be landing in your mailbox this week. In Part One, you’ll hear from OOIDA president Jim Johnston, as he shares his recollection of the Association’s early days.

If you’re one of our members who’s been with OOIDA for the long haul, we’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got photos or other memorabilia, let us know. Or bring it with you when we celebrate our 40th Anniversary at The Heart of America trucking show, Oct. 18-19 at the Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, KS.