Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

Unless you’ve been living in the root cellar, you as a driver know there are big challenges facing all truckers these days. Everybody tells you to call your congressman, or comment to FMCSA on pending regulatory changes. You should do these things, and you should vote. When you call your local congress-critter’s office, they can tell immediately whether or not you’re registered to vote. If you’re not, they’ll just chalk it up to a solitary, not very credible call.

So, you MUST be registered, doesn’t matter who you vote FOR. And if you voted for one guy and the other guy won, do NOT believe your voice doesn’t count: that office has no way of knowing who you voted for, all they know is you vote and maybe you’re one of their voters. Even if the opposition won, you are still a constituent. You should be calling regularly enough that the office staffers start to recognize your name when you call, making them put some recognition behind your views goes a long way toward being listened to. If they’re not running for election, they’re running for re-election. That’s a given.

Letters, E-Mail and Fax

You can use all of these, with email being the least effective. Some officials who know they’re taking an unpopular position on an upcoming vote simply won’t read the emails (Senators are worse about this, elitists that they are). Letters and faxes turn up as a real piece of paper, they’re far harder to ignore. The standard feeling is, for every letter someone writes and actually takes the time to send, a thousand more people felt the same way but didn’t make the effort. That doesn’t mean they won’t make the effort to vote, though. Keep them scared.

Letters are great, the old snail mail gets there eventually. However, be aware that mailed letters are now held up for weeks, being x-rayed and examined for security purposes (funny how they don’t worry much about the rest of us). If the vote is tomorrow, getting your letter in three weeks won’t help much. Fax is much faster and can actually be cheaper for you. If you have a fax program on your laptop, you can fax without a printer: write your letter and choose to print, then chose to print to your fax program. That should open your fax program with your letter already in it, so you can add the fax number and headings and hook up the old landline and send it. If you have Vista and don’t have a fax program, I finally found one called RKS Fax. It works well with Vista, since Microsoft took the fax program out of all of the home editions of Vista. The modems will support it, all you need is the program. $19.95 with a free 30-day trial. Many of the newer cell phones will send a fax. You might have to call technical support at your cell carrier for information on how to do it though. Can you imagine an army of truckers faxing Congress from their trucks? I think it would make them pretty uncomfortable.

I have one of the all-in-one AT&T phone deals at home where domestic long distance is included. I can send faxes for no extra cost. Since it ties up my phone line, I like to fax these kinds of letters at night: the office fax machines are usually left on for overnight faxes and they’re right there Johnny-on-the-spot first thing in the am. Many congressmen have several offices including the one in Washington. They keep in close contact with the home state offices so faxes sent there still count just as much as those sent to Washington. I also save the cost of the stamp, nice if I’m sending a whole bunch of faxes.

You can get the addresses and phone and fax numbers at these websites: Senate and House . Sometimes you have to dig around on your congressman’s website to find the fax numbers, but they’ll be there somewhere. Consider it a game of hide and seek; they’re hiding their information and you’re not gonna stop til you find it. The harder they make it to find, the more valuable you should consider it to be, don’t let them get away with it.

Other Ways to Get Their Attention: Become Proactive

Sign up for OOIDA’s daily email update, they send out a daily email with upcoming legislation and other trucking news. This might be the only warning you get before you’re faced with a new regulation you simply CAN’T live with! Its free, go to OOIDA.com.

I don’t subscribe to Transport Topics, the ATA’s newsletter, it’s too expensive. Instead, I sign up for their weekly email alerts. These are free and give you plenty of hints about what’s on their agenda. It will usually include the weekly “editorial” from some high mucky-muck at the ATA, or perhaps a lawyer with transportation issues, etc. These can be very enlightening, one talked about the need to loosen cabotage rules a while back. One a few years back talked about how much more money they could make with Mexican drivers. A couple of weeks ago, they had an editorial about the fact that, even as truck accidents were down, truck driver fatalities were up and ‘they just couldn’t figure out why’. I promptly fired off a letter to the editor about the fact that the driver fatalities rising might just have something to do with the fact that the new trucks will catch fire at the drop of a hat, even in a relatively minor crash and saying only the major carriers who were buying these fleet trucks could make changes. Next day, I got a call from the ATA offices, mostly wanting to know who I was. They professed to know nothing about more fires (“I know NOTHING!!!”-Colonel Klink ), but said the letter got their attention and they would print it and see if it got any response.

Now, you can’t tell me these major carriers who buy thousands of the orange and white and blue tractors of a certain model and brand don’t know they have a high incidence of fires. I told them that, in one day, two truck accidents within a hundred miles of me had both caught fire-and killed three drivers. I’m not dumb enough to believe they don’t know these things are happening, but it’s to their financial advantage to pretend they don’t. They’d rather have a cheap fleet than a driver-safe fleet. Saving fuel costs should not cost a driver’s life. Changes to the model, electronics and body composition would likely add a few thousand to the cost of the tractor. I think I’m worth it!

Same with this same model of truck and their notorious record of exhaust leakage into the cab. There have been several deaths and winning lawsuits for drivers’ families and yet, it’s the world’s biggest secret. That’s another thing they say they don’t know anything about. If you’re driving one of those killers and we all know which ones they are, it’s a good idea to hunt up one of those lawsuits for $4-5 million and print it off to keep handy the next time you have to get one of those recurring leaks fixed. You’d be surprised how far it goes toward having the shop put some real effort into finding the leak and making sure the fix is permanent.

Tomorrow, I’ll give you some more examples of how you can make an individual difference in how truckers are treated and how we can gain a voice in the changes coming down the tracks like a runaway train. Nobody’s going to do it for us, we have to stand up for ourselves.