Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

I’ve heard many arguments about the fuel price crisis lately. We’ve all received quite an education on oil and it’s effect on the economy. I was quite surprised to find out something new from a Hollywood type like Ben Stein. He was on Glenn Beck discussing the oil scams and debating how we could become oil independent if the will was there.

He commented that Germany ran out of oil when their supplies were cut off in World War II. Under dire circumstances and heavy bombardment, they still managed to have plentiful supply of synthetic oil from coal. Here’s a long-winded link about how they did it. I found it very interesting that home heating oil and diesel make up 90% of the content when the oil is extracted. Sure, it’s not easy or cheap, and the Germans had a plentiful supply of slave labor, but it wasn’t difficult enough to slow their war machine.

If the Germans could do this back then under bad circumstances, what is our hold back to switching technologies now? I’m not saying coal is the total answer, I’m thinking that we have the technology to use coal and numerous other sources, other than just ethanol, to come up with a solution that works well. Like Ben said, the will just is not there. The will was never there at any other time that a supply crisis was claimed either.

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This is the first large carrier I’ve noticed to go under. It’s largest creditors were T-Check and a fuel company, so I’m assuming fuel prices played a major part. I hope other preventable factors played a major role, but I would not suspect it.  I don’t know too much about Jevic, but they appeared to be a strong company.

I talked to one of their drivers about a year ago and he really liked working for them. He had a reefer LTL deal that was making money for him. I would not have suspected a company involved with LTL and refrigerated to be one of the first big companies to file.

There are plenty of links all over the web about this, but I found this one interesting. What other industry that is non-union would have “so what” type of comments from people? You know out of 3,000 people there are at least quite a few hard working people that have just everything pulled out from underneath of them. Most will find another job quickly, but their health insurance and other benefits are gone, and gone in the blink of an eye with no warning. It will probably have an adverse effect on their customers and their employees too.

I have to wonder how many more companies will follow suit and I would really like to know the details of what went wrong with them. I’m sure I’m not alone.  It worries me about the economy overall. Jevic had over 5,000 creditors with the largest debt being over $1.5 million! Wow. If more companies do follow suit, that is a huge wake to leave behind.

I fear this may be bigger than previous market “adjustments” where weaker companies go under. No need for a strike if this keeps going, there will be plenty of involuntary strikers out there.

I should not have checked the news today. It looks like an economic doomsday if you believe it all. I usually don’t believe it, but then you see news like this. Other fuel dependent business, such as airlines, are starting to scream for relief and making drastic changes also. Time will soon tell if Jevic just had common industry problems or if others are on the brink of disaster also.

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I remember first hearing about the ATA in truck driving school. The instructor told us that they were for trucking companies, not drivers. I just forgot about them as I thought he was just saying that’s an associations for owners. Then I noticed all large companies are members. Then I noticed any company associated with them destroyed many careers and always had a bad reputation. Now I was starting to dislike them.

I have been learning more and more about them as I try to figure out what drives the industry to support legislation that is harmful to it’s own well being. The trucking industry seems to me like child that will beat it’s head on the floor when it’s mad. The more I learn about what drives the poor legislation, the more I uncover about the ATA. Bad things, like speed governers and DAC, just seem to point to the American Trucking Assocation everytime. Most truckers are well aware that the ATA is bad for the industry, but I don’t think we all understand the extent.

First and foremost, it’s ran by a pure politician, CEO Bill Graves. The guy’ has important guy hair and all, but does he know trucking? Alright, the hair thing is a cheap shot, but how many trucks has the leader of the self-proclaimed “association with the most clout” driven? He’s got a hell of a record for human resource management, but its the American Trucking Association, not so much need for HR guy to solve the companies trucking ills. Would an HR person be happy that a trucker was involved in legislation concerning Human Resources?

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All that we here about are the losers in the high fuel price situation. I came across this article and it caused me to think about who the winners are going to be.

Last week, his employer, Walkenhorst Transportation of Lee’s Summit, Mo., reset the maximum speed of his rig to 68 miles per hour from 75 to squeeze out a few extra miles per gallon. While he can still reach most posted speed limits, it now takes an extra 45 minutes to complete the 641-mile daily round-trip hauling auto parts from Nashville, Ill., to a Ford plant in Kansas City. That means Montgomery must leave home at 8:45 a.m. instead of 9:30 — with no extra pay.

So, the public is a winner in a safety aspect. We are running slower. My truck is now governed where previously it was my decision on how fast to run. Drivers are going to lose money in the short run, but my opinion is that my overall productivity is higher when I run reasonable speeds, it’s less stress.

“This is going to put every small trucking company out of business,” he said, filling his truck with $482 of fuel at the Mr. Fuel station off Interstate 70 in Foristell.

ATA companies rejoice. I haven’t heard any complaints from them about fuel yet. No longer will they have to worry about the little guy undercutting them and taking the drivers that they trained. I’ve even seen them taking over union jobs with private companies. Krogers grocery chains used to have highly coveted union trucking jobs that are now gone to U.S. Express. Granted high employee costs played a bigger role, but fuel is going to push the remainders out.

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I got an e-mail today from a website concerning uniting truck drivers. It’s interesting that someone can try something like uniting a group on the Internet, but this was annoying. The e-mail was requesting trucking related website owners to unite with him on the quest to have bigger and “more effective” strikes.

My website is simply a site for information about technology to inform truck drivers about what is out there to help us succeed. Now why would I put something on there to help them fail by doing something stupid like stopping their truck?

The e-mail had a bad tone to it, using clichés like “CB Rambo, get over it, etc.” Here’s a sample from it -

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I enjoy digital photography while on the road, maybe more than most. It’s a great pastime for truckers because we always have something different around us for a subject. Family and friends get a better idea of what we do out here when they have a visual to look at too. The cost is relatively low and cameras that shoot RAW format photos are coming well within the casual amateur’s price range. I will explain this odd format that is starting to raise questions among casual users.

When I started reading about RAW, it sounded like a file format for professionals only. You need special software and only higher end cameras would write these files, so I assumed I didn’t need it for what I was doing. I was wrong. The only difficult parts of shooting RAW format photos is taking the extra time to convert the files when you load them to the computer and learning the software that converts them.

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There is much debate with Linux concerning it’s usability for common people. The install pretty much puts folks into 2 categories - the Linux sucks crowd and the Linux is awesome crowd. I would be in the Linux sucks crowd.

The reason Linux sucks is that nothing works easily and you have to relearn computing. I have things I want to do on the computer and configuring the computer is never on the list. Right from the install you will have problems and you’re only reasonable resolve is to go to forums and search. If you ask any uneducated questions they’ll tell you to read the manual and that you lack intelligence. The “manual” is a mind-boggling reference that is as loosely put together with non-descript terminology as the forums. It’s not that Linux itself sucks, it’s that it is a highly unfinished project. It works great once you jump through enough hoops to make it work. If you can get a piece of software to work in Linux, the performance gains will make you want to forget about Microsoft, even when you’re using Microsoft programs on Linux.

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Buske Lines and S.C. Johnson employees have been caught in the type of scam I have only heard rumors of. Here the link to the news story.

Every large company I’ve worked for always has strange deals that you only hear rumors of. I’ve heard of trucking companies taking contracts at a loss just to get the contract. It makes no sense, until you learn about a large company doing back room deals with employees at another large company. I suspect many are involved with this type of business, Buske just was caught.

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Adding your photos to a blog post, web page, ebay, etc. can be a little tricky. You cannot just upload the image file that comes right from the camera because the file size is to large to be practical. You need to downsize the image with Photoshop, Gimp, or other photo editing software. It’s time consuming and sometimes you do not get the desired results. There’s an easy way to have near perfect web ready photos and it’s free. Read the rest of this entry »

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I found this article concerning the use of high-tech for dispatching interesting. Even smaller companies are realizing the value of technology in trucking. However, they only realize it from a dispatch point of view.

For less than the cost of one truck, this company has upgraded their ability to service customers and keep track of shipments. I would guess they will see a return on investment very quickly.

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