Do anything often enough and there is a fair chance you’ll eventually get caught. Pete is a committed bachelor. He is a poster boy for unmarried men who have, in their eyes at least, avoided the plunge. He is unrepentant and unruly, free to act as he pleases. Not my words, they belong to Pete who regularly tells us the benefits of being ‘unattached’. A few brave enough to try have sought to pin him down. Some relationships have even lasted long enough to warrant Christmas presents, even marriage has been mooted before both the individual and the idea are quickly booted. In truth, no girl he has met and/or dated has ever matched up to his mum. That, however, is another story, which I won’t embellish on here. Nevertheless, for all is distaste of the holy sanctity of marriage Pete is a father. His son, for the sake of this tale we’ll call Paul, is now in his late 20s and is the result of a one-night stand. Yes, Pete slept with Paul’s mother once. Only a paternity test clarified that Pete was the father because he genuinely had no memory of her. Judging by the subsequent fireworks, she clearly wished she’d no memory of him either but, again, that is a story for another time. Pete was no stranger to one-night stands. His track record is, if he is to be believed, enviable. Phone calls from Hugh Hefner asking Pete to make a special guest appearance at the Playboy Mansion only stopped after a court injunction. Big Dave likened Pete’s conquests to smoking, and once coined the phrase: ‘If he had a fag for every slag, he’d be on 20 a day!’ Ignoring the non-politically correct element to that sentence, and the gross exaggeration, it was fairly accurate. Pete still drives, and no doubt still rolls his cigarettes while on the move. It is an acquired skill born out of practice and patience for anyone who enjoys a choke on the cheap. And it was Pete I thought of when I saw that Her Majesty’s Constabulary had, at great expense to the tax payer, caught a ‘lorry driver’ rolling a cigarette while on the move. Using an unmarked tractor unit borrowed from Highways England, law enforcement recorded incidents with a camera. Quoted in the Hartlepool Mail, Inspector Darren Breslin, from the Cleveland and Durham Specialist Operations Unit, said: ‘In cases where we see drivers putting lives at risk to roll a cigarette, it is exceptionally worrying. Vehicles such as heavy goods vehicles are significantly heavier and larger which mean that collisions could be more serious.’ He is, of course, right. Anyone who has witnessed the aftermath of a road traffic collision involving a truck will tell you it is horrific. Rolling a cigarette while driving is done countless times across the country by car, tractor, van and truck drivers. It is a momentary lack of concentration by the driver, often someone with decades of experience, that will go without incident, in most cases. It is no different to looking at your phone, using a CB, fiddling with the radio and/or CD, eating or drinking when you are driving. And there are plenty of cases where drivers have been caught in the aftermath of a major and fatal road traffic collision doing things they shouldn’t have been doing when they should have been concentrating. However, there is an increasing culture led by insurance companies that the driver be established as blameless. More cameras are being fitted into the cab and trained on the driver to try and influence their behaviour. Yes, its Big Brother. Yes, it’s constant supervision. And yes, it’s frustrating. But drivers need to be responsible. Even if it is something people have done since smoking and driving became inextricably linked at the finger tips it is still a loss of concentration when the eyes are on the paper and baccy and not on the road. Like the individual caught by the Police on the A19, Pete was also unlucky. His one-night stand led to 18 years’ worth of financial support to raise Paul. Pete, as he likes to tell us, subsequently got the snip so there would be no future ‘errors of judgement’ as he likes to call his son from time to time. And as Big Dave pointed out, the best way to avoid getting caught rolling cigarettes when driving is to quit smoking.
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Sometimes it takes a break from the hurly-burly of lorry driving to put things back on an even keel. Last year proved difficult. A job with a blue-chip company proved challenging with mismanagement and no accountability that led to my departure to a subsequent pre-Christmas stint on the agency. By New Year I’d had enough and sought something else, anything, to break what had been a downward spiral. I called it gardening leave, with an emphasis on landscaping. A friend runs a small landscaping business and was kind enough to employ me as a labourer. Moving the earth wasn’t something I was ever known for, just ask the first wife. Armed with a spade and wheelbarrow, plus a sack truck (the nearest I got to a truck in five months) my job was to move plants, turf, compost or mud to-and-from wherever the professionals were working. Stately homes, parks, council properties, retail sites… I got to see parts of the county I’ve lived in for more than 10 years I didn’t know existed. I got to go home every night, enjoy the benefits of hot water, eat a cooked meal every day, watch the telly, go out, relax with family and friends and recharge the batteries. I took up sudoku, reading, walking and cooking. My newfound world would be occasionally punctured by Big Dave phoning from a layby near Nantwich to complain about waiting time, or a text from Baz filled with expletives about traffic, and even Fossil called one Wednesday by accident (it was good to catch up). With former colleagues continuing their daily grind I asked myself why I would ever want to re-join the rat race? In truth I am too old for a career change and carrying plants to people half my age three times a week isn’t going to pay enough to keep me in pints and pies. No, it was back to the open road. I landed a job at a timber merchants driving a 26 tonner. It’ll do, for now. And let’s face it, it is a sellers’ market. Where once a driver left another would be waiting to take their seat has slowly evaporated. During my time at the coalface a whole generation of people have not chosen road haulage. The lack of career development, inadequate working conditions, meagre wages, the need to attain the illusive “two years’ experience” behind the wheel and an intimidating workplace bereft of proper management or supervision will, surprisingly, put people off. This so-called ‘driver shortage’ has been growing instead, a useful phrase uttered by management to paper over the cracks of their own inept complicity. Lorry driving is a job, like teaching, nursing, plumbing or landscaping. A job that requires training and a qualification, and that carries responsibility. For lorry drivers it is to look after and operate expensive pieces of machinery and the freight it carries, to know and adhere to complex rules, to drive safely, ensuring the safety of other road users. It is a skilled job that requires suitable recompense to differentiate them from the unskilled, with satisfactory terms and conditions from their employer and to be treated with fairness, consistency and respect. I have long argued that there is no ‘driver shortage’ but a shortage of decent employers. There is little sign that will change; where I work now, there are three trucks and eight qualified drivers, four of which work in the yard or behind the counter, with one now the depot manager. That is four qualified drivers who do not drive. I haven’t asked why, but they don’t seem to be in any hurry to pick up the keys again, not even for the wagon in the yard. My new employer seems fair enough, they make all the right noises and with an ex-wagon driver in charge of the depot, what can possibly go wrong? Hauliers and logistic companies need to change the way they do business if it is stop haemorrhaging lorry drivers. Who is looking out for lorry drivers in this day and age? Often I am told it is the Road Haulage Association (RHA). Like a cheap suit, the RHA has been all over television and radio during the past 18 months, with its leader Richard Burnett and wingman Rod McKenzie issuing proclamations of woe. They have been;
My view is that hauliers have only themselves to blame. Transport is cheap and they are the ones who made it cheap. Rates are cut to the bone. The industry is oversubscribed so if Two-a-Penny Transport won’t do the work, Cheaper-than-chips Haulage will. Hauliers have fought each other tooth and nail in a race to the bottom and only now, when there's a crisis, does the business model show its faults. At no point has the RHA questioned hauliers over the practice of operating paper-thin profit margins, or still using ‘month-end and 45 days’ payment terms to subbies but factoring invoices for early payment, or trimming tax-deductible benefits, or using credit to plug holes in operational costs, or franchise haulage agreements where the primary source of work (the franchiser) starves its abundant but third-party fleet (the franchisees) of work without compensation. I’ll say it again; transport is cheap and hauliers are the ones who made it cheap. I know it’s not advisable to bite the hand that feeds you but if you are going to act as the voice of the road transport industry on television and radio you cannot cherry-pick the debates that suit you best. Lorry drivers are walking away from the industry in their hundreds and hauliers are the ones responsible for that. Working conditions, demands on the driver, long hours with poor pay, and lack of support is what creates so many vacancies. Employers need to look again, and not simply ‘carry on trucking’ because school-leavers are not interested in the social, physical and mental demands of the job. Work patterns needs to change; a decent wage, four-on-four-off, shorter journeys, larger and smarter warehousing with wider consolidation are all areas that can improve the job. No, it’s not cheap but transport shouldn’t be cheap. It should be properly funded and properly policed, and that cost paid for by the customers and clientele who needs their goods moved from A-to-B. It would create the sort of environment that would retain older disillusioned drivers and attract younger people too. Even in the cutthroat world of road haulage an operator is only as good as their word, as illustrated by a contract win undermined by its failure to invest in the infrastructure. Two drivers refused to leave the yard, another didn’t show up. Desperate and with the clock ticking the transport manager was shouting Anglo-Saxon expletives across the fixed tables of the ‘driver’s restroom’ at employees in-between futile efforts on the blower to persuade agencies to send anyone available, no matter what the cost.
And therein lay the problem. We, the employees labelled as ‘lorry drivers’, are paid a competitive wage and do our jobs to the best of our ability while others receive a handsome reward for doing the same thing. Money is an emotive issue. It forces us to react and often be willing to evoke a change in our professional circumstances. The grass on the other side of the fence isn’t always greener. At the start of 2018 the company picked up a ‘contract’. Usually this means drivers coming over under TUPE, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006. However, the bulk of the work carried out by the former contractor had been subbed to third parties because they couldn’t recruit enough drivers, so the usual flood of fresh meat proved to be little more than a trickle. For reasons beyond my pay-grade my employer put an end to the sub-contracted work and began to switch storage from ‘there’, although it kept some trucks onsite for local employees, to ‘here’ where my employer had spare capacity in its warehousing operation. Realisation my employer couldn’t cope with the extra work showed up in changes to our working week. Much of the trunking work was given to subbies, the current posse of lorry drivers were switched across to plug the yawning gap; more tramping with less day work. The four-on-four-off drivers found themselves on five-three and six-two combinations. Drivers became tetchy. Whatever my employer promised its new client it has struggled to deliver on that promise. Loads are frequently late, genuine mistakes are made in haste. For example; I drove 48 miles with the wrong trailer. The paperwork said I had the right trailer. The transport office kicked off. I was rerouted. The ‘right’ paperwork was emailed to the regional distribution centre. When I arrived, security looked at the paperwork and said I had the wrong delivery address. I pointed out the right delivery note had been emailed to ‘Goods In’. Security didn’t know about the email and wasn’t about to investigate. Four hours later I was sent back to the yard where I’d started because the consignment had been ‘rescheduled’. Not the end of the world but it’s no way to run a business. Local employment agencies routed as many drivers as they could spare, without putting all their eggs in one basket. A recruitment campaign aimed at the ‘young uns’ yielded just two lorry drivers; one left after three days and the other after a fortnight, both by mutual consent. Others that came in were a handful of retired or 'doing something else' drivers. They’d get the more local work, so they’d be back at the yard by nightfall. Existing employees on days found themselves on long haul with nights out, usually at short notice. Drivers became disgruntled. With it being a sellers’ market these guys cashed in. ‘Pat’ spent one afternoon explaining how much money he was getting. First it was a set fee; £150 for an odd day shift. Pat would then go back to his 9-to-5 as a painter and decorator that usually pays between £80 and £100 a day. Another phone call by a desperate transport manager, an apology by the painter and decorator as he was busy, more money offered by the desperate transport manager; ‘oh, go on then, for £200 I’ll do it’. The transport manager has clearly been given authority to pay more than the going rate. A week later a desperate transport manager and the painter and decorator negotiated a £250 fee for a day’s work. The most Pat got for a day shift was £320 for working a Tuesday after a phone call got him out of bed at 5am. Pat’s attentive audience got very pissed off. Pat was not alone. Several retired and ex-drivers would make themselves available for two or three days a week in-between taking a Learjet to the Seychelles to top the tan up. Without even attempting to verify Pat’s daily rate, a few phoned to the transport office to have it out. It is currently a toxic environment and what was a decent job has turned to effluent. How do the Range Rover driving senior management team do it? They have taken on a contract, promised the earth and left it to the transport office to try and make it work without bolstering the fleet or the number of drivers. Employees are unhappy. Transport office is run ragged. Senior management smoke cigars. Lorry drivers have always been expendable and even now, with the obvious lack of working lorry drivers available, it transpires we, the employees labelled as ‘lorry drivers’, are still viewed as superfluous. A lorry driver going through a disciplinary requires support otherwise it can be used as an easy way to offload employees. My current job is clean and straightforward without pushing the boundaries for driving hours or the working time directive. A comfortable gig that pays well enough not to go looking, but the Devil makes work for idle hands.
Over tea and buns our tightknit band of ‘cargo chauffeurs’ plotted and schemed against, well, I’m not sure what. My guess is working, or even driving. The tail began to wag the dog. Management knew this, but it lacked the structure and leadership to deal with it. Director of operations turned a blind eye, a lukewarm humans sources manager and ineffective transport manager (I know, not your average haulage business) also ignored the unchallenged malcontents as there was no tangible issue; i.e. the goods got delivered. The more the drivers moaned the more efforts were made to placate the workforce. Eventually the boss’s patience snapped. Changes were made and in walked the new transport manager, Fletch. His remit was simple; divide and conquer. I still develop a nervous twitch when I consider under what circumstances Fletch became so battle-hardened. We guessed at military, or political activism, or growing up in Chard (a town where ‘even holidaying Glaswegians avoid’) He didn’t two-face anyone, what you saw was what you got; a bite first ask questions later approach to management. Naturally intimidating he made Malcolm Tucker appear polite. Word occasionally seeped out from the transport planning office of many orchestrated campaigns to remove people he didn’t like. If anyone left, he revelled in having got rid of them, even if he hadn’t. His primary target was a core of lorry drivers who were disruptive, but it brought collateral damage too. Therefore, it was inevitable from the moment that Baz fell out with Fletch he was in trouble. It started innocuously enough with a misunderstanding over time and place; two key principals in the supply chain. Baz stood his ground as did the transport manager. Cooler heads might have prevailed but there weren’t any in the room. A ‘disciplinary meeting’ letter was handed to him the following Friday scheduled for Monday, regarding his conduct with a written warning or dismissal on the cards. Baz was, and probably still is, as belligerent as they come whose bark is worse than his bite. However, Baz, like the rest of us, saw the meeting as a formality and he did not seek counsel. He merely showed up to argue the toss. Had he sought advice and brought supporting evidence from his erstwhile colleagues and had a representative in the room, things might have turned out differently. Instead, according to Baz, Fletch read the riot act flanked by a quivering wreck of a human resources manager and an impotent director of operations. Baz was dismissed with immediate effect. Baz argued over the initial misunderstanding. Fletch ignored that and pursued issues like punctuality, reliability and his conduct with the transport office (threatening behaviour was cited) to support his case that Baz was a liability the company could do without. At the Working Men’s Club Baz threatened physical and legal reprisals but instead he got a job down the road and all was forgotten. Had Baz valued his job, he should have gone in prepared. For example, the transport manager was abrasive with little personal skills that stage-managed unnecessary discord, often the work rota made errors that were pinned on driver rather than the software, and there was no process to file an aggrievance or a ‘I told you so’ if the driver was proved right. Baz didn’t even take a perfunctory note of the conversation, we don’t even know if he was given the opportunity to put his case and answer the allegations made against him. Had we understood what he was facing I like to think his former colleagues might have come out in support of Baz, after all, we were the ones left with Fletch. Over 18 months drivers were terrorised, every mistake scrutinised, and every line of corporate reasoning emphasised, all in print. I kept my head down, and avoided, mostly, the scrutiny of Fletch. Others like Baz were not so fortunate. In all five of the seven of the drivers who left went through the disciplinary process were sacked. The two survivors went in with external support and evidence and retained their jobs. Others merely handed in their notice, and not all had jobs to go to. By my reckoning half of the drivers left during that period. That may seem nothing compared to other places with a high turnover, but these drivers left because they couldn’t cope with the way they were being treated. When the boss struggled to recruit he showed some backbone and made more changes. An application to join the Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme (FORS) brought welcome management procedures. Out went the director of operations and the human resources manager, while Fletch was put on ‘gardening leave’. The atmosphere improved instantly. Volvo Trucks is celebrating 25 years of the FH; I remember my first drive of the all-new Swedish behemoth because it coincided with several other ‘firsts’. I don’t remember the 1990s fondly. Between jobs and enduring my first divorce, I hunkered down for a bit in the home counties, hoping to enjoy the life of a single man with weekend custody of two children more than a two-hour drive away.
Hangovers were punctured by moments of lucidity that were distorted by an inner pain I couldn’t suppress; rejection. I won’t lie. It remains the lowest point of my underwhelming, futile, paid-by-the-hour life spent mostly in the first lane. Like all those suddenly cut adrift I did my best to keep me and my mind occupied, so for the first time in my life I became an ‘agency driver’. I signed up with Naz, the owner of a Driver Hire franchise near Heathrow. For a while he became a welcome surrogate partner, who’d phone all hours asking me to do a nightshift or work the weekend, even though I wanted day work and couldn’t work weekends. He was persistent if nothing else. “Think of the money,” he’d repeat after I’d said I was unavailable. During the summer of 1996 he offered me a day’s work for a haulage company based off the A4 in West London. They had a precious cargo that needed to be delivered to Cheltenham and then Reading. I would have a chaperone; not in the cab but in an unmarked police car; a blue Ford Sierra with Bodie and Doyle sat inside. A proper first. Another first was the chance to drive a Volvo FH12. A bluey/purple, slightly mucky 4x2, low-roof tractor unit attached to a tandem axle box trailer was parked up ready to go. I’d never seen one up close. It looked very different to its competitors; a narrow grille and narrow windscreen on the front of a long aerodynamic arc made it look very un-British. The ‘firsts’ came thick and fast; a seat with air-suspension, a ‘Driver Information System’ with a trip computer, air conditioning and ‘walnut’ trim. I feigned indifference. The transport manager questioned my knowledge about the wagon and demonstrated the cruise control option, the first truck I’d driven with such technology. The cab was clean, and still had that ‘new’ smell even though it had clocked more than 100,000kms. It was well looked after. The trailer was loaded, padlocked and my police escort was waiting. I hopped in, inserted the tacho disc down through the top of the dashboard (another first) and fired it up. It also sounded different; like a muffled drumbeat on a keyboard sped up. I liked it. I launched cruise control heading up the M40 towards Oxford, my right foot becoming idle. Limiters had just been introduced, so trucks were inching along at similar speeds. I rose and fell on the seat with its air-suspension much like Lester Piggott in the Grand National. I searched for a dampener without joy. In the mirror the Sierra remained a constant presence. It all felt…weird. The 420hp 12.1-litre engine worked effortlessly. I worked the 12-speed three-over-three range-change/splitter with due care and attention. The four-over-four had been my bread and butter but then so had marriage. Earlier that week Naz had me on a job that involved driving to Leeds in an ERF EC10 with a twin-splitter. The difference between these two trucks was noteworthy. At Cheltenham I backed close to the doors of a business unit and the manager, I knew he was the manager because it said so on a small lapel badge, scurried out. “You’re late, you are late, you’re late,” he said combing anxiety with a shortness of breath. Dressed in smart-casual Bodie and Doyle emerged from the Sierra. They looked on as the store manager got a key from his pocket and opened the padlock. The door rolled up to reveal boxes on pallets. Bodie glanced up and down the road and gestured for us to hurry up before sparking up a Superkings. We then proceeded to unload eight pallets containing the new Liverpool home and away kit for the 1996-97 season. The club had switched kit supplier from Adidas to Reebok; it was yet to be launched. Word was out that it was a ‘high risk’ load, explained Doyle. “First, I’d heard of it,” I said coolly. Doyle caught my eye and nodded. It unnerved me. By the time I kicked on to Reading ‘cool’ had been replaced by ‘fear’. I panicked every time a car slowed down in front of me or tried to overtake. I lapped a roundabout twice, copying something I’d seen from an espionage film. From the driver’s seat Sierra Doyle gave me a few hand gestures suggesting I get on with it. At Reading another man with a key in his pocket opened the back door of the trailer, and once the remaining pallets were unloaded Bodie and Doyle left without so much as a by your leave. The run back was uneventful; I toyed with the cruise control and found the dampener on the seat, so each bump wasn’t like trying to jump Becher's Brook. I relaxed and enjoyed it. When I got back the yard was shut. I parked up and put the keys through a letterbox and went home. Naz called me later about a nightshift. Two days later I spent 15 hours on the south coast delivering carpets in a Ford Cargo. The state of toilets available to the itinerant lorry driver leaves little to the imagination. I pride myself on being fairly robust. My nostrils can cope with most things and my stomach rarely turns. Ideal traits for any budding lorry driver (see ‘pissing in the wind’).
Unfortunately, my memory also likes to conjure mental images of things seen with my eyes and will occasionally conduct a slideshow of things I’d rather forget while at the same time conveniently overlooking why I ventured into the kitchen with an alarm clock. Flashbacks are often triggered by a specific event. For example, if I venture into any ‘every little helps’ supermarket a cerebral slideshow of a toilet at a regional distribution centre (RDC) who house goods for the ‘blue stripe’ retailer vividly reappears. That ‘incident’ happened more than five years ago, and yet I cannot shake it. Having got through the security gate where even having the right paperwork is no guarantee of entry, then parked up on the correct bay and strolled via the marked out footpath to the ‘driver’s hub’ to hand in the paperwork and keys, I was left with a choice of plastic chairs, an ‘out of order’ vending machine and Sky News on mute. After a few moments watching Kay Burley’s lips move in silence my intestines twitched slightly, and my attention turned to the wooden (I say wooden, its MDF really with a lacquered wood-effect veneer but let’s not quibble) door in the corner marked ‘toilets’. My erstwhile colleague Big Dave, who I meet occasionally at weekends, is (currently) married to a former nurse. She likes to tell stories of how many nurses suffered from problems linked to urine retention. She blamed understaffing. Unable to take a break during a shift, let alone go for a slash, it meant nurses would ‘hold it in’ for hours on end. As lorry drivers it’s something we know well, especially if we’re pushed for time. Holding onto wee leads to infections, she explained, and overstretching the ‘external sphincter muscles’ (her words not mine) that hold back the golden shower will eventually mean losing control of the bladder. Her stories usually include a graphic description of weak bladders in action; ‘the gates opened’, ‘flooded two wards’ and/or ‘up to our ankles in shandy’. Likewise, resisting the urge to deliver a load can lead to problems with the bowel. Holding on to waste products for extended periods also leads to infection, constipation and inflammation. Just ask the most famous lorry driver of them all, Elvis Presley. Big Dave’s wife doesn’t see it as an indignity but merely a way of the body telling you things aren’t working properly. Anyway, it’s clear to me I need the toilet. Armed with intestinal fortitude I opened the door to discover…another door. Behind that door was hell. At this point I considered going into the detail, however, I cannot do it justice. Perhaps an analogy serves better. Imagine, if you will a pile of shit and you standing knee deep in it. Yes, that about sums it up. My eyes quickly watered to reduce the stinging, I stopped breathing once the smell hit my nostrils and my legs began to cramp up. I went numb. It was like an anaesthetic. I backed out before I passed out and almost fell backwards into the waiting room, then I headed out for what passed as fresh air and I was actually reprimanded by the ‘goods in’ clerk for going outside. It took me several minutes to come back to my senses. I imagine this is how people recover from major surgery. Someone in a suit appeared, as if by magic, as I lean against the wall. I half expected him to show me another door that led to a changing room. He asked me what I am doing. “Holding the building up, pal,” I offered up as I caught my breath. “You cannot be out here,” he replied with a hint of aggression. “It’s a working yard, it’s against the health and safety rules for the site.” I am not in a position to argue, partly because I need to get the pallets off the trailer and the paperwork signed off, so I can get across town and reload. The boss wouldn’t be happy if I was thrown off site before that happened. However, I make the shopkeeper wait until I am good and ready to go back in. My experience is one shared by lorry drivers via hundreds of social media posts. Toilet facilities afforded to lorry drivers are disgraceful. Each one reminds me of that hellhole I encountered, and the story is the same every time; the lorry driver is ignored, their needs are overlooked, and no respect is given. Things need to change. My suggestion is simple; lorry drivers are visitors to a site. Like all visitors, whether they be an executive or the chauffeur, they need to be treated with respect and given access to basic amenities. You should not have to battle with warehouse staff or security over ablutions. But as George Orwell illustrated in Animal Farm; “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” HAULAGE HEADLINES Making sense of senseless sense
LEAD STORY POLICE HUNT MICHELIN MAN THE Metropolitan Police is on the hunt for former marketing icon that is Michelin Man. Police say the pallid ribbed rubber tyre man has not been seen recently and they are concerned as to his whereabouts. Police have warned the public not to approach the 125-year-old who official debuted as a mascot of the Michelin tyre company in 1894 at the Lyon Exhibition. . Instead of placing all the emphasis on the lorry driver and operator to enhance safety, the DfT and Mayor of London must make changes the road network to improve cycle safety. Cycling and lorries. Everyone has an opinion. No one is right. everyone is right. Only Brexit is more divisive.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has put the onus on to haulage operators to meet the new direct vision standard (DVS). That’s another debate for another day but clearly a level of direct vision for the driver to the cyclist would improve matters. Construction vehicles appear to be the focus with a high seating position making blind spots significantly larger. Justification for DVS is damning statistics that show trucks were involved in 22.5% of pedestrian fatalities and 58% of cyclist fatalities on London’s roads in 2014 and 2015, despite only making 4% of total road miles driven. While low entry cabs and transparent passenger’s doors are steps in the right direction, in truth the Mayor of London can and should do a lot more. Two areas to focus on is separating cyclists from traffic and adding traffic lights specifically for cyclists. In cities across the European Union cyclists are separated from traffic at every conceivable opportunity. In France, roundabouts have a cycle lane going around the outside to separate bikes for motorised vehicles. This small degree of separation means motorists know where cyclists should be, and cyclists can tackle roundabouts with full vision of adjacent traffic even if they are making for the third exit. In Holland cyclists get their own traffic lights that work in turn with motorised traffic. In really congested areas cyclists get their own lane complete with a traffic light system that allows cyclists to criss-cross roads and roundabouts in turn with vehicles. And its traffic lights that present a real problem, especially if it’s a section of road with several sets of lights. It’s commonplace for an intersection with traffic lights to have the green painted bike zone down the nearside and in front of the stationary traffic. In good old Blighty, and especially in London, I have no doubt that road planners believe a visible zone at lights ahead of the vehicles at traffic lights work. First, when on red, cyclists swarm and congregate the vehicles. When the lights go green cyclists set off at different speeds forcing vehicles to either go around or set off slowly waiting for the cyclists to sort themselves out. An accelerating truck might pass all the cyclists before coming to a halt 500m down the road at the next set of lights. And so, the mobile Tetris begins again. The danger is repeated again and again. At lights more, lorry drivers are protecting themselves by stopping closer to the curb and forcing cyclists to go around the outside to pass. Cyclists are forced to go around a stationary object and into view of the driver, sit tight behind the vehicle in question, or mount the curb and plonk themselves back onto the road in front accompanied by some sign of annoyance. Driving through any city is tough; traffic lights, roundabouts, one-way systems, limited parking, fast-moving traffic, pedestrians, cyclists. There is a lot for the driver to take in. Forcing low entry cabs onto operators will help but this measure needs strengthening with commitment from the Mayor, TfL and GLA to contribute. Separating cyclists from traffic is a priority, and traffic lights for cyclists are a must – changing road infrastructure will cost money but unless his does something all the Mayor of London has done is delegate responsibility and transfer liability with the least amount of effort. Lorry drivers suffer from déjà vu more than most people, whether it be the same road, the same conversation or the same food yet the one that grates the most is being held up at a delivery site. Unlike many deliveries to warehouses, this one requires me to unload the trailer. After lining up 26 pallets of a popular household product into two neat rows I help ‘Liam’, a young warehouse operative with greasy hair and fresh acne, check the contents. Considering the load consists of 2,912 identical items this shouldn’t take long...
Liam inspects the delivery note. It has one line on it, hardly War and Peace. Liam awkwardly brushes aside his fringe then draws a handheld device from his hip with a speed that won’t have troubled Clint Eastwood. Liam sets off along the first line of pallets scanning barcodes. Liam suddenly stops midway to chat to a co-worker, both then wander off somewhere. When Liam returns sometime later Liam starts scanning the first pallet again. “Everything OK,” I ask. Liam abandons the scanning and over the next few minutes I discover that Liam wouldn’t invite fellow employees to join him in the pub, and if his management team ran a pub everyone would all be sober. The equipment – like his handheld scanner – rarely works, the company is understaffed and underpaid, and everyone who started when he did have already left. I’d have settled for a ‘no’. “When did you start?” I ask. “Two months ago,” Liam replies. After a pause I offer my own recent involvement with his employer: “I’ve only been here for seven hours.” This delay is the latest of several in the past couple of weeks, I want to tell Liam that I’d been holed up in a windowless room in Hatfield for three hours, ignored in a waiting room in Derby for two hours, told to come back later (no actual time given) by security at an RDC in Bristol, and sat in my cab for two hours and 43 minutes in Glasgow before being told to back onto a loading bay and then to wait for another two. I want to scream at Liam that I wasted a 15-hour spread over and didn’t even get to register a split rest. In each case I kept my end of the bargain and arrived on time. Yet it seems indicative that the driver’s time is treated with the least importance even though within the intricate chain that binds the movement of goods it is only the much-maligned driver who is restricted by time and motion, as defined by law. Alright, I’ve ignored Working Time Directive, which is another anguish altogether. In waiting rooms across the UK truck drivers take a break from watching porn on their phones to buy crisps and coffee from vending machines, some are lucky enough to use flushed toilets and ignore the continuous loop of a muted Sky News predicting doom on flat screen TVs. Most drivers get this once a day, sometimes twice. The amount of time lost to delays reduces driving time but increases each shift. How many times have you lost a precious 15-hour day, while not even getting close to nine hours driving let alone 10? Drivers are human beings; they’re not impervious to the crippling frustration caused by poorly run RDCs unable to keep its own schedule, only to have salt scrubbed into the wound by indifferent staff. Perhaps the best way around it is to see it for what it really is; a colossal joke. Some executive somewhere in an air-conditioned office overlooking an expanse of concrete is chuckling away at the pain caused to unseen victims. At one site a bored driver loudly threatened a dirty protest if the goods in desk didn’t buck up its ideas only to have another driver point out it would be difficult to make the toilets at this RDC any worse. Instead he threatens to clean the toilet, ‘have it sparkling so you could your dinner off it’, sort out the plumbing, provide soap and toilet roll, enter it in Britain’s Got Talent as an actual working toilet in an RDC and then piss all over the floor. The recipient of the trucker’s indignation merely shrugged, before shouting: “BAY 34”. A trucker bounded across the waiting room, collected the truck keys and signed paperwork then left in a hurry. The rest bite created by a potentially clean toilet dissipated, drivers got back to their phones and Googled ‘MILF’. Mention prolonged waiting times to a driver and most shrug declaring that they don’t care as they’re paid by the hour. Unless it’s Friday, then they have an opinion... Liam didn’t seem the sympathetic type, so l left him to battle on with his scanner. He swore a few times and disappeared again before reappearing with another one and starting again. |
AuthorAging proletariat with face, teeth and body to prove it. Archives
August 2021
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