The road transport industry needs to promote the positives it brings rather than hammer home the tired ‘without trucks you get nothing’ message that predict doom and gloom. Lorry drivers are on the frontline. They are the ones who deal with customers on a day-to-day basis.
They are ‘ambassadors’ for their employer. Not important enough to carry an endless supply of extravagantly wrapped crunchy hazelnut surrounded by a creamy hazelnut filling with a crisp wafer shell covered with chocolate and gently roasted pieces of hazelnut, but important enough not to act like an arse. Big Dave once found this out to his cost. He lambasted a forklift driver who put a stack of empty pallets on his trailer in a less-than-careful manner only to find the forklift driver was also the sole shareholder of the burgeoning wholesale business empire where Big Dave had just delivered. But it’s not just there where lorry drivers are front and central, it is also out on the road. An urban myth exists that a particular green-and-red-chip business missed out on a major contract because one of its drivers took verbal issue with the driving skills of the CEO of a renowned retail supplier. Of course, no one knows if that is really true but it serves as a warning. The more common tinderbox is the fleeting one with the general public out on the open road. Interaction with a tax-paying member of the community stuck behind a truck or has one right them behind only requires a small incident for it to serve as a permanent reminder as to why they loathe lorries and the people that drive them. I spent a period of my life ferrying the eldest offspring to the swimming pool. There, mingling with people from other walks of life, I had a ‘debate’ with another parent over ‘lorries’ and how she saw them as a ‘bloody nuisance’. She regularly battled trucks up and down a dual carriageway on her way to work. This often made her late, and irascible, every morning, she explained. I didn’t go down the ‘without trucks you’d have nothing’ route. Our conversation ended abruptly when I suggested she sets off earlier. Now outed as a lorry driver other parents would occasionally raise the topic of lorries-and-why-I-hate-them with me; one had witnessed a road rage incident with a lorry driver, another parent had been carved up by a truck and another had watched a lorry driver dump their rubbish out of the window including a bottle of what he thought was ‘cider’. It is difficult to defend these situations, and in fact I don’t recall that I did. Like all road users, lorry drivers make mistakes and poor decisions in equal measure. The difference is that they do it in something huge often with a name and a telephone number on it. And, of course, there are some truckers who don’t care what anyone thinks of them and no amount of peer pressure, training or sage advice will make them change their ways. I’ve known drivers spend the summer trying to wobble caravans by overtaking closely and then swerving to create a draft strong enough to cause untold mayhem, others enjoy brake-testing cars, while one wagon driver collected plastic bottles, fill them with mock-cider and lobbed them casually at people or passing cars. Yes, these people exist and drive lorries. And I have not been immune from upsetting other road users and no doubt have gone someway to form or entrench any harden views that lorry drivers and lorries are little more than a hindrance to society. If the road haulage is to change its perception, then it has to do more than merely tick a box for training or put a ‘without trucks you’d have no clothes’ sticker on the back of a trailer. Driver behaviour can be controlled, to a degree, with in-cab cameras; more operators are using this approach and seeing the benefits. Tired messages about ‘without trucks you’d be sitting on the floor’ have never resonated with the general public because they do not link (or care to link) the things they buy with how it arrives in the shop. Affiliate groups, trade bodies and associations that claim to represent our industry need to expand their horizons beyond the membership and the wider haulage bubble and be positive. Get out there, campaign to the general public, push the benefits of haulage and logistics as a career, explain how it shapes society, show how the just-in-time movement of goods work and how technology is used to help make the industry greener and more sustainable. I genuinely believe that those who continue to hammer out the ‘without trucks you’d die slowly because you’d starve as the shops would have no food in them’ message don’t have the capability or imagination to do anything else. They only focus on how institutions like government restrict practice and reduce profits, and suppliers like OEMs fleece operators. Road haulage is more than that. It is the lifeblood of this country. Sadly, Ford claimed the ‘Backbone of Britain’ for its Transit van but it would be better served for the wider freight sector. It’s time those in the industry sold transport to the general public based on its benefits not its necessity.
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AuthorAging proletariat with face, teeth and body to prove it. Archives
August 2021
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