[bleep] off.
As a former driver who ran 48 plus Canada, lots of local stuff and still maintains his license. Your examples suck donkey balls.
#1. Anyone who can't stay away from driving drunk sure as hell
isn't worth much to the profession.
#2. If your driving habits are so bad you need licences in multiple states
to keep a good one? Again. POS driver.
Got a bunch of T shirts. Never came close on my license.
#3. Car incidents shouldn't cou t against the CDL . But they do. So any
decent driver drives a car like his truck.
#4. My hypocrisy illustrates this one.
5/07, 4am, going to work in a car. Pulled over for 70+mph in a 45 construction zone.
On seeing my CDL, and learning of my gasolene hauling job, i was
given the gift of a "Failure to heed highway warning signs" fine.
$100. No points.
Cops are hesitant to put point on CDL holders licenses.
As to Cali and trucking, their crap goes back many decades.
Their truck inspection and fines were so bad that many drivers and
small companies wouldn't go there. And that goes back to the 80's.
As a fellow former driver and current trucking company owner, I agree with all your points.
To expand a little on the NATIONAL problem with capacity, it is in part related to a couple of changes in regulations.
One, the whole Diesel engine “after treatment” disaster. Due to the stupidly short timeline that the engine manufacturers had to come up with something that worked, essentially ALL diesel trucks built between 2007 and 2016 were frightfully unreliable. Average longevity of the engines went from close to a million miles to barely more than half that. Overhaul costs, at the same time nearly doubled due to the added complexity and additional parts. Many trucking companies went broke, many resorted to rebuilding older trucks over and over again. New truck sales plummeted. International Truck would have gone out of business if they had not been bought by VW.
All that to say that we had a hardware shortage coming into this boom, and it was due to .GOV.
Second, the requirement of electronic log books on commercial vehicles. This cut driver productivity by as much as 25% in the name of safety, but the numbers, incidentally show an increase in accidents after the mandate.
Third, last year’s requirement that drivers must register with the federal Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, and companies must check their drivers records every year. This pushed an estimated 50,000 drivers out of the industry. I’m not going to say that the industry should tolerate potheads or drunks, but there probably should be an expiration date on offenses, like with points on a driving record.
All this supply side reduction by the government, together with record freight offered is resulting in today’s sky high rates and capacity issues seen nationwide. Stack the additional government idiocy unique to Ca (CARB and AB5) on top of that and you have the perfect storm.
