On oil, the issue had an Autocar Truck advertisement advertising gas and electric trucks. . . the latter being something that locals now insist just can't happen.
Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Friday, February 23, 2024
Saturday, February 23, 1924. Electric Trucks.
Monday, February 19, 2024
Soap Blindness. Being careful about what you are wishing for.
Independent truck drivers, whom share nothing in common with Donald Trump whatsoever, are claiming they'll boycott New York State today due to the judgment against the serially indicted former President.
In the Gene Shepherd classic A Christmas Story, Ralphie imagines that he'll get "soap blindness" and live on the streets, to the regret of his parents, for having his mouth washed out with soap. No such thing exists, of course, but in reality, if it did, it'd be worse than the remorse the parents would feel for the person enduring it.
In other words, a person needs to be careful for what they wish for.
Truck drivers, or at least American independent truck drivers, are heavily invested in the belief that "America needs us". They're also heavily invested in a myth of manly, rugged independence. The reality of the situation is quite different, however.
The United States went to a semi tractor supply distribution system through the short sightedness of Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the massive Federally funded expansion of the US highway system during his administration. Eisenhower, impressed with the Autobahn, which he'd seen while the Supreme Commander of Allied Expedition Force in Europe, wanted them here. It was really an example of the American System at work, and while I'm generally a proponent of the American System, it shouldn't have happened in this example.
Coming right at the same time that the American love of automobiles really took off, it caused a massive ongoing subsidy of the highway system, and by extension, the expansion of over the road trucking, at the detriment of the railroads. I've posted on that here before, stating:
It's doing that fairly inefficiently compared to rail. Rail is incredibly cheap on a cost per mile basis, and it's actually incredibly "green" as well. It's efficient. Trucks are nowhere near as efficient in any fashion. Not even in employment of human resources. Trains have, anymore, one or two men crews, the same as semi trucks, but they're hauling a lot more per mile than trucks are with just two men.
And, as we also stated:
One semi truck does as much damage to the highways as 2,000 passenger cars, or some I'm told. I was told that by the owner of a company that has semi trucks.
On top of it, truck driving isn't something Americans want to do anymore, something the independents who are protesting seem to be missing. As we earlier noted:
And laborers are also demanding better wages and benefits in order to do the work they're doing.
I can blame the nation for putting itself in this situation, however.
Drivers can make a lot of money, for sure, but their paychecks often go towards paying for their trucks and the like. Modern trucks are automatic transmission vehicles and the days of really highly skilled teamsters who knew how to double clutch and shift two gear shifts at once (which I've seen done), are long gone. The job has become one where temporary immigrants and immigrants from the Third World are incredibly common.
So sure, while there are Trump loving independent teamsters out there, there are a lot of drivers from India, Somalia, Russia or Mexico who no doubt have little Trump love.
And motorists have little truck love. That's part of the reason that teamsters feel compelled to attempt to remind people that things move by truck. The problem is, they don't have to.
Had the Defense Highway System not been built, things would move by rail, except locally. There's no reason that couldn't happen again, and if the Federal Government suddenly decided, for whatever reason (and expense would be a good one) to end the funding system, the result would be just like what happened when it quite subsidizing housing the mentally ill back in Reagan's day. States wouldn't pick it back up. It'd take awhile, but not as long as supposed, before rail picked its old role back up, but it could and would.
Beyond that, rail transportation is already very "green", as noted above, compared to truck transportation. It could be made much more so by electrifying the system, which is a proven system. Trains engines are also more capable of readily being made in alternative fuels than semi trucks are. Short haul trucks, from rail to consumer, are also relatively easy to make the conversion to electricity.
Up until after World War Two, most things moved by rail, and trucking was local. The highway system, while the Federal Government was already in it, was much more local.
So, want to show how valuable you are to the economy? Going on strike or into a boycott may do it. Perhaps you are like the railroader of World War One and World War Two and can't be ignored. Perhaps you are an economic Lysistrata and people won't want to ignore you.
Or perhaps people figure they're better off without you and they don't want to be taxed to support your industry anymore and they'll look forward to not seeing trucks in their rear view mirror.
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Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Doing Everything Wrong (Be careful out there on the 4th)
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Blog Mirror: CB Radios Not Yet Obsolete; Veteran Truckers Say They’re Still Useful
CB Radios Not Yet Obsolete; Veteran Truckers Say They’re Still Useful
Interesting, but why don't they switch to GMRS?
Sunday, June 25, 2023
The Work Truck Blog: GMC New Design flatbed truck.
GMC New Design flatbed truck.
This is a nice example, at least appearance wise, of a GMC New Design truck, the style of which is identical to the Chevrolet Advanced Design Truck.
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Monday, June 19, 2023
Sunday, May 14, 2023
The Work Truck Blog: What's this blog about?
What's this blog about?
Oh no, Yeoman, not another blog.
Well, yes.
This one is dedicated to trucks, more specifically work trucks.
I've always had a thing for trucks. And by that I mean real trucks. Not the cards mascarading as trucks that are so common today.
I'm sure I picked this up as a kid.
My father always had a truck. Indeed, he always had a truck when most men of his occupation had cars, and perhaps a truck at home (most did). Most men who did what my father did, and at the time he did it they were all men, drove a car to work day by day. Not my father. He drove a truck.
I don't think my father ever actually owned a car of his own, although he co-owned there with my mother after they were married. Before my grandfather died in the late 1940s, and my father worked as a teenager at the company packing house, my father drove a packing house sedan that had been converted into a truck. It was a 1949 Chevrolet Sedan that had the bonnet removed from the truck, and a box installed.
If that doesn't sound like a truck, rest assured it is. The suspensions on late 40s and early 50s sedans were pretty truck like. I myself had a 1954 Chevrolet Sedan for many years, and I drove it fishing fairly routinely, just like you would a truck. I've owned two other cars since then, and I'd certainly not do that with them.
He had the 1949 prior to going into the Air Force and when he came back out, he bought the truck depicted above, the only new one he ever owned. He had that until some point in the 1960s. I'm told that I cried when he traded it in.
At that time, he acquired a 1965 Chevrolet Camper Special, which oddly enough was a half ton. I recall it well. A stick shift, light green truck with a white tonneau tarp, he had it for many years. I learned how to drive on it. Indeed, when I was old enough to test for my license at age 16, he had only just recently replaced it with a 1972 GMC. I can recall this as I had a hard time with the driving test as I took it on my parent's 1973 Mercury Comet, which I later owned. It was an automatic and I kept going to shift during the test, something which was emphasized by the fact that I was nervous.
I already owned a type of truck at that time, that being what the Army called a 1/4 ton utility truck or vehicle. I.e., a Jeep. Mine was a 1958 M38A1, my first vehicle.
In buying it, I acquired a 4x4, something my father had never owned. Unfortunately for me, or maybe fortunately, the engine was shot when I got it, so like the first car in the ballad Our Town, it didn't go far. It established a precedence, however. I've never been without a 4x4 since, and I've owned two more Jeeps, one of which I currently drive almost every day.
The 58 M38A1 was ultimately replaced by a 1974 F100 4x4 pickup, a light half ton. It's amazing to think that the 74 was "old" when I got it, as couldn't have been more than six or so years old in reality. It was well-used however, and I only drove it for a year or so before I traded it in, myself, for a Dodge D150, the first great truck I ever owned.
Also, a 1974, it was, as Dodge used to advertise, "job ready". Suspended more like a modern 3/4 ton, it was rough riding and tough as nails. I drove it well into college, even though by that time I already had a second truck, a 1962 Dodge W300. Ultimately, I sold it to my father, it becoming the only 4x4 truck he ever owned. He drove it until it died, and truth be known, he didn't live much longer after that. It's odd to think that he was younger than I am now when he bought it from me, and used it until both he and it really could go no further.
As you can probably tell, I've owned a lot of trucks over the years. If you stick to just pickup trucks, I've owned seven of them, of which four were half tons and the remainder one tons (or heavier). All have been 4x4s. If you include Jeeps as little trucks, which I think they are, I've owned an additional three.
I'm likely done buying them. The last one I bought that I regularly drive I've had now almost twenty years. Petroleum vehicles are coming to an end, and at age 60, I'm also coming to an end.
But I've never gotten over my love for real trucks, and hence this blog on them.
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Friday, January 26, 1923. The Sun-Joffre Maniefesto (孫文越飛宣言)
Sun Yat-sen and Communist envoy Adolph Joffe entered into the Sun-Joffre Maniefesto (孫文越飛宣言) providing that the Republic of China and the Soviet Union would cooperate with each other, while acknowledging that the Soviet system wasn't appropriate for China.
Sun Yat-sen is enormously admired to this day, but frankly there's plenty of reasons to regard him at least a little questionably. This is an early example of Nationalist China leaning pretty heavily to the left, which it did for many years. The Republic of China and the Soviet Union were sort of uneasy fellow travelers for quite some time.
Joffe was a Trotskyite whose health was already declining. After Lenin's death and Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party, he was refused exit for medical treatment by the USSR and killed himself. He almost certainly wouldn't have made it through the 30s had he been well.
The U.S. Army was photographed driving some of its trucks in Washington, D.C.
Friday, October 21, 2022
Monday, October 17, 2022
Two 1/4 tons.
A photo taken before the fall weather started to set in,
My 97 TJ in the background, with a 1960s vintage Bronco I in the foreground.
I've always really like the looks of the first generation Bronco. The TJ is probably a better 4x4, it ought to be as it's thirty years newer, but the Bronco beats it in style.
Friday, September 9, 2022
Teamsters.* They aren't what they used to be. And that's sad in some ways.
It was the only thing in the parking lot.
My 2007 Dodge 3500 that is.
It was parked there, all alone. My wife took it to work, as I drove the 1997 Dodge 1500 to the shop for an exhaust repair.
A Haliburton driver drove into the lot, apparently one of the numerous misdirected truck drivers that take the exit, wrongly, and need to turn around in the parking lot. He had plenty of room, but he hit my 3500 anyway.
He was driving a tractor trailer combo.
He was from Nigeria.2.
I have nothing against Nigerians. I've had one friend from Nigeria. But I have to ask the question.
Are there any American truck drivers anymore?3.
I work on trucking accidents quite a bit. The last one I worked on featured a Polish driver.
In one I'm working on now, the drivers were Somalian. I had a prior one where a driver was a central African who died driving a pickup truck in the first snowstorm he ever experienced.
Some time ago I worked on one where one of the drivers was Ukrainian.
I see them all the time where the drivers are Russian.
I used to see them where the drivers were from Mexico. No more, however. Mexican drivers made sense, given NAFTA, which makes me wonder who is now driving the trucks in Mexico.
What's going on here?
Supposedly the US has a truck driver shortage to the tune of 80,000 drivers. By the end of the decade that figure is expected to be 130,000.
Maybe the drivers just are paid so little, in context, that Americans have other options and won't do the job.
Indeed, I think the entire concept of a labor shortage in a country of 300,000,000+, which isn't gaining any more land, is a complete crock. Truly, at that level of human settlement, if there are jobs going wanting, it makes sense that they be exported overseas.
But you can't, of course, export trucking jobs.
Supposedly the percentage of immigrant truck drivers is around 18.6%, just a little higher than the percentage of immigrants in the workforce, which is 17%. That demonstrates its own oddities, again, for a country that now is likely exceeding its carrying capacity for human habitation, or at least the capacity at which it doesn't become extremely limiting and overall unpleasant for the inhabitants. But just considering that, 18% is a lot.
So, might we note, is 17%. That figure we'd also note resulted in one of Chuck Todd's accidental points against the point he was trying to make in a fairly recent post COVID Meet The Press in which he blamed inflation on the Trump era reduction in immigration, the logic being that the price of labor was going up as we weren't taking in as many immigrants. And, indeed, that may be a factor, but the point would be that we're artificially keeping wages low by depressing wages by taking in those who are willing to undercut those already here. It's like shipping jobs overseas, but by importing the overseas workforce instead, with the express intent of keeping wages in the country low.4
Which brings us to this point in the current inflation finger pointing. Part of this is just wages being readjusted to the level they should have been at long ago. And part of that, although probably not all that much, can be offset by reducing the obscene wages the upper management at a lot of large American corporations receive.
That aside, the 18.6% doesn't reflect what we're seeing in accidents.
An industry source reports the following:
- There are over 957,311 heavy truck drivers currently employed in the United States.
- 5.9% of all heavy truck drivers are women, while 94.1% are men.
- The average age of an employed heavy truck driver is 48 years old.
- The most common ethnicity of heavy truck drivers is White (62.8%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (18.9%) and Black or African American (12.0%).
- The majority of heavy truck drivers are located in Houston, TX and Fort Hood, TX.
- Heavy truck drivers are most in-demand in Colorado Springs, CO.
- Heavy truck drivers are paid an average annual salary of $54,369.
- Bakersfield, CA pays an annual average wage of $68,921, the highest in the US.
- Heavy truck drivers average starting salary is $39,000.
- In 2021, women earned 88% of what men earned.
- The top 10% of highest-paid heavy truck drivers earn as much as $75,000 or more.
- Wyoming is the best state for heavy truck drivers to live.
- Heavy truck drivers are more likely to work at private companies in comparison to public companies.
Well, I don't know what you make of that other than that truck drivers are, on average, not paid that great. That probably explains why people don't want to do it. Living away from home, for wages that aren't as high as you could get doing something else, why would you want to do it?
Which likely explains why we see as many immigrant truck drivers as we do. Whatever they're making here is more than they'd make where they are from. We noted some of this earlier here, before it really applied directly to us in the form of collision:
I can blame the nation for putting itself in this situation, however.
What this also shows is the impact of technology.
It was trains, not trucks that moved most American goods and products prior to the 1950s. We've addresssed that here as well too:
But here's something I hadn't considered, even thought it's referenced in the post above.
And trucks have become part of the American vehicular fleet in a way that would have been hardly imaginable even 50 years ago. As they've become more comfortable to drive, and easier to drive, they've been a common family vehicle, which is not what they once were. Pickup trucks used to be pretty much only owned by people who had some need of them, even if that need was recreational. Now, they're common everywhere. Indeed, the Ford F150, Ford's 1/2 ton pickup truck, has been the best-selling vehicle, that's vehicle, not truck, for the past 32 years. So, so common have trucks become in the United States that one model of 1/2 tone truck is the number one single high selling model of vehicle. Pretty amazing for a vehicle that started off as utilitarian and industrial.
That is, they've all become more comfortable to drive.
Semi's too.
Early semi tractors were pretty hard to drive. Transmissions were not synchronized, and the drivers had to be able to double clutch and work two transmission levers simultaneously, while also driving something that had manual steering. I've actually seen this done, FWIW, on 1950s era 6x6 trucks, although it took somebody who really knew them well to do it. Early truck drivers did, often shifting with both hands while hooking an arm through the steering wheel, something that sound frighteningly dangerous. By the time I was young, however, big rigs had evolved considerably. Nonetheless, they still required the ability to really work a manual transmission.
As I haven't kept up on this, it was only fairly recently, due to an item of litigation, that I learned manual transmission trucks are on their way out. Indeed, almost all of the big rigs you seen on Interstate highways have automatic transmissions. Trucks coming in and out of oilfield locations, if owned by contractors, are probably manuals, but they're also older as a rule. If you see new trucks, even there, coming in or out of one, its an automatic.
And frankly, anyone, with just a little driving experience, can drive an automatic transmission semi. Maybe not well, but you could drive it.
And hence the problem.
By the time I was a college student the romance of truck driving, and yes it was once regarded as romantic, had gone. Locals started disliking the heavy trucks and the people who drove them, as they were regarded as dangerous. I recall that coming up, oddly,in a geology class once during which the professor, from rural Montana, noted that he thought the decline in truck drivers was sad, as he had an uncle who was a truck driver when he, the prof, was young, and he was such a good driver.
And he probably was. This conversation would have occurred around 1983. The uncle probably drove trucks in the 40s and 50s, when they remained pretty hard to drive. People working skilled equipment are, well, skilled, and skill develops professionalism as a rule.
Now the trucks have become so easy to drive the real skill has faded, and with that, I suspect, the job has become dull in the way that skillless jobs become. It doesn't pay well, and people don't want to do it, save for those who almost have to in some circumstances.
Footnotes:
*. The name teamsters refer to men who used horses and wagons. I.e., they drove a team. That shows us, really, how old the term is, and how old the Teamsters Union is. Having said that, horse-drawn teams were still in use for some things as late as the 1940s.
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