The Backward Road of American Trucking

For everyone’s sake, those behind the wheels of trucks should have proper training. That is not the case today.

Editor’s note: This piece is adapted from Gord Magill’s forthcoming book, “End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers” which releases on March 24.

The professional trucker, once rolling from the start of his day, or after having completed loading, especially when hauling flatbeds or pulling a heavy equipment trailer, will stop within half an hour or so of departure to check his load. Chains can come loose, settling or slightly swaying; bungee cords and ropes holding down tarps may require minor adjustment; and tires always require a look. Then there is the matter of eliminating the copious amounts of coffee with which you may have started your day.

While I was working in Australia, pulling road trains up and down the West Coast of the “Lucky Country” (or Cursed Island, depending on one’s perspective) between Perth and Karratha/Dampier, nearly 1,000 miles north of the most isolated city on earth, I often stopped at a little roadhouse gas-station joint, or “servo” in Ozzy parlance, called Ginger’s Roadhouse, in a tiny place called Upper Swan, about 20 minutes north of Perth. Ginger’s had enough parking to fit about four road trains. It also had an espresso machine where one could get a “flat white,” which is an upgraded version of a cappuccino and seems to be the coffee of choice for the part of the Australian population descended from prison officers. Many truckies stopped at Ginger’s to check the chains and tarping on their loads before “heading up the track,” and so did I. When in Perth, do as the Sand Gropers.

On one typically warm afternoon, as I was loaded and rolling northbound, I pulled into Ginger’s, hopped out, and had a look around my two 45-foot flatbed trailers, checking the chains holding down the offshore oil-rig baskets bound for the port at Dampier, where they would be transloaded onto rig tenders and taken to one of the drilling rigs working the North West Shelf oil field in the Indian Ocean.

On my way in for a coffee, something like a scene out of one of my many trips to Burning Man was assembled in front of the servo in the form of three gentlemen wearing identical costumes. As one of them approached me, thoughts of Burning Man switched to thoughts of Oktoberfest, although this gentleman wasn’t carrying a stein of lager.

“Hello sir, would you happen to be traveling north? Do you have room for me and my friends?” Spoken in pretty decent English but with a very heavy German accent.

I had a look over the threesome. One was ginormous, about 6′6″, and could probably take me out with one punch. The other two were more my size and appeared a little younger than I. All of them looked like they had just left a Bavarian beer garden. Bummer they didn’t bring any Biermädels with them.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m heading up to Dampier. How far would you like to go?”

One of them whipped out a paper map that, just like their costumes, harkened back to a different age. After consulting the map their leader, Christian, the kid who had first approached me, said they would like to go the whole way.

“Not sure where you’re going to sleep, because there is only one bed in the truck and none of you have the right equipment for that. It’s a little over a day’s ride, and I’ll be camping out somewhere along the way.”

Christian laughed. “Okay, no problem, we will sleep outside.”

After we had hopped into the Ozzy-built Kenworth T-904 I was driving, with Christian in the passenger seat and his boys seated in the bunk, I quickly relayed some rules to Ze Germanz.

“You guys need to be paying attention. If I tell you to duck, duck.”

Turns out the two in the bunk didn’t speak much English. The taller of the pair spoke zero.

“The problem,” I said to Christian, “is that I’ll get in shit from my employers if they see you in here. We are not supposed to pick up hitchhikers or have anyone in the truck.”

“Ah, I see. We will duck, no problem.”

When I had taken this job, I was still in Canada. I had made the connection through my friend Gavin and then traded a few emails and phone calls with the owner. I had to operate on Gavin’s word, which is golden as far as I’m concerned, about what this company was like. He had heaped praise on the family who owned it. As regards hitchhikers, Gavin told me that he had flown his wife over from New Zealand to ride along with him.

No more.

Not long after I arrived in Perth, the company was broken up and the trucking half sold to an offshore energy outfit from Scotland. The transition to the new owners resulted in the incursion of spreadsheet-brained management types more concerned about compliance than maintaining a family-friendly and humane work environment. My wife Jenna was going to come trucking with me, as part of our plan for an extended work adventure in Australia. That plan was nixed by new policies.

I have spent most of my life picking up hitchhikers and have often been a hitchhiker myself. Nothing terrible has ever come of it—I have never picked up Rutger Hauer or the creepy guy in that Twilight Zone episode—and I wasn’t about to let a bunch of management nerds tell me who I could or could not bring in the truck, which was effectively my home.

Never mind the lonely existence of a ‘truckie’ operating across the vast expanses of Western Australia. That Ozzy state has some of the loosest hours-of-service rules in the world. You can run for some ridiculous amount of time—like three weeks straight—before your employer is under any obligation to give you a day off. If I wanted to have passengers, I was going to have passengers.

Once we got the ground rules out of the way, the boys had to duck within a few minutes as I chanced upon a southbound road train I recognized immediately. I reached for the VHF radio.

“G’day Spider, not much traffic back to the yard. How’s it looking going north?”

“You’re clear, mate. Not much goin’ on, aye. How ya goin’, Gordie?”

“Not bad. Coffee’d up and ready to roll. Might pop in to see your girlfriend there in Cataby. Catch ya later, sir.”

A burst of laughter squeals across the radio.

“Rog-ee mate, see ya later.”

Once safely past my mate Spider, real name Greg, I motioned to the journeymen that they could sit up straight, and this is when the talk began in earnest.

Like most other young guys in the internet age, we shared a number of cultural and political references, and the obvious wanderlust which landed us all in Australia. I had to find out about the outfits, though, and what it all meant. Christian was only too happy to oblige. His recited oral history of the journeymen flowed so smoothly it was almost like he’d had to tell this story thousands of times. His answers to all my questions were delivered in the manner and the confidence of an expert.

The German tradition of the Wanderjahre, or Wanderschaft, dates back to medieval times and is where we get the English term journeymen as a title for those who have completed an apprenticeship in the trades. The Wanderjahre, or “wandering years,” are what Christian and his associates were undertaking after the completion of their three-year carpentry apprenticeship.

“There are many rules to the Wanderschaft which we still follow to this day,” explained Christian. These include “wearing these outfits which identify us as journeymen. In the tradition, we would travel to different towns, and exchange work for lodging, and learn the ways of carpenters in other areas. We even carry a journeyman passport, which the mayors of towns would stamp, so as to prove that we are not vagrants.”

With this, all three of them pulled out their carpenter’s passports, as if I were some customs official at an airport.

A key component of this ancient German apprenticeship program is the restriction on when the Wanderjahre may begin: not until three years of training have been completed. The Wanderjahre act as a type of finishing program, where a newly minted carpenter, technically proficient though lacking in experience, learns the finer points of the trade through interaction with carpenters in other locales and gains experience by employing his skills along the way with whatever hosts will have him.

You would think this must line up at least somewhat with how truckers are trained and turned loose upon the highway. But you would be completely, utterly, and decidedly wrong. Truck-driver training is exactly back-asswards in America. Most new truckers, once they have learned the bare minimum to pass a state CDL exam, are sent out on their own to crisscross America without any experience whatsoever. The results are about what you would expect.

One recent study examined the question of whether age or experience was a factor in the likelihood of a trucker being involved in a collision or other serious incidents. It reached the same conclusion as those who had molded the rules of the Wanderschaft many centuries ago: experience matters, and training and mentorship should therefore be more emphasized.

Unfortunately, nearly all the megacarriers who operate in the United States have ignored this ancient wisdom. In the name of profiting from taxpayer funds lavished upon their internal CDL mills, they have come to depend on the steady flow of “steering-wheel holders” that these mills produce.

In most cases, a budding truck driver will sign up for one of these schools after he or she has been conned by a recruiter at a jobs fair or some such event. The student will discover that there is plenty of money available, whether from the federal Workplace Innovation and Opportunity Act (WOIA) or Pell Grants or various state programs, to subsidize or even completely pay for that training.

Failing that, trucking companies will offer to pay for training through their own in-house financing, which often comes with many strings attached. Typically, this involves a contract stipulating that the trainee may not quit and work for another company in a specified time period without forfeiture of the training loan, which comes with interest rates that would make the credit-card companies blush. Many dodgy credit scams involving truck-driving schools have been investigated by an organization called the Student Borrower Protection Center. These scams often involve needless upfront administrative fees meant to juice the high interest rates that are the profit centers for these schools.

For the price that the taxpayer or student is paying, the product delivered is of decidedly low quality. Most trucking schools only train to the test, which is to say they convey the bare minimum of knowledge and skill you need to drive a few miles and maybe back a trailer up under the supervision of a state driving examiner. Do these schools show you how to install tire chains such that you can take a loaded semi over the Donner Pass in the wintertime? Do they teach you the basic skills involved to navigate nasty weather?

Not a chance.

The investigation into a tragic accident that took place on an interstate in Fort Worth, Texas, in February 2021 reveals the state of the average American truck-driving school.

On an icy morning commute, two people were killed when a recent immigrant to America from Haiti named Jean Marie Saint-Lot, driving for one of the no-name subcontractors often used by Federal Express and other large corporations, failed to slow down for the icy conditions and plowed his rig into stopped traffic, in which four other people had already died in a 133-vehicle pileup.

An investigation found that FedEx had farmed the load out through a load broker, which then double-brokered the load through a company owned by a dude from Uzbekistan that later passed the load to the company for which Mr. Saint-Lot drove. Double-brokering is an all too common, if illegal, practice in America. Basement-dwelling cheap carriers employ inexperienced and dangerous drivers like Mr. Saint-Lot, who obtained his Class A CDL in a three-week course offered by a truck-driving school in Florida that, not surprisingly, taught him nothing about driving in winter conditions.

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One of the functions of guild systems such as the Wanderschaft is to ensure that all practitioners of the trade do their jobs correctly. When you hire a carpenter, you are getting an actual carpenter who possesses the skill and craftsmanship expected by and of his fellow carpenters and will build you a house that won’t collapse.

The driver-licensing regimes of Australia and New Zealand have a quasi-apprenticeship system built into them. The aspiring driver must graduate through levels of accrued experience on progressively larger equipment. Once you turn eighteen and have at least one year of car-driving experience, you can then test for what they call Down Under a “rigid,” which is a straight truck without a trailer that would fall under an American Class B CDL.

After one year driving one of these small trucks, you can apply for a trailer license, or Heavy Combination (HC) license in Ozzy-talk. Later you can apply for an MC, which is the Ozzy license for road trains and B-doubles. In Canada we call a B-double a Super B-train; it’s two trailers connected by a fifth wheel on the lead trailer (not a dolly converter), with a total of eight axles on the ground holding up a weight of 140,000 pounds, which is 60,000 pounds more than the standard American tractor-trailer combo.

One would think that those who cry the most about making our roads safe in North America would want to import this system from Australia rather than hand the keys to the likes of Mr. Saint-Lot, who after three weeks of taxpayer-subsidized training was competing against people, like me, who have been trucking since they were teenagers. We also might wonder why the trucking industry in Canada and the United States doesn’t actively recruit highly skilled operators from, say, Norway, where truckers know how to drive in snow and navigate mountainous terrain, which implies high levels of operational skill.

I have been unable to locate any study comparing the safety or performance outcomes of the truck-licensing regimes of Australia or New Zealand to those of Canada or America, so we have to rely on bare statistics.

In 2021, 163 people were killed in crashes involving trucks in Australia, and 5,991 were killed in the United States. Controlling only for population, you are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in the United States than you are in Australia. You might think Australia’s much lower population density contributes to that outcome, but one must consider that Australia, contrary to the images put in our minds by films like Crocodile Dundee and The Road Warrior, is a highly urbanized society where 86.6% of the population lives in five coastal cities. The U.S. population is a bit more spread out, though similarly urbanized at about 82%. (This total includes the suburban population.)

There has not been any well-publicized attempt to bring an obviously sane licensing system to North America, although my home province of Ontario imposed graduated licensing on car drivers. (I was in the first cohort of teenagers subjected to this regime.) Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, and New Jersey have similar rules for car drivers, especially for those applying between the ages of 16 and 18. There is no such system for truck licenses.

What we have consistently seen, instead, are calls to debase minimum requirements for truckers and those who train them, especially from large megacarriers, which have major driver retention and turnover problems.

The goal of the megacarriers, as reported by FreightWaves, seems to be to ensure that the blind lead the blind. For instance, they want the minimum years of experience necessary for a registered trainer halved from two to one. I remember feeling uncomfortable when asked to train someone back in 2004 when I’d already had seven years under my belt; how could anyone feel comfortable training someone when he himself is still wet behind the ears? And how could anyone in good conscience advocate for such a policy?

Truckers are not at risk of building a house that is going to fall on you, but they are part of your daily life if you spend any time on the roads. The motoring public ought to have some assurance that those behind the wheels of trucks have the proper amount of training. If Americans are three times more likely than Australians to be killed in a truck collision, perhaps we ought to consider adapting our trucker-training system to more resemble theirs. Who would be hurt by this?