Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Ride Along

I’m continually amazed by people merging in front of big trucks and semis, especially as traffic is coming to a stop. I see it every day. Why do you think the truck is leaving that space? It’s so they don’t kill the people in front of them. I wonder if it would help to add a “big rig ride along” day as part of driver’s ed. Students would go ride with a professional driver for an hour or so. Drivers would learn a lot about how long it takes to stop a truck and what cars do that is dangerous around trucks. There are likely a lot of legal and liability issues with that idea, but if implemented correctly, it might improve our overall safety.

I thought a lot about this last weekend while driving around a 5300lb truck pulling 10,000 pounds of trailer and dirt. It’s the truck driver’s responsibility to be safe, but just in the short time I was driving that rig, there were at least a couple people who were saved from a messy death only because I guessed ahead of time that they were going to do something stupid.