A New Offensive in the Freeway War

If you ever drive the freeways in a car, lean back now and relax. I’m going to tell you about something I saw last week. The mere sight gave me a two-day high.

It was on the Santa Ana Freeway heading north toward L.A. At the Beach Boulevard off-ramp in Buena Park, a huge truck tractor-trailer rig had been pulled over by a highway patrolman on a motorcycle. He had the driver standing spread-legged against the front of the truck, and he was shouting into the driver’s face: “This the first time you’ve gone to jail?! What’s the boss gonna think about that?!”

Other highway patrolmen had arrived, and I could overhear what the motorcycle cop was telling them.

When he first spotted the truck, it was in the second lane from the shoulder and roaring along only a few feet behind a small car, a Honda. Traffic was fast but thick, so there was nowhere for the Honda to hide.

The truck kept bearing down on the car, trying to blow it out of the lane. He was so close that the Honda driver was leaning out his window and gesturing to the trucker to back off. Each time he did, the trucker moved in even closer. The truck was less than a car-length behind. This went on for a mile before the trucker noticed the cop with his red light on.

When he finally did notice the cop, he leaped onto the brakes and locked them up. The cop said he could see smoke spewing from all 18 wheels. The truck came to a complete stop in the middle of the freeway, and the driver jumped out of the cab and ran back in the lane toward the cop. He wanted the cop to know right away that whatever was wrong, it wasn’t his fault.

The cop was furious, because the trucker had been belligerent about being stopped. Just one more victimized trucker.

Seeing a renegade trucker caught at last was wonderful. Who among us has not been victimized by them and their Smokey-and-the-Bandit mentalities? Yet it was the only time in my 27 years of California driving that I can remember seeing a big truck pulled over for a traffic violation.

(Official statement of proper perspective: I realize that many truckers, perhaps most, are responsible citizens and careful drivers. But it only takes a handful of jerks to make life miserable.)

With their attitude of “Move over, Shorty, and let a real man pass,” is it any wonder that truck-caused accidents are on a tremendous upswing? They are, you know.

Statewide the accidents involving death or injury fell by 23% in 1980 after the California Highway Patrol began a new truck inspection program to eliminate mechanical failures.

But since then interstate trucking has been deregulated, and a lot of junky trucks and voracious drivers have gotten onto the road. About 40% more trucks are driving through Highway Patrol scales this year than just two years ago. The increased competition has made truckers want to go cheaper and faster to stay in business.

The result is hardly surprising. Statewide in 1983 and ’84 truck-caused accidents increased by 17% and 19%, respectively. The CHP figures 90% of those accidents were caused by the truck drivers themselves. It was such a sudden and rapid increase that the CHP is beginning a new drive to create truck-enforcement task forces in all its divisions.

One of the first is now working intermittently in Orange County. It amounts to putting extra officers on the road and having them concentrate on trucks only.

Maybe it will help, but I wonder. I rode with one of those special enforcement officers last Tuesday, a 16-year veteran named Jim Church, and I don’t envy him his assignment.

We prowled for hours along the northern stretches of the Santa Ana, Riverside and Artesia freeways, and while there were plenty of trucks, they were all doing 55 or 60 in the right lane and staying far back from the cars in front. Each one was a credit to his profession.

Where were all the rampaging truckers I’d seen from my Volkswagen when I drove this same pavement?

“It’s so hard to catch them,” Church explained. “It’s astronomically harder than catching average drivers. You don’t even have to try with the average driver. These truckers are all sharp.

“They can see you from so far away, they sit up so high. They have a CB (citizens’ band radio) network that has you spotted all the time. You look up and see their antennas and you know they know where you are.”

And what are the CHP counterweapons? Cars and motorcycles labeled, painted and lighted so garishly that you can’t miss them and aircraft too hazardous to use in congested urban areas where the bullying truckers are most dangerous.

The Legislature is so committed to protecting us from these truckers that it has given the CHP permission to use radar--as long as no state money is used to buy it. (Thanks a lot.)

And even if the CHP can convince a county to buy and maintain the radar, the Legislature won’t let the CHP use it on freeways and highways where the speed limit is 55. (Legislators drive those freeways, too, and radar is much too effective.)

The Legislature has even decided that (1) since a big truck is much more of a danger when driven recklessly, then (2) its driver should be allowed more tickets than you or I before he gets into trouble. If you didn’t follow that logic, I can’t explain it either. It’s just the way it is.

I wish the local CHP good luck, but frankly I don’t think it has a chance. The only thing that would really help is some genuinely harsh consequences for truckers who do get caught.

But unless one of them runs Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s Jaguar off the road, that will never happen.