Big Wheels : One Jackknifed 18-Wheeler on the 210 and Millions of People Eat Dinner Cold

WE DON’T USUALLY do reader-participation gimmicks in this space, but the format’s getting faster all the time, so here’s a question for you: When was the last time you spilled a load of oranges on the 210 or several barrels of lightly irradiated fish oil on the eastbound Santa Monica? Since I have neither the time nor the technology to receive your answer, let me guess what it was: Never. Unless you happen to drive a truck.

Trucks play a major role in our lives, and you don’t have to be a harried commuter to know it. Just listen to drive-time radio, and you’ll hear the persistent mantras of Metro Traffic: an overturned big rig, a spilled load of something ludicrous or noxious, a jackknifed 18-wheeler and millions of people arrive late for work or eat dinner cold.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Well, get me wrong for just a minute; I’ll wait. OK.

Now don’t get me wrong. I bear no personal animus toward truck drivers, aside from the guy on “Twin Peaks,” who should be arrested on charges of aggravated pouting.

But just after World War II, somewhere in this country a big decision was made, and it’s beginning to look like the wrong call. That decision was to change the century-old way that stuff was shipped from one part of the country to another. We went from being a railroading nation to being a trucking kind of place.

It had cultural implications galore, of course. Railroads were good for the folk-music industry, while trucking has single-handedly (or 18-wheeledly) kept Nashville in business. Hobos have not fared well in the transition; it’s hard to hop a refrigerated big rig. And the sound of the lonesome whistle late at night has been replaced by a less romantic rumble that, if you’re considering buying a house near a freeway, brokers will always tell you is “just like the ocean.”

But the main impact has been on our ability to go hither and yon without simultaneously going haywire. And it does no good for the trucking industry’s publicists to rejoin, as they always do, that truckers pay more than their fair share of highway user taxes. That’s the point of the question back in Paragraph One. The industry probably calculates “fair share” without counting the untold hours of wasted time caused by the havoc that only trucks can haul in.

OK, I’m in this far, halfway to being an added ingredient in Hoffa Stew, so I might as well press on. Railroading was a team venture, requiring the cooperation of a bunch of people to get the job done. Truckers are loners, cowboys without cows. Which is a better model for beating the Japanese? On a more mundane level, there is a steady increase in the amount of what is charmingly referred to in the haulage trade as “hazmat” (hazardous materials to us bystanders) being shipped from city to city, often in futile search of a final resting place. I’d rather have that stuff safely sequestered on two rails than see it sharing my roadbed.

Of course, in the modern age, trucks are a necessary part of the transportation system--if we had one. Rail spurs don’t go everywhere, so there has to be some trucking to final destinations for everything from food to this fine newspaper to radioactive ooze. We will always enjoy the obstructed views and the diesel fragrance that only driving behind a huge truck can provide on our surface streets. Those are almost private pleasures, to be enjoyed one extra-wide-turn-slowing-two-lanes-of-traffic-to-a-crawl at a time.

But freeways are what truckers use when they’re making those long hauls, dragging out-of-season produce from one end of the country to the other and looking out for smokeys, or whatever they look out for these days. Maybe they’re looking out for “Smokey and the Bandit 4”; I know I’d look out for it.

And the freeways are where trucks make their most obvious and massive contribution to degrading the urban experience. Hey, I’m no radical. I’m probably the fairest person you’d ever want to know. So I’d never advocate outright banning from our freeways of anything with more wheels than a station wagon. What I suggest is simply requiring every truck driver who wants to use our big roads to sign a binding pledge: a no-spill, no-jackknife, no-dropped-load oath. As long as it’s adhered to, brother, put the pedal to the metal and forget the double nickel. Violate it one time, and you’re exiled to Exposition.

Everybody else, I’ll see you in the on-ramp car-pool lane. I’m the guy with Judy the Inflatable Love Doll in the passenger seat.