Truckers Driven by a Fast-Paced Era

It’s well after dark on a hot July night, and J.W. Smith is hauling 10 tons of cargo through the trucker’s version of highway hell: the serpentine, 88-mile section of Interstate 5 through Los Angeles County.

Loaded with insulation bound for San Diego--part of a three-day, 1,000-mile journey through California’s vast interior--Smith thanks his trucker’s stars that he missed L.A.’s dreaded rush hour. Yet even at 10 p.m., the Golden State Freeway remains a cutthroat test of nerves.

Four-wheelers (trucker-speak for cars) dart back and forth as Smith maneuvers his 68-foot-long rig down the slow lane, just south of the Ventura Freeway interchange. Like the mouth of a large, winding river, the highway is wider here in the city, the traffic faster, more frenetic.

Near Griffith Park, a pickup truck merges into traffic without looking, causing Smith to hit his brakes. Then two more four-wheelers bolt past him on the right, using the road shoulder at the last second and slowing down after cutting in front of Smith’s heavy rig.

“Sometimes I think I’m too cautious, and it makes me mad,” says Smith, a 59-year-old Oklahoma native, as he brakes for yet another motorist. “I could put my rig through this traffic like these other folks do, but then people would die. It all seems so unnecessary.”

Such have always been the hazards of big-rig driving. But today, Smith and the 1.3 million other truckers on the state’s roads also must contend with the effects of a hurry-up economy that is moving away from warehousing toward providing an immediate and constant supply of goods. Nearly all deliveries are considered “hot loads”--cargo that must be taken to market under difficult deadlines and, in the eyes of some drivers, at almost any cost.

And more large trucks are on the roads than ever before--bigger, faster rigs that haul more than 60% of the nation’s domestic freight: watermelons from California’s farm fields, your new two-door coupe, that washer and dryer.

As a result, the nation’s freeways have become a more hectic place for trucker and motorist alike, with ever more aggressive big-rig drivers--some with precious little training--picking their way through traffic on overcrowded thoroughfares.

In California, although the number of fatal traffic accidents has dropped more than 12% over the past five years, truck-involved fatalities have remained relatively steady--dropping one year and rebounding the next. Nationwide, large trucks have been involved in a disproportionate number of fatal accidents, statistics show. In 1997, big trucks were involved in 13% of road deaths while accounting for only 7% of the total vehicle miles traveled.

A Los Angeles Times analysis of the 163,776 California truck accidents between 1994 and 1998 showed that trucks were responsible for half of them annually. (The study defined trucks as vehicles of more than 10,000 pounds. There was no specific breakdown for big rigs.)

“There’s no indication of a higher incidence of aggressive truck drivers. Still, almost everyone on the road has had a run-in with a reckless trucker,” said David Longo, a spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration. “Aggressive behavior goes across the board on the road today. But with the bigger and heavier trucks, the stakes are much higher.”

The Times analysis also showed improvement on the part of truckers. For example, accidents blamed on such factors as trucker fatigue, speeding and unsafe lane changes have all declined, sometimes significantly.

Steve Telliano, a spokesman for the California Trucking Assn., attributes the drop to several factors--from increased CHP scrutiny of truckers to companies cracking down on rogue drivers to the truckers themselves, many of whom have begun to police their own conduct.

“An industry like ours would be crazy not to try to make things safer,” Telliano said. “And increased law enforcement is stepping in where the industry can’t police itself.”

On a three-day trip from Los Angeles to San Jose and San Diego--in rush hour city traffic and the open spaces of the Central Valley--a Times reporter and photographer were shown a view from Smith’s tractor-trailer that few motorists ever get to see.

From the tan leather interior of his Peterbilt cab, eight feet above the freeway, Smith each day witnesses an occasionally lethal mix of anxious truckers and overzealous four-wheelers--many of whom don’t know how to safely negotiate around a big rig--that has ranked California second only to Texas in truck-accident deaths in recent years.

Day to day, he and other truckers say, the worst stress comes from four-wheelers who make risky maneuvers and herky-jerky lane changes. Smith divides dangerous motorists into two groups: those who react too cautiously and those who treat trucks with little or no respect.

Driving on the Corona Freeway near his company headquarters in Pomona, Smith points to a Honda Accord dashing across his path--and four lanes--to make a freeway exit. Like a flyweight in the ring with a heavyweight boxer, such motorists seem to know that trucks cannot react as quickly and make aggressive moves, thus assuming that they can always outrun a big rig in the end.

Those delusions can be deadly, Smith says. “If you wreck with a big rig, you’re going to lose,” he says. “Believe me, I have seen the damage a truck can wreak.” Fully loaded big rigs can weigh 80,000 pounds, compared to 3,500 or less for many cars.

Despite years of practice, he says, many motorists still don’t know how to safely drive near big rigs. “You see the same thing over and over,” he says. “As the years go by, car drivers don’t seem to get any smarter. If anything, they drive worse.”

Blunders Put Drivers in Harm’s Way

Smith has a bad driver checklist, the blunders he sees every single day:

For one, he says, motorists don’t understand that it takes a big rig four times as long to stop as a car. And gusting winds can make an empty trailer “walk,” or veer into the next lane, clearing out any four-wheelers in the way. Still, cars continue to pace trucks, even on the windiest days.

Even worse, drivers ignore a truck’s blind spots. When he’s behind the wheel of his rig, Smith has blackout areas at the 7 and 5 o’clock locations in his field of vision. For a few crucial moments as cars pass, he can’t see them. City freeway traffic compounds the problem--especially during rush hour--as cars make quick lane changes.

Other motorists follow his rig so closely he can’t see them in his side-view mirrors. The area directly behind a rig is another blind spot, known by truckers as the “no-zone.”

The problem is that cars have no clue about what a trucker sees from behind the wheel, he says. “Like the woman who never dimmed her high beams because someone once told her truckers sit up too high to be blinded by her brights.” Just like motorists, truck drivers are also blinded by high beams.

But Smith is equally critical of his own breed. He especially resents those who run on cheap retread tires, leaving behind dangerous rubber shards after freeway blowouts that can send cars veering out of control. He detests the menacing road bullies who run with blinding fog lights, bearing down on slower cars until they give way.

Worse are those who fail to check their brakes before hitting the road, risking a dangerous runaway rig on long, steep declines such as northbound I-5 on the Grapevine.

“I get more angry at the big rigs, because they’re supposed to be the professionals,” Smith says as he rattles north along I-5, hauling a double trailer loaded with JC Penney furniture from a warehouse in Chino to another in San Jose. “But they’re often the ones acting like jerks.”

Driver Shortage Means Lower Standards

The problem of aggressive truckers stems in part from a driver shortage. Trucking industry officials say companies are 80,000 drivers short nationwide in an industry that employs 4 million drivers. The result, Smith says, is that some outfits hand over a 50,000-pound rig to young mavericks with an “It’s my road” attitude despite only six weeks of schooling.

One local trucking company owner, who asked not to be identified, said he has been forced to drop his standards when hiring new drivers. “There just aren’t enough people out there anymore who will do the job,” he said. “We have to take who we can get.”

California leads the nation in the number of truckers killed annually, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics. In 1997, on-the-job crashes killed 81 big rig drivers here. Texas was second with 68; Florida ran a distant third with 33. However, California truck drivers died at a rate of 1.8 per 100 million miles driven, significantly below the national average of 2.6.

California far outspends any other state on enforcing truck regulations. The number of big rig drivers cited for speeding in California nearly doubled between 1994 and 1998, from 30,328 to 55,605, CHP statistics show. That rise was much greater than the increase in the number of trucks or miles driven on state roads.

Efforts have also been made to weed out trucks with faulty equipment. In 1998, nearly 175,000 tickets were issued to big rig drivers in California for faulty brakes, more than in any other state, CHP statistics show.

But at the federal level, a 1999 report by the U.S. Office of Inspector General criticized government efforts to monitor big truck equipment violations. The report, commissioned by Congress, concluded that the Office of Motor Carriers--an arm of the Federal Highway Administration that regulates big trucks--had failed to conduct enough inspections or follow up on repeat violators. By order of Congress, that office was restructured this year.

Although the number of trucking companies had increased by 36% since 1995, the number of inspections had dropped 30% over the same period, the report stated. And only 11% of the more than 20,000 violations cited last year for the government’s most significant safety regulations resulted in fines, the report said.

Rather than impose fines, inspectors tended to offer warnings in an education program that the report concluded needed to be scrapped for more hard-nosed enforcement.

But “many trucking companies see fines for running problem trucks on the road as the cost of doing business. To them, it’s no big deal,” said Michael J. Scippa, executive director of Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways, an advocacy group.

Stephen Oesch, vice president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said the report shows that a lack of government oversight contributes to the number of truck-related highway deaths. “The report was certainly a damning indictment of the government’s enforcement program,” he said. “It’s what we’ve all been waiting to see.”

Some Choose Profit Over Safety

Smith tries to keep his rig and his driving record in good shape. He’s an old-school veteran with strong opinions, a Visalia-area resident who prefers flared Levis and cowboy boots--the short sleeves of his plaid Western shirt rolled up like some 1950s high school jock’s.

He owns two rigs, and for the last 15 years has driven for KKW Trucking in Pomona, establishing himself as one of the company’s most reliable drivers. In nearly four decades in a big rig, he’s gotten half a dozen tickets. Since 1993, he has driven a million miles--twice the distance to the moon and back--without a ticket.

He calls himself “Mr. McFrugal,” keeping his rig at a steady 57 mph, just over the state’s 55-mph speed limit for truckers. On his normal run between Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., Smith ignores the trucker banter of the CB radio boys, preferring to listen to books on tape or the crooning of Hank Williams Sr. and Loretta Lynn. His one nod to modern ways is his cellular phone, which he uses to contact his wife once a day or hook up in small convoys with trucker friends to avoid the loneliness of the long-distance night.

But darkness is not the trucker’s worst enemy. The Times study of California truck accidents shows that 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. is the time of day when more accidents occur. Smith says that’s when truckers stop to eat, often returning to their rigs groggy after a big meal, perhaps adding to the number of crashes.

Truck experts also point to crowded freeways. Said Oesch: “It’s the time of day when everyone seems to be on the road.”

Fatigue also remains a deadly problem for American truckers. Tight schedules, prompted by the ever-quickening pace of moving goods from store shelves to living rooms, can force drivers to ignore the legal 10-hour driving limit for big rigs. On the Golden State Freeway near Griffith Park, four days after Smith passed through, a trucker died when his rig drifted across four lanes before striking a bridge abutment. Officials say the driver probably fell asleep at the wheel.

Smith says he has often refused hot loads unless accompanied by a second trucker to share the driving. But such demands risk his reputation.

“Dispatchers will sometimes give you a load and tell you to get it there immediately. They don’t care how,” he says. “It’s a domino effect, causing drivers to drive faster, cut corners and stay at the wheel too long because somebody’s always waiting for that load. Go by the rules and you get a reputation that you can’t do the job. ‘That’s OK,’ they’ll say. ‘We’ll give it to somebody else who can get it done.’ ”

For now, Smith will continue watching some four-wheelers and fellow truckers careen past his window at breakneck speeds. “We live in a society that just can’t slow down,” he says in a down-home drawl.

“In the end,” he says, “the dollar bill calls the shots.”

About This Series

* Sunday: A day of truck accidents leaves a legacy of loss and pain one year later.

* Today: Truckers contend with crowded highways, time pressures and reckless motorists.

* Tuesday: New technology could make trucks safer, but at a price.

This series will be available on The Times’ Web site at wwww.latimes.com/trucks

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Making a Truck Stop

With synchronized brakes, big-rig trucks are designed to stop by dragging the heavy load to a halt.

Jackknifing occurs when the front brakes activate before the rear and the cab can’t hold back the trailer’s weight.

Source: California Highway Patrol Major Accident Investigative Team, American Trucking Assn.

Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD / Los Angeles Times