A concerned truckie has shared dash cam footage of another truck driver who appears to be watching a video on his phone while behind the wheel.
Wayne Rogerson, an interstate truckie from NSW’s south coast, told Big Rigs that encountering truck drivers who are distracted by texting, watching videos or FaceTiming is a daily occurrence.
“It’s downright dangerous, and it needs to stop,” he said.
“I have friends and family out there on the road, and we all want to make it home at the end of the week.”
The below footage was taken earlier this year on the Hume Highway, south of Barnawartha, Victoria.
Rogerson said there are “too many unskilled drivers” on the roads and something needs to change.
“To be in charge of a vehicle weighing in excess of 60 ton, there needs to be something put in place to make it safer out there.
“Another issue is that there are far too many trucks running the highway at night without working lights.
“I only just avoided running into another B-double in thick fog because he had no trailer lights.”
The topic of truckies watching videos to keep themselves entertained on the road was also raised at the Australian Trucking Association’s recent Technology and Maintenance conference.
During the Technical Q&A session, Toby Merryful, senior safety compliance officer with the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator, said: “Boredom is now turning to people watching screens, YouTube, whatever – as they go down the highway.
“It’s definitely a problem.”
Chris Blanchard from Herb Blanchard Haulage in Grafton, NSW agreed that boredom is one of the biggest safety risks for truckies.
He argued that automatic trucks and modern roads have made drivers’ lives easier in many ways, but they have also made the job more tedious.
Speaking at the TMC’s Technical Q&A session, he told the crowd: “I think that fatigue, for a lot of our drivers, is probably the biggest safety issue.
“But most of us here have very good fatigue management regimes in place. When I talk about fatigue, I’m more talking about boredom.
“We have modern roads now, which we all wanted – we don’t want to go back to 30 years ago.
“But once upon a time you were going up and down hills, changing gears – now we’re just driving down the road like a machine.
“You look at a perfectly good section of road and there are trucks that have rolled off the side.”
He added that devices and screens in the cab, which are meant to be monitoring the driver and making them safer, can actually cause them to be more distracted.
“They are distracting the driver from their core job of driving the truck,” he said.
“I think that’s an area that [the industry] needs to consolidate a bit, and look at reducing the number of devices and screens in the cab.”
How was that truckie watching a video filmed from a moving vehicle?
Dashcam
Driving for massive hours, day in day out without any mental stimulus is a death sentence.
I’m not condoning anyone driving with their eyes glued to a screen.
Nore would I expect anybody to manage their fatigue with nothing but coffee, the radio and stretching their legs for 5 minutes every 5 hours.
But if you can glance at a speedo you can glance at anything. Maybe not true for everybody, all the time.
Last thing truckies need though is more scrutiny, penalties and babysitting.
That video wasn’t filmed from a dash cam, more like he was holding his phone to video it. Some people need to mind their own business