Catching up to swift , a race to the crash.

I suppose many drivers get their experience with one of the Mega’s and then move on to better opportunities. Probably why the accident ratios are higher with them since the majority of their drivers have limited experience.

 

I guess.... what did that have to with my quote

 

Never mind

 

Raw numbers don't tell you anything. You need to look at preventable accidents per million fleet miles or something like that. If company A has 5 accidents and company B has 3 accidents, it looks like company A is more careless...until you learn that company A has 100 trucks that have traveled 10,000,000 miles in the past year and company B has 10 trucks that have driven a combined 1,000,000 miles. Now we see that A has one accident per 2,000,000 miles and B has one every 333,333 miles.

 

"68% of Americans don't understand fractions and the other half don't understand percentages."

Compare the number of drivers at a company with number of accidents at that company. And compare miles driven by a company's drivers with number of accidents by that company. It's possible for the company with the most drivers to simultaneously have the most accidents AND have a smaller accident rate than other companies.

 

FFE had a two million miler in Arizona at a very tiny rail crossing with his President's Fleet 379 Pete long nose. The train came along and chopped off the entire truck ahead of the firewall. The Dallas Newspaper had that truck in AZ in a absolute middle of nowhere cut in half by a train because he did not take care to stop far enough back from the track. The wide shot ensured that there is literally nothing for a mile radius of note in that remote area.

Needless to say the atmosphere inside the Lancaster Office that day and for sometime after was less than accommodating. The People could not stand it. The drivers could only laugh and laugh some more. The driver had a picture on the wall of honor with other long term safe drivers in the millions and millions of collective safe miles. But because of the preventative nature of this particular whoopsie the reputation of the company at least in the Dallas area was in shreds. A complete and absolute laughing stock for a while in the area.

You can have a company filled with elite drivers who have more miles than god and never hit nothing or did a penny in damage. But one good screw up or a good wreck will absolutely and utterly destroy your company quicker than anything. especially when it is splashed all over the media publicly.

It doesnt matter. Look out for yourself. No one is going to prevent anything but you. Ive had accidents before. Big and small. The main thing is no one got killed as far as I know. I can sleep at night with that. Animals not so much. Kill them all the time. But if anything it's really unfortunate that sometimes when something happens there is going to be a hell of a situation. You do not want to be involved in that.

 

From reading that sketch about Swift's history I noticed the Arizona cotton coop. Swift was still hauling for them when I was there. I remember their customer number was 2.

 

Was out on 84 in Oregon earlier this year. Rough place to be when it's snowing. UPS double was hammering, on ice, no chains. Any surprise he lost control, hit the barrier, bounced out an spun out sandwiching an SUV between his trailers?

 

Swift gets a lot of hate but honestly all bad encounters I've had were with fedex drivers

 

I don't think I have ever personally seen a Swift in an accident.