Driver Facing Cameras

At CFI we have full video and audio inside the truck and video front-facing as well. As a brand new driver, I was super self-conscience about a camera with w/audio being 12" from my face. After a few days I decided that if someone wants to watch or listen to me belt out songs for 11 hours a day, that's their problem. Before I knew it, I had forgotten it was even there. It's 100% going to be everywhere before we know it. Too many dummies causing accidents and not being safe. As much as we like to blame 4 wheelers for everything, there are terrible truck drivers too. We all see them every day.

 

Well.....I don't know if that Werner driver had a driver facing cam or not. I honestly don't think it's designed to help the driver necessarily. Its strictly about the company covering themselves and getting insurance reductions that's it. I had a buddy during the paper log era, the camera in his truck came on because they saw he was close on his 14. They were so strict about compliance it was ridiculous. Others got theirs triggered by particular event. Now, they are not going to have a driver facing camera without a forward facing camera. It's all about money man. In a way I can't blame them because for some companies, one fatality can put them under so why not knock off a few dollars on insurance, and why not protect the business? I am necessarily saying I like it, because I don't, but it's what it is.......

 

Hang a naked girl picture on the sleeper curtain……..

 

Lovely. F**king lovely. Just who I wanna share the road with.

 

The only reason why driver facing cameras still exist are because of drivers that accept them. Have some backbone and quit your job if there's a camera pointed at your face. Have some self respect.

 

Cameras

I'm actually not real fond of cameras in trucks in general. I'm sure that they prevent accidents at times with certain drivers, in a narrow perspective. This is the argument of many trucking companies, but it misses a more important point.
The real issue isn't whether or not the cameras apparently prevent accidents, it's whether or not trucking is a job that anyone wants any more, if cameras are going to be involved. What the trucking companies do, is they earmark everyone with a CDL as a truck driver, not a human being that is deciding, for now, to drive a truck. With that in mind, they figure that their needs, their desires, and their problems are the potential drivers' as well and that drivers have to deal with them because they don't know how to do anything else. On the contrary, if a job becomes less desirable and more condescending, it loses appeal, and whether or not cameras help the employer is a moot point to the drivers, if they offend the drivers.

Some people really like driving trucks and will keep letting the camel move into the tent. It doesn't bother them. Too bad they don't care as much about my opinion as I care about theirs. I'm told that some are akin to savants (or perhaps idiot savants), and can go years without triggering a camera. I've seen a man that can juggle ten chainsaws too. I'm happy for them. The one I met must have used all his brain cells up driving a truck because they didn't know how to take a bath, apparently. If a trucking company can run off a dozen or so super-talented truck drivers, then who am I to complain? The human brain is very specialized and each brain has different amounts of talent distributed in different ways.

I mention the camel, because if you think privacy invasion will stop with cameras, you don't understand human behavior very well. One thing that all humans are slaves to, including the ones that run trucking companies, is psychological conditioning, and people will continue to do what they perceive works, past a point of diminishing returns even, until some form of resistance comes up sufficient to stop them. While truckers are pushing back at cameras, the cameras will likely win, and then it will be something else even more intrusive—until they run most truckers out of the industry. This can happen as fast as it takes to erase, "not to be used for identification" off of a Social Security card.

The trucking industry has gone on for many decades without cameras, and now they're already thinking trucking can't happen without cameras. Many people with self-respect have quit. The result is a higher driver turnover, with more green drivers and fewer experienced ones, changing companies' paradigm/set of drivers into ones who overall have more violations and accidents for the cameras to deal with. The cameras catch this increase in mistakes, and they get credit for preventing accidents. Is this accident prevention in the big picture, or are the cameras creating the very problems that they're fixing? Maybe some of both. Perhaps if the company didn't run off the drivers less inclined to make mistakes, the cameras wouldn't record as many, or prevent as many accidents. Cameras could also be increasingly recording and preventing accidents due to competent drivers or potential drivers shunning trucking for any number of other reasons.

Next time you get a violation from an outside facing camera, or even an inside facing one, ask yourself what the chances are that what was cited would have caused an accident. Almost all "violations" have a snowball's chance in hell to cause one. While the cameras' secondary job is to create an environment of safety, the actual primary job is to create an environment of obsequiousness. If safety was the number one priority of most trucking companies, they'd shut down in the North in the winter. Trucks wreck far more often from ice and snow than cell phones, and you can clearly see that on the side of I-80 or any number of roads in the winter. Your convenience is not important enough to risk your life; theirs is.

Despite the allegation that cameras are in work places, nobody in a regular job would put up with being called into the office about every week or so to discuss something they did on one of those cameras, unless it was clearly a close-call to an accident. Imagine people getting demerits for stepping on or over the white employee walkway line many factories have that directs foot traffic to their work spot. And being nagged that this is a safety hazard. After about one or two such occurrences, the employee would just quit.

 

The idea that a camera used to protect the driver has to be hooked up so that it tattles on the driver is so stupid that only a trucker with an IQ of about 85 or less would believe it. When people put a camera on their car for the same reason, they don't wire their activities to the police station. In fact, if you have such a camera, it's possible in many places for the footage to be considered as evidence when any kind of crime occurs, and for it to be confiscated by the police despite belonging to you alone. If someone deleted their own footage, perhaps thinking its perspective would lead to an incomplete or misleading conclusion, such as in only showing evidence that helps the opposing party, and then cutting off prior to a key moment, they could be charged with tampering with evidence.

 

That makes two of us. I'd like you to beat it too.

 

THIS