how many of you prospective new truck drivers REELY know how to read an atlas??

The reason I ask this is that I train and I am perplexed at the amount of time that I have to invest in teaching students some of the most simplest parts of reading a map or atlas. Recently I had a student for a few days and brought him into our terminal in Gary and was planning to have him show his fleet manager the route from Rockford Illinois to Gary Indiana......because I don't think he could do it on his own.

For those of you going to trucking school and setting out to be a new driver, take some time and study the atlas. Make some routes and follow it. Look for things like toll roads, national network roads. Learn how to find and when to use the embedded city maps. Learn what the rest area symbol looks like, it might be a place for you to take a break.

I was fortunate, new how to read a map before I started. The learning sessions on the atlas are easy to fall asleep in or just not put in 100% effort. I can assure you that if you truely understand how to read an atlas, getting on the road will be a lot easier and safer for you and your trainer.

This is stuff you can do on your own in the comfort of your own home. I do like the GPS but I still use my atlas along with it.

Please do yourself a favor and pay attention in the map/routing classes and take a few minutes each day to look at the different roads and information that are in the atlas.

I don't expect a student to know everything, however, lately it seems that they can't even find or follow the most simplest of routes. No excuse for that!

 

Well I am training in national OTR and I can assure you that there is no excuse for not knowing how to use an atlas. It truly is amazing having a nice guy come on the truck and have his shifting smooth, his turns down, well ahead of the curve for driving skills and you write down a route for him to follow and he has no clue how to get there, what major cities he might be running through, where a rest area might be.

I recently had to explain to one of my students that this job is really quite simple. We drive to a customer called the shipper, get truck loaded, and the drive to a different customer called the consignee or receiver and get the truck unloaded. then repeat, repeat, repeat. I then told him that i know he knows how to drive the truck safely but reely....how are you going to get there? He looked back at me with a puzzled mysterious look.

the point here is that I hope that the new students put full effort into the mapping and use of the atlas so they won't be lost. After you have driven a while, the atlas will become less necessary as you will have experience and knowledge of certain routes but there are still some, even after experience, that you grab out the atlas and take a good hard look at.

I really, really, really, hate it when I get to an intersection or bifurcation and do not know which way to go....that feeling sucks.