Parking On The Shoulder, 3 Dead

We could speculate all year on how he planed. The fact he stopped on an expressway tells me he wasn't even on plan A. He's just a steering wheel holder that can't do his job properly.
I'm sorry you feel the need to defend the dregs of our profession. An actually professional driver never would have let it get to that point though.

 

I meant to say earlier before I started preaching that just two days ago I hit a big slowdown west of Indianapolis on I-70. Turns out there was most of the load from a Target trailer spread across both lanes. The left side of the trailer was mostly torn off. A little further up the road there was another truck on the shoulder, only his trailer was torn up on the right side. Apparently Target was parked on the shoulder and the other guy got a little too close as he went past him. Didn't look like anyone was hurt, but parking on the shoulder is a bad move unless you really have an emergency. I've had to a few times because of blown super singles on trailers and once because of a broken serpentine belt. I hate it. It's the last place I want to be.

 

My opinion....looking where he was parked and where he was going tells me that he had no plan, just driving until he couldn’t. With the exception of a retail store or large parking lot he had passed his last chance for parking long before he landed on the shoulder.

 

You are missing the point brotha. This happened where there was indeed a guardrail. Is there guardrails on every stretch of highway and road? No. It’s just by dumb luck the trailer was there and the person in the suv didn’t hit something else further down the road or on another road.
As mentioned a few times already, could have been a tow truck operator or a cop doing a routine stop. Innocent people get killed by sleepy, impaired or texting idiots in 4 wheelers as well.

 

All of that is true but misses the point. The point is that if that driver was actually doing his job there would be less of a chance of 3 dead people.
We can play the what-if game until the sun burns out. Doesn't change the fact that if the lazy, unprofessional driver would have done his job, he would not have been there to contribute to this wreck.

 

Did everybody lie and cheat that much before the ELOG?

 

Yes, if you call not parking on the side of the highway and having to deal with this sort of situation cheating.

 

There are more trucks on the roads than available parking. Not every truck can find parking at end of the day. I understand that driver shouldn't have been parked on the shoulder but we can't just blame him and walk away without looking into why he had to make that choice?
Also, how do you plan a trip? Drivers don't have any control over loading/unloading times, traffic, weather, available parking etc. How do you plan a full proof trip when you have no control over these issues?

 

There's a 50 mile rule that has been added to Personal Conveyance to avoid this situation. If you run out of time, you can put your log on PC, remark "out of hours, can't park at shipper/receiver driving to nearest safe parking," then roll. You won't get a ticket for being out of compliance with e-logs. (Well, maybe if you did it every day, I don't know.) The point is, there's a mechanism in place to get around having to park on the effing shoulder even with e-logs.

In the old days, the guys I knew who were cheating was more like, grab a grocery sack half-full of various illegal stimulants, run a load from Cali to Rhode Island, pick up a backhaul in Jersey and run it to Cali, and do all that in five days so you could crash at home where your wife would do your laundry and feed you when you woke up.

 

Trip planning doesn’t have to mean having everything planned down to the minute. It can be as simple as a best case scenario, a worst case scenario, and a couple scenarios thrown in the middle. No matter what, if your plan in the morning is to drive until you can’t youre probably going to have a bad day.