people net and rapid acceleration/deceleration

Get yourself a dash cam. Document anything to time of date if it happens, have the video ready to defend yourself. A go pro on your head is the best. A quality dash cam on the glass even better.

That is one thing.

The other is to get your mind ahead of the truck. Don't be afraid to be three steps ahead of the people who don't yet reached a decision that they will stop short in front of you. Usually there are small signs that they intend something. Such as passing you in the hammer lane then matching your speed suddenly just moments before cutting you off across 5 lanes to dive into the exit ramp....

 

A company can set parameters for things like this in PeopleNet pretty much any way they want them. Our PeopleNet will send a report for rapid deceleration and following too closely. But they have it set low enough that you have to really be over the top before it reports it. And then they have to see an ongoing pattern of poor driving through multiple event reports to ever say anything to you about it. One isolated event won't cause us any grief.

 

And yet ours is set so any tire slippage, or even the right bump gives a notification. Of course of the literately thousands of warnings I've gotten (several a day) nothing has ever been said. I think it goes to a trash bin in safety e-mail. If they are writing up petty crap like this, they are looking to get rid of drivers. I'd be looking for a new job so when they do go under you aren't sitting wondering what happened.

 

If companies want to write drivers up that have many years of safe driving, just because a computer said the drive tires spun out, or the driver hit the breaks so as not to kill some idiot, then go ahead and write them up. Soon the company will be out of good drivers, and their company will suffer. If trucking companies want robots to drive their trucks, then go buy some robots. I wish technology had never showed up. Trucking was so much better 25 years ago. As was life in general. Write me up for whatever you want to, but I'm a safe driver with experience to prove it. I do not need a computer to tell me how to drive.

 

Where have you been all my old iron life.

I love this post. Then again... Ive evolved a little bit but this thread makes me feel that newbies are being subjected to being scared of the own assigned truck. That is wrong to me.

 

Since when do "experienced drivers" not have any bad habits or unsafe driving style?

Trends and problems are VERY easy to spot in a sizable pool of driver history where consistent reporting equipment and means is used across the entire fleet. If 90% of the drivers go 4 months without a hard-brake event, and one guy gets them one a week. Either you have an unsafe driver who always follows too close and too fast, or defective accelerometer or other detection means in that truck. My money is on the unsafe driver.

But by all means, continue to make excuses.

 

Easy enough. Tell 'em "If you don't want me using the brakes, next time, I'll just HIT the MF'er."

 

You can get a big truck stopped in 6 seconds and a few milliseconds change. I have.

The one way converstation that results when shop finds out about it never stops. But eventually does when the supervisor's blood pressure falls off after he drained his heart with it's reserve blood.