What important skills of truck driving did you learn after your first year of trucking?

Okay. Good point. Chinatown might be right about that a truck in the tight lane might create a headwind for a truck in the hammer lane.

I still believe that whether or not a truck in the right lane should slow down to let a truck in the left lane pass is debatable though.

 

11# If a car parks directly behind my 53' dry van trailer, and if the front of the car is only about 2 or 3 feet from the bumper of my trailer, I might not be able to see the car in either of my side mirrors. I was trucking for ten years before I realized this. I realized this yesterday. I have always checked both of my side mirrors before i backed my tractor-trailer straight backwards on city streets before, but I just had the dumb luck that no car was parked directly behind me and was real close to my back bumper. In the future, if I have not been watching my mirrors every second to make sure that no car or motorcycle got behind me, I will have to step out of the truck to check that no car or motorcycle is behind me before I back straight up on a city street.

 

Yeah; I know that the blind spot is a lot more than 2 or 3 feet. I said that if the front of the car is within two or three feet of the rear bumper of the trailer, then the entire car might be impossible to see from the driver's seat of the semi-truck. A car is about twenty feet long. So the blind spot would be at least 22 (20 feet of car plus 2 feet between bumper and front of car= 22 feet) feet behind the trailer.