You’ve seen the video and the incendiary copy by now — tanker truck rollover crashes and subsequent explosions in San Francisco and Houston almost back to back this past week put trucking front and center in the cable TV news hole, on a semmingly endless loop.

It’s a horror story for the drivers in each case: though the tanker driver in San Francisco managed to escape, his exploding rig collapsed part of the freeway, guaranteeing snarled traffic for months. The driver in Houston fared far worse — he got killed, the worst possible outcome for his family.

While the details of both wrecks get sorted out, one thing is for certain: both truckers were navigating highway on-off ramps that are entirely too narrow and too sharp for tractor-trailers. That’s one of the unspoken issues behind truck accidetns today — not only are most truck-car collisions caused by the driver of the car (75% fo the time), highways are designed from the ground up to handle cars — not heavy trucks.

I’ve experienced this all over the U.S. — many on-off ramps are barely wide enough to fit my vehicle, let alone an 18-wheeler, and you can feel the G-forces even if you exit the highway at the posted speed limit on most ramps. For a big rig with a high center of gravity, if you are not driving BELOW the posted speed limit on these ramps, you could be in world of hurt.

So as these two terrible crashes are reconstructed, let’s hope the investigaors look at the on-off ramps these drivers had to navigate, for if they were wider and not so sharp, we just might prevent these kinds of horriffic accidents.

An informal effort among truck drivers began on April 23 to “picket” if you will the nation’s capitol — a rolling protest against opening the border to Mexican truckers, designed to slow down traffic on 495, the major highway surrounding Washington D.C., also known as the Capital Beltway.

This is just the latest salvo in a gigantic maelstrom of fury over the concept of allowing Mexican carriers to operate on U.S. roads JUST LIKE CANADIAN TRUCKERS DO — my emphasis added. Yes, there are plenty of concerns we need to address with Mexican trucks, specifically making sure both the vehicles and their drivers meet ALL U.S. laws — but again, no different than what we require of our Canadian brethren north of our border.

The biggest issues about Mexican truckers I hear from U.S. fleets and drivers is that their rigs are unsafe and that Mexican drivers are cheap labor, designed to take jobs away from Americans. But is this really true? The funny thing about this debate is that no one worries about CANADIAN drivers stealing U.S. trucking jobs, or driving down freight rates, or running unsafe equipment — at least not in a blanket, sterotypical fashion they way we seem to be treating Mexicans here.

The other funny thing here is that the same so-called safety groups, such as Public Citizen, that condemns the U.S. trucking industry with a very broad brush is working hand in glove with many of the folks it lambasts –owner operators in particular — to bar the border to Mexican truckers.

This isn’t to say there aren’t major issues we need to solve with Mexican truckers — but the biggest ones aren’t about them, necessarily. There are entire regions in Mexico that are veritable war zones, where drug cartels and various criminal enterprises duke it out with each other and law enforcement simultaneously. No one wants that to spill over our southern border — but I also think most Mexican truckers don’t like living with that either. We should have common cause, I would think, against that.

In any event, I think we’ll find opening the border will be a moot point sooner rather than later — even Mexico’s trucking indsutry wants a 12 year moratorium on the border opening now. I think that’s the best course to follow — table the Mexican truck decision for a while longer, till they are on par with our rules and requirements just like our Canadian partners to the north.

‘Security’ is oftimes a very esoteric concept, something all of us in trucking know is necessary on some level. Yet security also brings with it big costs in terms of dollars, loss of productivity, etc. We’re wasting time standing in line, getting IDSs checked, loads verified, etc., etc., and countless other etc’s added on for good measure. It’s a concept many of us, I suspect, feel we don’t need too much of because of that old bromide ‘It can’t happen here.’

Until it does.

It’s hitting home for me today — I’m a graduate of Virginia Tech, and me and thousands upon thousands of other fellow Hokies like me are trying to fathom how some nutjob could kill over 30 people on our beloved campus. Someone — a crazed student or some other demented individual — has put Tech atop the record books for the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. It’s a horror show I still can’t believe is happening.

Now, sure, this is a college campus, not a loading dock or a border crossing. The security footprint in much easier to establish and maintain at the latter points. But this rampage shows just how much damage one person with a handgun — just one — can cause. One person armed with explosives, or hijacking a truck with explosoive material, can cause even greater horror than what happened in Blacksburg today.

It also shows that nothing and nowhere is safe — not the malls, not the schools, and definitely not the highways. It’s a reality we must all come to grips with one way or another.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth going on about limiting the maximum road speed of tractor-trailers to 68 mph. The fleets supporting the idea believe putting a 68 mph ’speed ceiling’ in place would improve highway safety and save fuel. Those in opposition say they need all the power and speed they can muster to pass slower vehicles on the highway, and fear a 68 mph speed ‘cap’ would cause rigs to bunch up on the highway.

In my opinion, we’re barking up the wrong tree here — what we need to do is go back to the 55 mph national speed limit so haphazardly abandoned by Congress back in 1995 — that’s for ALL vehicles, mind you, not just big rigs.

That limit came into being back in 1973 during the Arab oil embargo against our country — retaliation for U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war. With gasoline supplies dropping dramatically and prices spiking, limiting vehicles to 55 mph was but one energy conservation practice put into play by the Nixon Administration.

That’s why we need to go back to it today. According to data compiled by the American Trucking Assns. (ATA), motor carriers spent $98.3 billion on fuel in 2006 — up over $20 billion in ONE YEAR from the $87.7 billion spent in 2005, and over $30 BILLION more than the $65.9 billion spent in 2004. Anybody worried about this trend here?

It’s also interesting to note that the ATA and other trucking companies were AGAINST dropping the 55 mph speed limit back in 1995 — a fact conveniently overlooked by so-called safety advocates these days who believe truckers are at the root of all highway safety problems.

Now, that isn’t to say the trucking community was united to preserve the ‘double-nickel’ — far from it. Many drivers opposed 55 mph because not only were trucks and highways built to handle higher speeds safely, many felt the 55 mph limit gave states a huge revenue stream from speeding fines, while limiting a driver’s ability to make more money. True, highway fatalities have stayed flat since speed limits went up, but only on the trucking side — fatalities on the general motoring public’s side of the ledger continue to inch up every year.

But the real reason we need to go back is energy security. It’s not about running out of oil; it’s all about the countries that provide us with 60% of all the oil the U.S. consumes. Venezuela is in the thrall of a dictator that hates the U.S. Iraq’s economy remains in shambles due to escalating terrorist and sectarian violence. Iran is pushing hard to get nuclear technology online — and this is a nation whose constitution calls for the ‘destruction of Israel.’ Anybody out there believe they are NOT trying to build a nuclear bomb? And would NOT use it?

Diesel fuel is hovering near $3 a gallon now and the spigot is still wide open — what if one of these nation’s shuts it down? That’s why we need to go back to 55 mph.

I had the singular honor to help judge a “show truck” competition this year ar Mid America, held by the National Association of Show Trucks (www.nastshowtrucks.org) and sponsored by Truck-Lite. For me, these trucks are much more than mere “chrome and polish” — they are literally rolling works of art, each hand crafted and painted with the unique vision of the truck’s owners.

What makes the NAST contest even more interesting is that trucks of each of the finalists (six in all) are all “working vehicles” — Bob and Shelly Brinker, the winners this year, have over 800,o00 miles on their 2000 Freightliner, dubbed “The Legend of the Black Pearl.” Runner up Ron Huey does them one better — his Silver Eagle International has over one million miles on the odometer.

But is the glitz and glamour worth it? From a purely business perspective, sinking ten grand into paint, chrome, and interior work — plus all the cleaning and washing that goes with it — doesn’t seem to make a lot of fiscal sense in this era of $3 a gallon diesel. And when profit margins hover around 5%, every penny counts, again making all the polish seem like a poor investment choice.

And yet … every truck on the road serves as a billboard for this industry: a huge, rolling exclamation point that the public puts under a microscope every day. Bo Trout, a long time owner operator, NAST member and show truck owner put it to me this way: “If by doing this we change one person’s mental image of trucks and truckers, it’s worth it.”

To Trout and other show truck owners, it’s not about the money — in fact, he said, you can’t do it for money alone because the winner’s purses aren’t that big. “It’s all about pride of ownership and pride in your profession,” Trout explained, then told me this story:

“I have one truck I designed as a tribute to our soliders. One day I had a woman follow me in her car to my freight stop outside an airport. I kept thinking to myself, ‘Uh oh, did I cut her off? Is she angry with me?’ Then she gets out — tears in her eyes — and explains she has relatives serving overseas and wants to thank me for the display in honor of them. A moment like that makes it all worth it.”

Here’s a question for you, generated in coversations with some drivers and stories passed on from others. As everyone knows, the American Trucking Association and assorted fleets are pushing to set the maximum speed for truck engines at 68 mph — using engine governors pre-programmed at the factory to make sure trucks go no faster than 68 mph.

Now, what I am hearing is that some engine makers say equipping an over-the-road truck engine with a speed governor can damage it — and that if you, the truck’s owner, use a governor to restrict engine speed this way, it will void your engine warranty.

It’s perplexing, to say the least, to hear this rumor — for aren’t slower speeds safer for the industry? And wouldn’t restricting top-end speed actually improve the life cycle of an engine, since it there would create a ‘ceiling’ on how hard it would have to work? Let me know what you think.