Got to meet the Hitchcocks a few months back; a family trucking business out of Webberville, MI. The dad, Matthew Brian Hitchcock is the owner of MBH Trucking (Just in case you missed it … ‘MBH’ are his initials) and he runs about 11 trucks hauling just about everything — he even has a hazmat division, too.

Matthew is a show trucker, by the way — spends a lot of time and money spicing up his rolling stock for national competitions and, appropriately enough, is the past-president of the National Association of Show Trucks (NAST). The neat thing is that trucking isn’t just Matt’s obsession — his whole family is involved. One of his sons, Rick Hitchcock, showed up at Mid-America with a 2005 Peterbilt — dubbed the ‘Slammed Pete’ — that looked more like a low-riding gangster machine than a freight-hauling rig.

But that’s what’s cool about Rick’s ride — it’s an honest working truck, with hydraulic cylinders installed on the chassis to give it more ground clearance where needed, even one to swing up the front bumper so it doesn’t get dinged when making deliveries.

Rick came to the show newly married, too — he and his bride Jennifer had only been hitched about eight months, yet both put in long hours shining up his rig and making the wood-floor interior sparkle like new. (He also had classic AC/DC music videos cranked on the two LCD TVs installed over the sleeper– rock it!) Though he didn’t take home a trophy, he got a lot of ‘thumbs up’ from the people attending the show that more than approved of his creation.

The Hitchcocks are an expample — to me, anyway — that family pride is still alive and very well in trucking. That’s going to be very important, I think, in the years ahead as the younger generation decides whether to stay in this business or not. And why not take a little pride in choosing trucking as a career? The eye-catching low-riding design of Rick’s Pete may not be to everyone’s liking, but it tells everyone he likes what he does for a living. And you can’t ask for more than that.

You may remember the story back on April 29 — one retold in this space — about tanker truck driver James Mosqueda’s accident on I-580 south of San Francisco, where he took a ramp exit too fast, flipped his truck over, watched his gasoline tanker explode into flame, and then literally melt an entire section of that elevated roadway into glowing debris.

Well, Mosqueda’s company, Sabek Trucking of South San Francisco, just got its license to haul gasoline suspended by the California Highway Patrol this week after a CHP inspection found 36 safety violations — and this is the first such suspension CHP has imposed on a hazmat trucking firm since 1992, according to the Tri-Valley Herald newspaper (which has done a stupendous job reporting this story, I might add.)

Apparently, however, Sabek has a bad safety reputation for some time, the Herald found: For example, law enforcement cited the truck Mosqueda drove that day 27 times for safety violations in the past 2 1/2 years. And though Mosqueda had a clean record, he’d only been driving tankers for 10 months before he wrecked: That could indicate a big gap in his driver training.

The suspension was based on a May 16 inspection of Sabek’s terminal in King City, CA, which found defective brakes and loose wheel lug nuts on two of three tanker trucks and three tanker trailers. In the past year, three of every four Sabek trucks rolling into state roadside inspection station have been ordered off the road for serious safety violations. The Tri-Valley Herald reported that CHP Commissioner Mike Brown told the company in a letter : “It is evident that your company does not have adequate safety measures in place to ensure the safe operation of commercial motor vehicles used for the transportation of hazardous materials.”

Talk about an understatement! Defective brakes on a TANKER loaded with GASOLINE?

Though the melted ramp has been rebuilt — in 25 days, no less — I don’t think we can let this incident pass from our minds as quick as it will disappear from the general public’s conciousness. Look, word passes fast down the trucking grapevine and I am more than certain drivers and managers within the trucking community knew Sabek had issues — and when you haul GASOLINE, the one thing a fleet CANNOT have is ISSUES, especially SAFETY issues.

There has got to be some way for the trucking industry as a whole to police its own — we can’t just palm that off on law enforcement. Sure, it’s their job to get the bad drivers and companies off the roads — but WE can do more. And we need to do more — an accident like Mosqueda’s fireball isn’t just an image issue; people could have been killed in large numbers, much less Mosqueda himself. If a carrier or driver has a problem, there’s got to be a way for the industry to step in and help — before a terrible tragedy occurs on the roadway.

It’s also important to recognize, too, that most fleets out there — but especially the hazmat folks — are doing it right every day. And give kudos for the Tri-Valley Herald for reporting that in their coverage: “The fact that no trucking concern had ever lost its ability to carry hazardous materials speaks highly of the safety record for those (trucking companies) that are out there,” Capt. Rob Patrick, commander of the CHP’s commercial vehicle section, told the paper.

You can’t ask for higher praise than that.

If you ever feel your ‘idea well’ has run dry when it comes to dealing with the chronic shortage of truck drivers in this industry, I suggest giving Kenneth Baylor a call. He’s the VP of labor relations for Republic Services, the country’s 3rd largest refuse hauler, based down in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. When you look up the definition of the word ‘enthusiasm’ in the dictonary, you’ll find his photo and name — he gets as fired up as an NFL coach when he starts talking about finding and keeping good people in the refuse business.

He’ll tell you that transportation companies of all stripes, but especially refuse operators, are all now entering a critical phase: the labor pool is shrinking as fewer and fewer people want the “dirty job” of driving a truck. Add to that the huge financial impact employee turnover is having on the bottom line of transportation firms today, Baylor said, and you get a recipe for major trouble down the road.

“This is a major league issue for our industry,” said in a recent speech. “Our average turnover rate is 19.3% in this industry – among drivers its 23.2%. We also have a lot of ‘churn’ in this business, where we trade 25% to 35% of our employees with each other in the industry.” He explained that the cost of turnover and churn – even though far lower than the 115% level currently experienced by truckload carriers – is astronomical to waste haulers.

“The cost to replace one employee – from hiring through training – is on average 50% of their salary. By some estimates, it’s 200%,” he said. “In the refuse industry, which had a payroll of $10 billion in 2001, the cost of replacing employees in just financial terms is horrendous. But when employees leave, so do institutional knowledge, skills, and relationships they’ve forged with customers. That has even larger impact to your business as time goes on.”

Baylor said that while fleets must offer competitive wages and benefits, focusing just on monetary benefits alone works only until the competitor down the street offers more. “It’s not just about a paycheck: employees want recognition for their efforts, more flexible work hours, financial incentives, and most importantly to be part of a team – to know that they are going to be included, that their advice will be sought.”

He stressed that the only competitive advantage waste and freight haulers have today are their people – and that’s why employee attraction and retention efforts are going to be far more vital in the near future. “Look, we all use roughly the same equipment and technology to perform the work we do. The only thing that makes us different is our people – and they are the ones delivering the service to our customers,” Baylor said. “In this business, we tend to focus on the 8% of the employees that give us trouble – not the ‘Steady Eddies’ or the super stars.”

He pointed to the mantra espoused by FedEx Corp.’s Chairman & CEO Frederick Smith: People, Service, Profits. “If you take care of your people, they provide excellent customer service, and that delivers profits for your company,” Baylor said. “That’s the kind of environment we need to create in this industry.”

You can argue about whether FedEx really delivers on that promise, but I’ll tell you one thing — Baylor tries to put it into practice every day. Once of the biggest points he makes in a speech — and let me tell you, you need to hear this guy give a speech — centers around the title of a book published a few years back called ‘When Pride Still Mattered.’

“Let me tell you something — Pride matters today. It never went away,” he stressed. “When your employees come up to you and say, ‘Who used my truck last Saturday?’ THAT is pride at work. THAT is what you want to hear — they are taking ownership of their job and you need to keep them fired up like that. We WANT them to own that iron, to consider it and their job ‘theirs’ because that is how you get a motivated, hard working employee to stick with you for years to come.”

Talked with Larry Tucker recently, the commercial tire marketing manager for Goodyear Tire & Rubber, about his company’s DuraSeal product — the self-sealing material that keeps truck tires inflated and ready to roll even if speared multiple times by nails and other road debris through the tread.

This isn’t new — DuraSeal has been out for two years now — but from what I am seeing much of the trucking community isn’t taking advantage of it. Now, you can get your own self-sealing liquids injected into your tires easy — and probably at a lot lower cost, too — but the big, big advantage with DuraSeal that I see is it can be retreaded, whereas the do-it-yourself sealers can’t.

You see, tire retreaders won’t take tires in that have been injected post-sale with self-sealers because those materials are extremely flammable — meaning they explode in the final-stage curing process. And as Tucker told me, “You never want to see a curing chamber fire, or even be near one.”

Keeping a tire’s retreadability, if you will, while still getting self-sealing tread over multiple tire life cycles is a huge benefit to fleets. Avoiding road calls for flats is a big deal, too, because towing fees are not cheap and the cost of downtime in this day and age is even worse.

Now, Tucker told me the fleets best suited for DuraSeal tires obviously remain those that get exposed to road debris more frequently, such as vocational, off-road, waste, and construction fleets. For the guys running linehaul on highway routes every day, the payback may not be as apparent.

But I tell you that may not be true anymore. My wife ran over a couple of roofing staples out on the road the other day — an example that the nice, supposedly debris-clear highways just ain’t so anymore. Luckily for me, we limped her car to our nearby repair shop before the tire went totally flat, but it was a day of downtime for us to get it fixed. That kind of downtime costs fleets a lot of money. So there may be more payback in self-sealing tires for linehaul operators than at first meets the eye.

And finally, any chance to talk with Larry is one you should take — he’s an off-road enthusiast that has tons of great tales to tell, with a bottomless well of tire knowledge to boot. You just can’t beat that combination.

OK, let’s get this out of the way first: I am a hardcore sci-fi junkie. I’ve got an office filled with Star Trek and Star Wars tchotchkes (that’s Yiddish for ‘trinkets’ and basically worthless stuff, just in case you are ever teleported to the planet Trivial Pursuit) along with all kinds of dog-eared science fiction novels on my bookshelves.

That being said, I want to leave you with a brief thought about the Spielberg blockbuster movie ‘Transformers’ due to reach theatres this summer on July 4. The hero of this movie — the leader of the ‘good robots’ known as ‘Autobots’ — is named Optimus Prime. I grew up watching him in a million different schlocky animated TV shows, and one thing always stuck in my mind about him: he’s a truck.

Originally a cabover tractor, Optimus is now going to be portrayed on the big screen as a twin-stack conventional Class 8 — when he is not in robot form kicking butt and saving the universe, that is.

So, why is this even remotely interesting to the trucking community? I say it again: he is the HERO and the LEADER of the good guys. You don’t see those two words associated with the image of trucks anywhere in the mainstream media today, much less in the movies. I’ve used this space to comment on this before — largely in reference to the 30 year anniversary of ‘Smokey & The Bandit’ and the negative aftertaste it left with this industry in its wake.

So now we’re going to have a gigantic, intergalactic movie hero that’s going to spend part of his time in the shape of a Class 8 rig — and, knowing Spielberg, this rig is going to look good, too. It’s a positive trucking nod that’s rare these days — and I’ll be in the front row July 4, giant popcorn bucket at my side, to see if it hopefully plays out that way on the big screen.

I don’t know about you, but when I start looking at all the economic data and analysis produced in this country on a daily basis, my eyes start glazing over and my head begins to hurt. That’s a snarky way of saying that it’s hard to figure out in ENGLISH what shifts in housing starts or the consumer price index mean for the trucking industry.

That being said, here are the names of three economists you need to keep handy: Martin Regalia, Bob Costello, and Jim Meil. Regalia is the chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Costello serves in that same function for the American Trucking Association, while Meil is the chief economist for Eaton Corp.

These guys are superb at what they do, but more importantly, they make it all understandable in layman’s terms — even the very complicated stuff. That’s why you see their names pop up on our web site and in our pages here at FleetOwner pretty often.

And all three have a talent for working humor into their presentations, so hearing them ‘live’ is actually better than reading the reports they produce.

Trucking executives and fleet managers will likely have more access to Meil and Costello simply because the bulk of Eaton’s business is truck-related and Costello, of course, represents trucking’s biggest lobbying organization. Regalia deals with U.S. business on a much broader scale, so he only tuns up occasionally at trucking functions.

While Costello is ostensibly the economist for truckers, bear in mind he’s limited in many ways by anti-trust laws from giving a complete economic picture for trucking, especially when it comes to the impact economic tides and turns have on rates.

In any event, if you see any of their names pop up on the agenda of a convention or conference you plan to attend in the future, make sure you go hear what they say — I promise you, you’ll get very clear, concise, and useful picture of how overall economic trends impact your business.

Ever heard of a company called Green Power Inc.? How about a waste-to-fuel process called catalytic pressure-less depolymerization, or CDP for short?

I’m no engineer, and I didn’t understand a third of what I looked at, but this interesting company reputedly takes everything from plastics, discarded tires, waste oils, medical wastes, biological materials such as wood pulp, leftover refinery tars, even spoiled foood and makes diesel fuel out of it — all using a nice handy refinery system build into a 53-foot truck trailer.

It sounds too good to be true — and lord knows I’ve seen a lot of snake oil in my short time covering this industry — but you can’t help but be curious about this. Green Power reportedly uses special crystal catalysts that, combined with their unique mobile refinery process, makes diesel fuel with a cetane rating above 54, a fuel Green Power calls ‘NanoDiesel.’

Now, mind you, I saw this on the Waste Expo trade show floor, without any independent chemist at hand to tell me if this is really feasible on a large scale. But you can’t help but think about the possibilities — turning all those landfills scattered across the U.S. into our very own Saudi-style oil fields — no drilling necessary. Heck, we wouldn’t have a littering problem in the U.S. anymore if this process really worked, because everyone would carefully hoard their garbage as raw fuel stock for their cars and trucks.

Of course, this fuel has to be tested using the SAE standards we all know and love to see if it really works for commercial trucks. But I really hope someone does step up to test NanoDiesel very soon. Check out Green Power at www.CleanEnergyProjects.com and tell me what you think.

John Mackey got in touch with me the other day about one my columns, the one detailing the tragic backing up accident wherein a 3-year old girl got killed by a medium-duty refuse vehicle.

John’s flacking a system called the Macbox III, which, in short, offers a variety of stuff in one package — GPS, video recording of vehicle/driver behavior, blind spot sensors, data capture, etc. Right now, his company is working with an insurance firm in New York to equip limo fleets with this technology, enabling them to get a 10% reduction on their insurance.

All the self-interest aside (and if you want to talk to John about his product some more, drop him a line at Jjohnmackey@aim.com), he made some good points that I think need to be examined.

First, since 2000, the kinds of technology needed to capture and record vehicle data in real time has been getting extremely cheap. Second, insurance premiums have gone way, way up since 9/11 in transportation and probably won’t decline in our lifetimes. Third, the roads are getting more crowded and thus harder to safely navigate.

And, finally, drivers not only need their performance to be downloaded and analyzed every day for safety reasons, they need a ’silent witness’ if you will to back up them up — especially in the case of an accident.

“The issue today is that the risk exposure of road operations is large and getting larger — and having no way to know what’s going on with your vehicle while it’s on the road is like owning a high rise that doesn’t have a sprinkler system,” John told me.

“What fleets need to do is control the exposure — not necessarily the driver,” he added. “You need to make decisions based on facts. If a driver is exceeding the speed limit or making several panic braking stops per day, you need to know that so you can go to the driver and look at several things: do they need more training? Or are they overloaded with work, so they end up racing from one delivery to the next?”

More importantly for drivers, this kind of technoloogy shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as having ‘Big Brother’ in the cab.

“If a driver says he got cut off, which is why he crashed into another vehicle, the video will show that,” John told me. “And, on the other hand, if it shows the fleet’s driver was at fault, both the fleet and the insurer know now to seek settlement — that prevents a case from dragging on for years.”

If you can improve a driver’s skills, give them the ability to view their ‘blind spots’ via video or sensors, and even work an insurance deduction into the works, all with one system, that’s got to have some value over time for a fleet, I think.

A longtime driver for refrigerated carrier Prime Inc. that goes by the handle Mustang said something interesting the other day on the radio. He said truckers have only two real fan bases left in the world: dogs and kids. “And the problem with kids is while they are pumping their arms to get you to blow your air horn, their parents are right behind them telling us to knock it off, we’re making too much noise,” Mustang said.

He makes a good point, which is why a group called Trucker Buddy is going to be very vital to this industry in the years ahead, I believe.

I know many people think Trucker Buddy is a pretty sappy concept — getting truck drivers to become ‘pen pals’ with elementary school students — but if you think about it, this type of outreach is crucial. By the time most kids reach high school today, a variety of employers are knocking on their doors, giving truck driving a lot of competition. And what better way to humanize trucking and show off its intelligence than to foster the connection with schools.

This connection also becomes vital as the future labor pool is expected to get very tight. “Look at the overall demographic shift here – you have 78 million baby boomers that start retiring in 2008 being replaced by Generation X, which is comprised of only 45 million workers,” says Richard White, VP-marketing and communications for the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Assn. “Basically, you have a lot of people retiring very soon and not enough people to fill the jobs they are leaving.”

All the more reason to get kids interested in trucking — and keep them interested — at an early age.