It’s been three years now since my pickup died — more like killed, actually. The first vehicle I’d ever bought (with a big fat loan from my parents I stress. I paid them back — well, I paid MOST of it back …) my Chevy S-10 Tahoe got nailed dead-on by a drunk driver while parked in the snow outside Squaw Creek Resort in Lake Tahoe, CA, in 2004. It still had a LOT of life left in it — only 150,000 miles on the odometer despite its 16 year age — but the crash totaled it.

Luckily, my brother — my pickup’s driver at the time (and yes I STILL considered it mine even though his name was on the title) — wasn’t anywhere near it. Working at the resort, he heard a loud ‘BOOM!’ and immediately got that sinking feeling. Sure enough, he found the drunk sitting in his smashed SUV beside my now ready-for-the-scrap-heap truck, staring off into space, and kept watch on the guy till the cops arrived.

Now, sure, all we’re talking about here is a hunk of metal on two axles — and a rather small one when compared to the big dualies or Class 8s I regularly write about today. And it wasn’t all that much to look at, shaped rather like a doughnut box on wheels, painted dead black with no fancy trim. Ah, but how USEFUL that sucker turned out to be! That, to me, is what gets missed in all the carping about trucks these days. I moved myself home from college, then moved both my brother and sister to and from college as well. Moved my friends, my cousin, and my parents to new digs. Shuttled furniture for my in-laws. Loads of dirt, lumber, and tailings from various home improvement projects to the dump. You name it, that S-10 hauled it.

That S-10 had oversize tires, too, which helped it really grip the road. Once, I took a road trip with one of my best high school buddies, Jason Epstein, to Syracuse University (his alma mater) in the winter to catch a basketball game. Driving late at night in a howling blizzard, we had no idea they’d closed the highway between Binghampton NY and Syracuse (a good hour drive at highway speed) but there we were in four wheel drive, cruising along slow but steady, no slipping and sliding. That truck got us through. And the fuel economy it logged wasn’t bad, either, I might add: its V-6 engine regularly got 20 mpg in the city and about 22 to 23 highway.

(A tip of the hat to Joyce Motors in Arlington, VA, here: they performed regular maintenance on that truck for over a decade and kept it humming like new.)

Took that S-10 cross country to Colorado for a skiing trip as its extended cab could fit three people (though not comfortably) and it went up and down the Rockies with ease. Once I got married and the kids started coming, though, the S-10’s days in my possession were numbered. Thankfully, none of the car dealers I visited made me a decent offer for it, so I ended up giving it to my mom and dad, who used it for a few years as a work vehicle, storing it at their cabin in West Virginia.

Later, after my brother totaled his Jeep in a freak accident (he has NO luck with cars — though his bad driving may have something to do with it — sorry, Mike, even Mario Andretti wouldn’t let you drive) he took the keys of my S-10 and drove it out West to California, narrowly missing a tornado along the way. And there it spent its final days, roaring along the Sierra Nevada range, dipping down into the nearby deserts, hauling ski gear and moutain bikes all over the place. A very useful truck indeed.

That’s the thing about pickups and, frankly, trucks in general — they are so useful. If I’d had to rent a vehicle for all the jobs I handled with my S-10, I would’ve spent more than the $12,000 sticker price easily. Because once people know you have a pickup, you’re getting calls all the time to borrow it for something (as my neighbor Jay Rouse well knows — I need to borrow his 10-year old F-150 again to get some mulch).

And talk about tough! Less than a year after I bought it, a tree fell on it — the upper branches of a massive oak crushing the roof and engine hood. But I just crawling into the cab, fired the engine up, and backed it out — with branches and glass spraying everywhere (not smart, but hey, I was all of 20 at the time. A DUMB 20).

A solid vehicle that did more than its share of work: that was my S-10. Thanks, Chevrolet. You did good with that one.

Spent some time a few weeks back at Goodyear’s Commercial Tire Academy in Dallas, TX, immersing myself in lots of truck tire details. We all know how important tires are to the safe and cost-efficient operation of heavy trucks today … but frankly, we just don’t think about it that much. Tires are just so taken for granted, not just by truckers but by the driving public at large, that lots of bad things keep happening.

Remember the Ford Explorer-Firestone tire debacle back in 2000? One reason Firestone tires were failing is that Ford recommended that owners run them under-inflated to improve the vehicle’s stability. That violates one of the most basic rules of tire physics — you MUST run them at the proper inflation or risk damaging the tire, leading to premature failure. Or how about the ongoing Chinese light truck debacle? Poorly constructed, unsafe tires enjoy brisk sales because they are cheap — and now NHTSA is trying to get the distributor to recall them, without much luck.

Roy Sutfin, general manager-service for Goodyear’s commercial division, nailed this disconnect dead on during my Dallas visit: “People will spend $200 or more on a pair of shoes in a heartbeat, without a second thought, but then turn around and try to find the cheapest tires possible for their vehicles,” he told me. “Look, from a safety perspective, what’s more important here? Designer footwear or what your vehicle is riding on when you are going 65 mph on the highway? Tires are what your family is riding on and, for truckers, what supports your business. They are extremely important, yet we don’t treat them as such.”

Look at how we take care of tires. An analysis of 1,000 vehicle inspections forms gathered by the Car Care Alliance from 16 states back in January found that 20% of those vehicles had improperly inflated tires, with 11% running on tread so worn out the tires needed replacement. Look at all the ‘gators’ you see driving down the road. Most of that rubber isn’t from recaps, as most truckers know, but from new tire failures due to chronic underinflation — tires than can cost upwards of $350 per unit, but that we can’t seem to keep properly inflated so they’ll last 500,000 miles or more.

Truck tires, especially, are built to take a lot of punishment because the OEMs know how much they’ll suffer over their lifespan. As part of my tire academy visit, I followed around Stan Zucchenlli and Gerald Mike Stout, two longtime tire salemen, as they conducted a tire inspection on a truck and trailer. One of the trailer tires we looked at, from the details branded on its sidewall, was made in 1998 — almost NINE years old, yet there it was, properly inflated and ready for business. Sure, trailer tires are designed to roll for many years, but that still was an impressive sight.

Yet inpsecting truck and trailer tires every day — especially measuring inflation pressure — is no easy thing and the 100-degree Dallas summer weather made the trailer part of the inspection (the truck stood parked in a nice air conditioned maintenance bay) a nasty business. It typically takes about 18 minutes to check the air pressure on all of a tractor-trailer’s 18 tires and it can get to be an irritating daily chore in a hurry, no doubt — one reason why those tire ‘thumpers’ are still around. (Like you can accurately gauge air pressure by hitting a tire — like seeing if the oil level is OK by thumping the truck’s hood. NOT!)

Still, these tires support the whole vehicle as it rolls down the road, have a big impact on overall fuel economy, and are what stops your tractor-trailer when you hit the brakes. Sure, the brakes stop the wheel from moving, but it’s the TIRE that’s connecting the vehicle to the road — and if those tires fail in a panic stop situation, your rims won’t have the grip necessary to even slow down much less stop your rig.

Tires are important — we all know that. It’s just that we need to put more of that ‘knowing’ into practice every day. That’s what will keep truckers safe and save them money, too.

“We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” –Charles Darwin

Had dinner a while back with Brian McVeigh, general manager of General Motor’s fleet and commercial division — the second largest division within GM, I might add, just behind Chevrolet. Brian’s a great interview, because he never shys away from speaking his mind on almost any topic and tends to be very blunt in his critiques, even where GM is concerned.

“Listen, there is no question we lost the car market to the Japanese — they build a great product and we got caught sleeping,” he told me. “But we’ve been working very hard to catch up and we’re going to continue to do so. Now, when you look at light trucks, we’ve always dominated that segment of the market. And though the Japanese are starting to introduce product there, we have no intention of giving up our leadership in that segment. That means we have to keep bringing new stuff to the table.”

That’s one reason why GM’s OnStar communication system is now an embedded feature within both its car and truck lines — something that’s getting harder and harder to remove from the spec sheet — because GM believes vehicle telematics is going to become a key battleground in the future.

“Telematics gives you greater dialog with the vehicle and how you operate it — offering fleet managers, especially, the opportunity to save money,” McVeigh explained. “You can achieve significant savings — more so, in my opinion, than buying a hybrid vehicle — simply by routing it better, managing idle time more closely, and staying on top of maintenance issues. [OnStar] is a tool to make the vehicle operate more efficiently across the board, not just in terms of fuel economy alone.”

While GM plans to keep offering more hybrid vehicles, McVeigh still isn’t convinced they generate enough fuel savings yet to repay their hefty sticker price premium. “If you are tacking on $3,000 to $4,000 extra to the base sticker cost of a vehicle, that’s a big deal to fleets,” he said. “That’s one of the issues we’re seeing in the move to become more ‘green.’ Fleets — especially in the public sector — get mandated to become more green, yet they don’t get any increases to their budgets to really help them do so.”

McVeigh also feels the future of alternative fuels isn’t going to be limited to one or two fuels either — it’s going to encompass a wide range of options, from hybrids and ethanol to natural gas and biodiesel, well into the future. “By 2040, we’ll have eight different fuels powering our vehicles because there’s just no single ’silver bullet’ out there than can replace petroleum completely. We’ll need a mix of them to fit various operations.”

On the light truck side, heavy competition mixed with the need to pare down costs is creating a lot of dynamic change for GM and the other domestics, McVeigh said. “We’re all moving away from the minivan, except for Chrysler — and that light van with the two sliding doors served as a great commerical platform for many segments of our market,” he explained. So now, customers must either move up to big 15-person vans or drop down into smaller crossovers, like the HHR panel van, instead.

“Diesel is the next big battleground, because it offers both the great fuel economy and power commerical customers want,” said McVeigh. “Yet the emissions rules are getting tighter, and that adds a lot of cost to diesel. But that diesel engine is key for us — we need to find ways to make it work despite the extra cost emission controls add to it.”

Finally, there are partnerships with upfitters — the companies that add ladder racks, work bodies, and other equipment to GM’s truck chassis. McVeigh feels far more closer integration with these final stage players is going to be extremely important in the years ahead. “We already have partnerships with 30 to 35 upfitters — they help you get down into niche markets where we, by ourselves, would find expensive to serve,” he said. “We’ve got a team of eight engineers that do nothing but work with all our upfitter partners to nail integration issues so we don’t impact safety or vehicle capability as we add things on. We also need a more smoothly inegrated vehicle delivered faster to the customer — all of that is going to just keep growing in importance to commercial customers.”

“Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” –Mark Twain.

It’s been a long, sad year in many ways for me. Before my good friend and co-worker Terry Nguyen drowned in June, I lost one of my best college friends, Jacob “Big Jake” Perkins, in February to a massive heart attack. Jake had been sick for years — his kidneys failed in 2000 due to a massive infection and the years of dialysis and a difficult organ transplant last year left him very weak. But none of that ever slowed Jake down. If anything, it encouraged him to be even more outgoing — he was such a huge fixture in the town where he grew up (Poolesville, MD) that they renamed a local charity golf tournament after him and established a high school scholarship fund in his name.

I think about Jake and Terry a lot these days and for good reason — they both left lasting legacies behind, lives we can celebrate and cherish because they did so much in the time they were alloted on this earth with us. Those legacies are not just about their personal acomplishments (which are many) but about how those accomplishments served others in the long run.

In Jake’s case, he worked tremendously hard on behalf of the Poolesville community and his other great love, our alma mater Virginia Tech, wherever and whenever a helping hand was needed. His unflagging support continued literally right up until the day he died, giving an interview to a local reporter about how the recent town elections might shape the future of Poolesville. He climbed into an ambulance not long after that phone call, where his big heart finally stopped beating.

The same sense of giving can found throughout trucking, as anyone can tell you. Take Gary King, who died in June this year. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he drove a truck for more than 30 years. In 1992, King, an owner-operator with Dart Transit at the time, began writing postcards to school classrooms as he traveled the country. With the help of corporate sponsors, his work evolved into Trucker Buddy International, today a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to helping mentor schoolchildren via pen-pal relationships with professional truck drivers. Since 1992, more than a million children have participated in the program (you can check it out at www.truckerbuddy.org) and it’s safe to say his brainchild will impact the hearts and minds of school kids for decades to come.

Another industry veteran passed on this year as well — Mike Russell, vp-communications for the American Trucking Association, from drowning during a rafting trip in Colorado. A former Marine and TV broadcaster, Mike worked tirelessly on behalf of the trucking community at large, but especially focused on drivers. He was instrumental in getting truck trailers emblazoned with U.S. Marine Corps images, a very succesful part of the USMC’s overall image campaign.

I can’t tell you how many drivers I’ve spoken to — many of them former Marines — who look with real pride on those trailers. The truckers who pull them also are very conscious of the honor they’ve been given, and all of that grew out of Mike’s discussions with the Corps. That’s but one of several legacies he’s left behind (another being his unwavering support of Trucker Buddy, I might add).

There are, of course, thousands of people I could mention in this pace that left an indelible mark on trucking (and our American community as a whole) the way Mike Russell and Gary King have before passing on. These positive contributions — for trucking directly, in your local community, wherever — really do matter and live on for a long, long time, making trucking and our country only better and better. It’s hard to say goodbye to them — lord knows, what I wouldn’t give for a chance to tell Big Jake and Terry how much I treasured our friendship — but the legacies they’ve left behind will always shine. I take comfort in that.

“We know how to build and repair roads to last longer, but it requires a greater investment up front. Given the fact that urban travel continues to increase, we must act now to build better roads to accommodate such an increase in travel.” –William Wilkins, executive director, The Road Information Program (TRIP).

The worst thing about the horror show going on in Minnesota is that it never had to happen. Never.

Read William Wilkins’ words one more time up there. He wrote those in 2004 — three years ago now — as part of TRIP’s ongoing, yet ultimately never quite successful, effort to wake up government at all levels (as well as the general public) to the danger posed by our deteriorating highway infrastructure. I’ve written countless stories over the past decade myself tracking the long retreat from adequate highway funding, as both the states and the federal government redirected tax monies elsewhere.

For example, take a step back in time with me again to 2004 and look at figures compiled by the Build Indiana Council (BIC), a coalition of over 500 companies representing the transportation construction industry. Indiana’s state highway construction program went from over $770 million dollars in 2004 down to nearly $300 million in 2006, with projections to remain around $500 million for subsequent years. Yet the Indiana Department of Transportation’s (INDOT) own long range plan warned that it needed investment levels of $1 billion by 2007 and $1.4 billion by 2011 to meet their planned construction programs.

In addition, BIC said local roads and bridges across the state face dire problems without the funding to address them. There are nearly 3,700 local bridges that are structurally deficient or obsolete, and close to 90% of county pavements are considered rough by industry standards. Local governments need an additional $200 million annually over the next decade simply to address these problems, the group noted.

According to TRIP’s research, one out of four of the nation’s major metropolitan roads – interstates, freeways and other critical local routes – have pavements in poor condition, resulting in rough rides and costing the average urban motorist $400 annually in additional vehicle operating costs.

At the same time, overall travel on urban roads increased by 35% from 1990 to 2002, with large commercial truck traffic growing at 51% over the same time period. TRIP warned that overall vehicle travel is expected to increase by approximately 42% and heavy truck traffic by 49% by the year 2020, requiring more road construction funds to handle that extra volume.

Before the I-35 bridge collapse in Minnesota, the arguments about highway funding were going up another notch as many states — Pennsylvania chief among them — sought to lease their toll roads to the private sector as a way to generate the extra funds necessary for road and bridge repair. That controversial plan, of course, raised a lot of ire both among truckers and regular motorists, who felt their fuel tax money should already be taking care of the problem. Perhaps the biggest beef trucking has about fuel taxes is that half the states put that revenues in their general funds — meaning it’s NOT reserved for highway repairs and construction.

Now, of course, this is all going to change — bridge inspections are going on all over the country at a furious rate, and politicians are falling all over themselves to get on TV and declare that more road funding is imminent. All too late, of course, for however many people ended up dying when the I-35 bridge collapsed.

(The toll is at five now, but is still expected to rise as divers examine the cars the fell to the bottom of the Mississippi River. My heart and prayers go out to all the families that lost loved ones in this calamity.)

We’ve got to get two things through our collective thick skulls: that our highways and bridges are in poor shape and that it will take a lot of time and money to correct the problem. That also means we as a nation must stop taking our highway system for granted. For example, in my neck of the woods, lawsuits held up plans to replace the crumbling Woodrow Wilson I-95 highway bridge spanning the Potomac river for YEARS as people argued over the size of the bridge, how high it should be, and the ‘noise impact’ construction would have on the local community. All while a bridge built in the late 1960s literally crumbled under traffic volumes it was never designed to handle.

We should have taken the repair needs of our bridges and highways more seriously, but we didn’t — it took a catastrophe that robbed people of their lives to wake us up. That’s the real tragedy here.

“Quiet about his work, very loud with his results.” - Mark Rypien, former quarterback, describing Art Monk, former Washington Redskins wide receiver.

James Arthur “Art” Monk, number 81, is one of the top arthletic heroes of my childhood. Known as “the Quiet Man” by his teamates for how he approached the game of football, Monk became one of the Redskins’ clutch players over his 15 seasons with the team — in my opinion, however, he was the best clutch player of them all. That’s because most of his 940 receptions for 12,721 yards came over the middle — the most dangerous place on the field for a wide receiver. Focused on the ball, the receiver can’t see the linebackers coming at him, leaving him vulnerable to devastating tackles. Yet Monk delivered time and time again in this most dangerous of spots — making big yardage gains, first downs, even touchdowns.

I think about Monk around this time of year, as that’s when I start getting press releases about all the truck drivers heading to the National Truck Driving Championships. These men and women, like Monk, exemplify world-class professionalism and skills, yet (for the most part) don’t brag about it. Monk wasn’t a showboat (unlike most football players today) preferring instead to lead by example — letting his play and his dedication to practice speak for themselves. Those same attributes shine brightly from these truck drivers as well.

“It’s much, much more that punching a clock for them,” Jim Staley, president and CEO of YRC Regional Transportation, which is sending 13 drivers to the championships this year, told me. “They have a strong commitment to safety, to professional conduct, and they have a lot of pride in what they do. They do so much to improve our image not just with the general motoring public but with our customers as well. When you put it all together, they make a strong statement about what it means to be a truck driver.”

The comparison with Monk is also apprpriate for another reason: the emotions around the championship — indeed all of the truck driving competitions — make it feel just like a football game in many ways.

“There’s a lot of excitement about this, especially at the local facilties where the competing drivers are based,” said Staley. “It’s huge morale boost not just for our drivers but for all of our employees at those locations. It’s like the feeling you get when you are at a major sporting event — and this is true from the local competitions right up through the state and finally national championships. There’s a lot of fervor about it.”

Not only do winning drivers get HUGE trophies (I’ve seen them — they are MASSIVE) to mark their victories, they get to do it in front of their families as most carriers — like YRC Regional — coordinate travel not only for their competiting drivers but for their spouses and sometimes chldren as well. “We want everyone there, to see what this means to our drivers and to our company,” said Staley. “It’s really important for people to realize, too, that these competitions are serious and very challenging — they are not just circling a racetrack. Real skills are involved here — skills that make the highways safer when they are on the road.”

And when you think about it, piloting 80,000-plus pound rigs at highway speeds every day is just like Monk making plays over the middle — a very dangerous activity, though it doesn’t look that way when you watch it on TV. That’s why you need clutch players behind the wheel.