Why are truckdrivers such assholes?

The BBQ Pit
121

A truck driver “cutting you off” in traffic? Asshole, in absolutely no different way than the far higher number of non-truck drivers that have cut me off in my life.

A truck driver driving at the highest speed he can and stuck next to another truck on a hill and you REALLY want to be able to go around him, because your time is of course far more valuable than anybody on the road that is not you? Not an asshole. Any more than the poor RV that gets stuck in the same situation trying to cross over a mountain pass.

Yeah, I really feel most people on the road think that whatever the fuck they have going on right now is of the UTMOST urgency, and all other drivers on the road exist only to be in their way and slow them down. An attitude I stamped out with extreme prejudice while teaching my kids to drive.

ETA: I feel I should point out, no truck driver WANTS to have a vehicle on their right side for an extended period of time. It’s uncomfortable to drive that way. And when you get “stuck” with somebody on your right side, and vehicles starting to get lined up behind you, you can’t just “drop back” because you don’t know how many vehicles are stuck in your blind spots. So the best you can do is just keep pushing as well as you can.

122

It takes me 5 seconds to pass someone on the road, not 5 minutes or 5 hours. I’m not creating traffic jams for miles because I’ve decided to pass someone and I know I can only do that at .005 mph.

The truck driver is the one that’s saying their time is more valuable than the time of the many people they block from moving along more efficiently.

In your example, the RV driver is an asshole too. You have to think your time is worth many many times what other people’s time is worth if you are willing to cost people many times the amount of time you save when you block traffic like that.

I have no idea why people are so desperate to justify the behavior of assholes, except perhaps they see it reflected in their own behavior and want to justify it.

123

Well, in Czarcasm’s defense, he keeps claiming he’s explaining the behavior, not justifying it.

124

Like @Czarcasm says, there’s a difference between explanation and justification. In the post @Atamasama is responding to, I specifically said “I don’t mean what kind of explanation would make you think this is OK” precisely to make this distinction.

Truck drivers don’t do this stuff randomly. It’s not the result of a benign tumour pressing down on their hippocampus. They haven’t been colonised by some fungus that’s taken control of their brain.

There exists some set of reasons which are the reasons truck drivers do this.

I find that if I’m trying to understand why certain behaviour occurs in people’s workplaces, a really, really good starting point is:

The purpose of a system is what it does

If you get some sporadic, isolated unwanted behaviours, that’s fixable. If you get persistent, widespread unwanted behaviours, it’s because your system is set up to faithfully produce them. (It doesn’t matter if you didn’t intend the system to produce them, or what you think the purpose of the system is. If the system keeps on doing a thing, then it’s a system for doing that thing.)

So why does the “delivering goods by trucks travelling on highways” system keep producing asshole behaviour?

Maybe @Czarcasm is right and the system directly and accurately incentivises this behaviour and disincentivises non-asshole behaviour
Maybe @Chisquirrel is right and in fact the truck drivers are wrong about how much time they save and what difference it makes to their ability to get to their destination on time - but although their belief is wrong it’s still sincerely held, so the end result is the same.
Maybe there’s some quality of the system that makes it more likely to hire assholes than non-assholes
Maybe there’s something about the system (other than economic incentives) that weeds out non-assholes faster than assholes
Maybe there’s something about the system (other than economic incentives) that gradually induces assholism in non-assholes.

Or maybe truck drivers are just irreducible assholes for no reason whatsoever.

Lest any of this be construed as an attempt at justification, or still worse a coded defence of my own behaviour, allow me to unburden myself of the following:

Boo. Boooo. BOOO. BOOOO! Boo to the truck drivers I say. Boooooo.

125

I think there’s a failure to establish the premise. Truck drivers are no more assholes than any other driver. In my experience, assholism is a common trait of the American driver.

126

In the regard specified in the OP (me), they are distinct from other drivers in that other drivers, of cars. do not make a practice of staying in the passing lane parallel to the vehicle in the right lane at five MPH below the speed limit for inordinate periods of time.

127

Look at the “brake check” videos on youtube. Often lumped in to “road rage” and “instant karma” there are lots dash cams documenting crazy shit going on out there. Driver A offends Driver B, Driver B gets in front of him and slams on brakes…then drives 20 mph under speed limit to hold him back, speeding up if he tries to pass etc. It’s like they’re spoiling for a fight. So to a degree, some are taking a sad song and not making it better.

I can’t imagine doing that to another driver because of its potential lethality, as well as the fact that my car will be damaged and there’s insurance etc. to deal with if the other guy can’t stop. There’s one video where a guy chases down the hit-and-runner, but GPS proves he exceeded 100 mph to do so—more taking the law into one’s own hands. Throw in some cartoon physics and I guess I should not be surprised some guys challenge big rigs to a game of chicken.

IIRC the average US driver will put about 15K miles on a car in a year.

Truckers drive about 3x that on average.

Given that they’re often obeying lower speed limits, the actual hours on the road is a higher factor than a car.

Then we have the stress factor of pulling something so long and heavy, though you’ve been trained. Mrs. L and I are really rethinking our plan to pull a fifth wheel because of that, in fact. You can plan around low bridges and narrow roads but there’s no remedy for other idiots with licenses.

Much as I dislike driving a car, I bet I’d dislike driving a semi by at least a factor of 20. While I’m thinking of it: if you see people driving rentals like U-Haul or Ryder, I hope the red flag trips in your mind and you realize that you need to give them extra room, time, etc. because that’s not their usual ride. They may be out of their depth. The longest week I ever spent driving one of those was the 8 hours moving my stuff and towing my cars with one of them. It took a long time for my butt to unpucker from that.

128

One thing missed in the “I must save two seconds doing my slow pass, else I’ll lose my space at the dock”, is that now the truck being passed is going to miss HIS dock. And the trucks being held up by this slow speed pass? They’re all going to miss their spots at the dock.

And the truckers already at the docks? The ones who got unloaded? Well, they can’t leave the docks, because there’s a huge line of trucks blocking all lanes of the freeway.

It’s trucks all the way down. Global gridlock. No wonder store shelves are empty, gas stations are dry, and production has halted across this land.

Or maybe that two seconds saved doesn’t really mean anything.

129

I don’t buy the “few seconds means several hours” argument. Sure, maybe the guy 15 seconds in front of you gets the last dock, but the docks don’t take hours and hours to load or unload. If it’s a mom and pop place with only a single dock, then it’s just shitty luck that you got there at the same time; that’s rare, because logistics folks don’t schedule their trucks that way. If you’re going to a big company with multiple docks, something is going to open up much sooner than “several hours.” Sure, this all goes out the window if the hilo drivers are on strike, but chances are logistic people didn’t schedule trucks during that time.

Modern logistics is fucking amazing, like watching the world’s best ballet. Maybe the explanation for their behavior is right, but then the truckers are just idiots if they think the circumstances are true.

130

I think this pretty much gets us to an answer:

  1. In any population there’s a minimum proportion of assholes
  2. Under stress, human beings are more prone do doing assholish things and generally making poor decisions than they otherwise would be
  3. Driving is somewhat stressful
  4. Driving big rigs is more stressful than that
  5. Assholish driving stresses other drivers out
  6. Time pressure is stressful

So we’ve got a nice little system here where a small number of natural asshole truck drivers drive badly in order to be certain they make the dock on time and screw everyone else. This adds to the stress on other drivers in the system. For some, given their natural stress thresholds and current levels of stress based on margin for making the dock, hours on the road etc. this added stress is enough to tip them over the asshole threshold where they start making selfish/poor decisions, this puts more delay/pressure into the system which tips other drivers over…

It’s not a perfect positive feedback system as satirised by @Just_Asking_Questions , because many (perhaps most?) truck drivers are in control of their stress and don’t hit the asshole threshold (and the highway system is in fact well designed enough not to hit gridlock). But in general, “truck drivers are human beings and occasionally respond badly to stress” seems like a pretty good explanation.

131

Another way to look at this is that “the current behaviour of truck drivers” is part of the amazing world of modern logistics rather than some isolated phenomenon.

132

Some of the confrontations in that video remind me of a Lawrence Block short story, “Like A Bug On A Windshield”, about a trucker who becomes convinced that another driver he encountered at a truckstop is hunting down offending motorists on interstates, forcing them off the road into fatal accidents.

133

You can’t put all the blame on the truck drivers for their predicament, of course. Logistics and Sales, made up for the most part of people that have never been drivers, make deals to secure contracts, deals designed to undercut other companies when it comes to time and money, then they pass that buck to the dispatchers who have to pick which drivers get which jobs. They of course will pick drivers who have a reputation for getting there first with the least amount of unignorable hassle.

135

But I can blame them for how they handle the predicament.

136

Are you saying BOO? Or boodacious job of delivering that load on time?

137

When I see someone holding a gun on a truck driver and forcing him to take a dump in a public parking lot in broad daylight I will be more understanding of the stress they are under. Until then I will think of them as the pigs they are.

138

Then understand that they are on the road because, for the most part, freight companies will hire them as long as they get the freight from point A to point B in the least amount of time.

139

Yep. The whole process favors assholes, so only assholes succeed in the business. Which means that trucker self select for assholeness and will never change. If they didn’t like being assholes, they could change things but they like it so it won’t change. Got it. Thanks!

140

This whole thread is just a multi-participant exercise in Fundamental Attribution Error.

141

There’s quite a shortage of truck drivers out there these days, so freight companies will hire them even if they take an extra 10 minutes on their haul by not being a jackass.

And all it really is is a race to the bottom, trying to cut more corners than the next guy, when, if none of you were cutting corners, you’d all be better off.