Posted on 11/04/2019 3:24:44 PM PST by BenLurkin
Wow. Yeah, if it was a fleet vehicle, especially back then, they’d have repaired the brakes back at the truck yard. As much as I live out in the sticks a little, our neighbor runs a trucking business on his property. He owns a lot at the end of our road, and his drivers park the cabs and trailers up there. If anything needs serviced, he has them drive down and pull the cab or trailer right into his repair shop. Unless someone gets a tag number or the name of the business on the door, there’s no way to trace something like that.
Yep, and in heavy traffic there is sometimes no where to go to the left or right. Has happened to me 2 times...stainless steel semi-truck battery cover fell off in front of me and fortunately I did have room to swerve, and the 2nd time it was a big semi truck retread remnant (”road alligator”) at 70 mph with cars to either side...had to hit it and repair the damage to my wheel arch trim later.
I’m retired now, but when I was working I handled liability cases for a major insurer. I handled a great many truck cases over the years. Big trucks have always been problematical, but it has become worse over the last 25 years or so. Independent trucking contractors have a great number of foreign drivers, especially Russians and guys from former Yugoslavia. They have been involved in more incidents than any other group of drivers that I dealt with. They are almost kamikaze in their handling of big rigs.
A metal bar at that speed can ricochet off the road and travel hundreds of feet before landing. The inly defense is to stay alert and aware.
I was behind a pickup once and it was carrying a container strapped to a pallet in the back. He hit a typical I-78 bump and the thing flew out and landed in the road in front of me. I was far enough back that I could have avoided it, but I didn’t need to. It skittered across three lanes and landed on the right shoulder. Amazingly, nobody hit it.
The guy in the pickup kept going. I eventually saw him driving backwards on the shoulder wondering what happened to his load.
No one does, because if you leave that much space other people cut in and, you then again, don’t have space.
Once again, FR needs a like button.
I watched an eight wheel truck dolly bounce across my lane. Closing speed was way over a hundred mph.
Driving on I-10 in downtown El Paso, I noticed some motion in the sky. It was a tire. It was very high. I could see it coming down hitting the pavement and bouncing again this time towards me, it was to late to do anything, fortunately it barely missed and careened into a culvert. Wow, hope it didn’t have the rim in it.
I drive Highway 99 to Sacramento frequently. It is a major thoroughfare running north/south and parallel to Interstate 5 a few miles west. The traffic conditions are frequently very congested, even on weekends and, yes, if you leave the advised space three cars will pile between. That said, I think Californians are terrible at securing loads, big or small. (It should be required in high school to know how to secure loads.) My husband had to dodge an airborne water trough. I had a truck dumping drywall sheets on the highway in front of me that exploded into powder. I was forced to run over a heavy object which dropped from a pickup and got my first dent in the new car. Roadsides are littered with chairs, coolers, shoes, bbqs, file cabinets. The funniest was a truck hauling a trailer load of porta-potties one afternoon on Interstate 880, a very busy stretch south of Oakland, California. A door on a porta-potty was swinging open and the wind unrolled toilet paper, literally TPing the freeway.
There is no reason of any kind to assume she was not.
I typically drive eight to ten miles under the speed limit on an empty road. I drive pretty far back on a busy highway, as I had a stroke when I was thirty one and my reaction time isn’t what it used to be.
You don’t seem to have even the most vague concept of just how far steel can bounce when it hits the pavement.
Well you can’t live without truckers, but they do comprise a major part of the idiot population in this country.
Even so it wouldn’t have been the drivers fault his brake pad fell off. There are actual accidents where no one is at fault.
It amazes me how stupid some truck drivers are to not firmly secure their loads. Drivers who don’t properly secure their loads get reported to the state police if my husband or I see them. And we stay as far away from them as we can, or pass them as quickly as possible. Several years ago, a guy in a pick up truck was hauling some stuff, including a church pew, when the pew went sailing off the truck, crashed through the windshield of a car behind it, and killed a six year old kid. Idiots like that need to go to prison.
Well, you seem to know a lot about me, for not knowing anything about me!
All I was saying is, she might have avoided being struck, had she had ample distance to steer clear. It’s a simple concept, you should try to understand it.
That came to an end when I found out all those rubber tire remnants you would see along the highways were from the blown tires on those rigs. The vast majority of them use retreads which are nothing more than cheap tires than can come unglued any time.........
Nope, I stay my distance from the big rigs these days.......
My father-in-law drove semi’s. My husband can tell a green, negligent, or poorly trained driver a mile off. It’s criminal to let those guys out on the road. Just yesterday, we were coming home from Chicago, driving through Iowa and Kansas, and saw two or three semi’s playing musical lanes. We got the heck away from them as soon as we could.
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