Drivers

jakethesnake:
to include such things as bridge awareness tuition

Really, awe come on, 1000’s of us have driven millions of miles without hitting a bridge. Bridge awareness training would not make any difference.
Just look at other parts of driver training and ask yourself how much of that is taken in ?
It’s all about the type of individual rather that what he is taught or to put it another way. ATTITUDE.

Fair points, but you are a 70’s pass like me we started out with very small cabs (only the all flash no cash mobs got high Scanny 110s and Volvo 88’s back then, Ford’s Transconti was a rarity, the chances are a flat trailer which you roped and sheeted, and the majority of loads then (unless packaging or similar) were no higher than the cab so around 11 ft at most, and when you’d spent an hour or more putting 2 or 4 or even 5 (including a fly) sheets and ropes over, you had a pretty good idea how high the thing was, and any bloody lorryist with an ounce of sense used a tape measure.

Eventually we moved on to curtain siders, but high van and curtain siders were incredibly rare, about the only drivers running semi permanently at 16ft back then would be car transporters.

The new drivers don’t get this hands on any more or have the luxury of a 11ft high when loaded flatbed artic to learn on, chances are they get a set of keys, a lorry they’ve never laid eyes on before, and a trailer number, and they’ll be hasselled out of the gate asap, little change of familiarisation, no spending an hour roping up the vehicle, being up on top like we were realising it was a bit bloody higher than we had thought, they might be straight out in the first week at 15’9", i’m not too sure how i’d have coped either to be honest.

Another point, invariably the flat roped load if high, eg three layers of paper reels, would be narrower than the bed, so arch bridges were an easier negotiations even if we missed them by accident as it were.

Also we used maps back then, so we plotted our own routes and learned them by heart, no relying on some little machine deciding our route for us and then sitting there vegetating just steering the bloody lorry whilst the electronics do everything else including directing us on a journey we didn’t even route ourselves.
I bet if the satnav packed up at any point in their journey half the sods wouldn’t have the foggiest idea which road they were on or where they were supposed to be going, that’s what happens when you take away the basics of the job.

By height training i don’t mean just instruction either, i mean various frames made out of reinforced cardboard or balsa type wood set out where they do the maneuvering, so they can go through a bridge too low at 40 mph and see what happens to the ‘bridge’ without the catastrophic results of a real bridge strike, or this could be electronic these days where breaking the beam would set off one hell of a siren and flashing lights in the cab scaring the trainee half to death, bit like a video game.