Truck You

Yesterday I wrote about flying during the Thanksgiving holiday. Today I have another pet peeve that relates to driving. Look what I get to deal with after work tonight, on the "busiest travel day of the year":

Truck crash closes I-95

I realize that the accident hasn't been thoroughly investigated yet, but really, who else is going to be at fault in a single-vehicle accident? And this is the second single-vehicle big rig accident in two weeks in my area that's closed a stretch of major highway.

Let's compare the trucker for just a moment to a medical doctor--just two gentlemen (or ladies) of a similar ilk. If a doctor makes a mistake as egregious as some of the moving violations the truckers who cause these accidents get cited for, he loses his license for a long time--sometimes forever. Now consider this: a doctor has considerably more complex safety considerations to remember than a trucker does, and a doctor's mistake endangers only one person at a time. A trucker's error endangers everyone around them and can kill many people in one fell swoop. Why aren't truck drivers held to the same safety standards as other professionals, so that we can get the bad ones off the roads? I wonder if it has anything to do with the millions of dollars that the Teamsters Union "donates" to politicians every year.