You presume that it's always a truck at the front of the queue.
Someone doing 65 in lane 3 will screw up a perfectly good four lane motorway
And it only takes one fool trying to do 85 in heavy traffic to cause hours of delays.
Perhaps trucks should be the only traffic on dual carriageways(etc) during normal working hours? Say 08:00 until 17:30.
They are professionals at work after all....
Everyone who drives a company car/van/wagon is a professional driver, are they not? If you are being paid a wage whilst driving, surely that makes you a 'professional'.
I was travelling up the A36 earlier. A very large, brand new Tractor towing a massive harvesting attachment. Had Ambers front and rear (a couple of transit vans). These guys are obviously professional drivers (as it's their job). So why run at 3pm on a frickin Friday afternoon? Short stretches of 2-lane, artics attempting to pass, but cannot due to the width of this thing.
Poole to Bristol, usually 2hrs. I clocked 3hrs 12mins because of this.
Why not run it at 8pm, or 5am???
I agree as someone who clocked up 950,000+ logged miles in company cars traveling all over the UK, plus another 200,000+ private journey miles. I was a "professional driver", and most of the time I found other professional,
lorry drivers, who drove for a living good drivers.
But, it was never their own, individual professionalism or not that worried me but the state of the lorry drivers vehicles, especially as in 1979 I escaped being killed by one that was dangerously unfit for the road. It happened when travelling between Lymington in Hampshire and Christchurch, Dorset.
On a old winding road, now replaced, I passed a rigid 4 axle 30 tonne truck, loaded to the brim with ballast, coming out of a side road from a quarry / depot. Shortly after that I was going down a small hill and had to stop in a queue of traffic waiting at light controlled road works. Then THAT lorry came into view in my mirror, or rather screamed into view with his brakes making me well aware he was there. Traffic was coming up the single laned road as this thing very quickly got larger in my mirror, with me trapped with an embankment on my right, and traffic coming up the hill. His brakes were now making a hell of a noise and I just knew he could not stop.........................he loomed very large in my mirror as I waited for impact in my Ford Cortina Estate Mk4. Just as I thought he was going to hit me, he veered out onto the other side of the road which miracrously had now emptied of traffic. With his brakes now not only screaming, but giving off a terrible smell he went passed me...passed the car in front, then the one in front of him, passed the next one, then the next, until finally stopping half way past the final vehicle in the queue!
In almost shock I started to move down the hill with the other vehicles and past the lorry, and I could see the driver was looking absolutely shocked. The last I saw of him was as he very slowly moved his truck into a layby and stopped. I can only imagine what his thoughts had been, but he would have survived, something I knew me and the other occupants of the cars in front of me would not have done if his grossly overloaded and I am sure defective truck had struck us.............30+ tonnes of overloaded vehicle, travelling about 40 miles an hour hitting the rear of a flimsy Ford Cortina Estate...................I would have been flattened, along with others!!
I have never forgotten that moment as it is one of the most "nearlies" I have encountered driving, so it not only the standard of driving ability but the commercial vehicles condition that will always concern me.
Fast forward to 2016 and the terrible Bath tipper truck accident that killed four, with a car crushed and two pedestrians, including a child, wiped out, due to having faulty brakes. That accident really rammed home what could have happened to me and still can to others when defective vehicles are driven on our roads by "professional" drivers