Episode 169    

 

5 Reasons Truck Drivers Can’t Afford To Ignore Their Gut Instincts

CDLLIFE Published:  ByAshley

 

 

 

 

We’ve all been there. You’re at a truck stop parking lot late at night and you can just feel that something terrible is going to happen. Or you start your day’s drive and something just seems a little off about your truck. Or maybe you have a bad feeling about the 4-wheeler that’s in the next lane.

Do you listen to your gut or do you ignore it?

When your instincts tell you that a situation is wrong out on the road, it’s easy to push that concern aside. But your gut instincts are one of the most valuable tools to keep your safe and to make you a more successful driver. Here are just a few reasons to listen next time your instincts send up a warning signal

1. Why do they call them gut instincts? Because there are intelligent and powerful organisms in your gut. Scientists have recently discovered that the bacteria in our guts, whose cells outnumber our own by over 100 times, can have a major impact on your brain function and behavior by producing toxins that make you feel bad and chemical rewards to make you feel good in order to manipulate your actions. Because these organisms live inside you, it’s in their best interests to use these chemical communication tools to keep you out of the ditch and keep you alive.

2. Your conscious mind is busy driving, so your unconscious mind catches the missing clues. When your brain is busy with a complex task like driving, you’re more likely to miss important visual cues, like the fact that the texting lady in the 4-wheeler has drifted into your blind spot. Your unconscious mind may still pick up on them and send you an instinctual warning when you think about changing lanes.

3. Your instincts can help you spot a liar. And clues from the unconscious mind can also help you when you’re off the road as well. Psychologists say that the unconscious mind is far better at detecting a liar than the conscious mind, helping you to avoid the latest truck stop scam. Next time your gut tells you that someone is telling you a tall tale, believe it.

4. Instinctive muscle memory can make you a better driver. The more experience you have behind the wheel, the more information your muscles have retained about keeping an 80,000-pound vehicle under control. Allowing the instinctive muscle memory you’ve developed over your driving career helps to help you makes you a more efficient and relaxed driver than one who is obsessively thinking through every tiny driving action.

5. Your gut might lead you to help someone in need. Keeping ourselves safe is a pretty strong instinct, but almost equally compelling is the instinct to help other people in need. The instinct to help other people is so strong, in fact, that it causes an endorphin release called “the Helper’s High”. Your gut instincts can make the world a better place.

 

 

 

Trust your instincts when GPS leads you astray

 

   Jack Glenn, Author at FreightWaves                  

Image: Jim Allen (FreightWaves)

The semi truck may be king of the road, but its dominion only reaches so far; there are certainly places it doesn’t belong.

However, with time crunches, traffic, construction work and other constraints along the way, many commercial drivers opt for the fastest route even if it means straying far off the beaten track.

Brian Runnels urges drivers not to blindly trust GPS devices. As Reliance Partners’ director of safety and a veteran driver, he explains that the best navigational tools are often an old-fashioned map and the driver’s own instincts.

“When drivers rely solely on GPS, it seems like they’ll eventually find themselves in a bad situation,” Runnels said.

If the road suddenly narrows or appears to lack commercial traffic; if it looks like it twists and turns up jagged terrain; or especially if warning signs are present, that would be the time to turn around if possible — it may already be too late.

As the industry encourages more trust in technology, GPS-related semi truck accidents continue to make headlines. Truckers should always trust their gut feelings and rely on a road atlas to greatly avoid these situations.

In Tennessee, emergency services spent 12 hours cleaning up the spill from an overturned tanker truck. The driver of the wrecked truck, hauling 4,500 gallons of motor oil, told reporters that he “took his GPS for granted, kind of got distracted and went down the wrong route in some unfamiliar territory on a county back road.”

Commercial drivers are encouraged to heed road signs prohibiting large vehicles from a thoroughfare, but even this isn’t enough to deter some.

One West Virginia community reportedly sees tractor trailers bottom out “once or twice a week” at a specific railroad crossing in town. The police chief expressed frustration with many truck drivers not reading the warning and detour signs, as well as failing to see the steep grade of the intersection as a potential hazard.

Runnels spoke of one incident in his home state of Indiana where a semi truck took a detour across a historic bridge with a 6-ton weight limit — with warning signs duly posted. As expected, the bridge buckled.

Runnels attributes accidents like these to wholehearted trust in GPS devices and failure to develop street smarts. That is why he always brought an atlas or road map aboard every haul. 

“I would compare the route the company gave me to my map, and by the mileage I’d know how far I could make it,” Runnels said of his old-school techniques. “I would then pull out a truck stop guide to see what was in that area. I knew exactly where I was going, and there was no guesswork to it.”

His rationale for maps is that they’ll never steer you in the wrong direction. Runnels isn’t against the use of GPS navigation per se, he only warns that these devices aren’t always designed with truckers in mind. That’s especially true for basic navigation services like Google Maps or Apple Maps.

“I wouldn’t let a student [driver] that was in my truck use a GPS until they learned how to read a map. They learned how to utilize the first 10 or 15 pages that have a ton of information on things like bridge laws, major low clearances and restricted routes,” Runnels said. “Maybe towards the end if I saw that they were becoming pretty proficient at map reading, I would allow them to use the GPS to compare it up against what a map said; oftentimes there were differences.”