-Todd McCann started driving big rigs in 1997 and covers about 125,000 miles a year on America’s highways. In other words, he knows driving. (He also runs the hilarious Trucker Dump podcast.) It’s hard to imagine anyone with a better perspective on the best and worst of highway driving than a guy who spends every day, week after week, sitting high up behind the wheel of his rig, watching cars ahead, behind, and alongside. We asked him to tell us what mistakes he sees again and again, and how we can all be better drivers. Spoiler alert: Put down your freaking phone.
This should be obvious: Pay attention.
-People don’t pay attention. They are in their own worlds because of cell phones. That’s why they get caught riding on the right side of the road. That’s why at the last-second they realize they are about to miss their turn. About 75 percent of the time when they are trying to merge onto the highway and are trying to push me over—which is ridiculous in itself—it’s because they are looking up at the last second from their cell phone. They realize that they should worry about merging and you see the cell phone vanish. They put the phone down and look up at you like, “You didn’t see that.”
-I’m not one of these guys who thinks that if you’re texting going down the road, you’re a danger to everybody. If it’s a quick text, I don’t see it as being much more dangerous than fiddling with your radio station, as long as there isn’t a bunch of traffic around. But I’m in Jersey right now and I see it on I-95 all the time where there’s a ton of traffic and there are people cruising by on their phones. That’s just amazing[ly dumb].
-Stop hanging out along my side.
-Have you ever seen the signs on the back of trucks that say, “If you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you?” I get what they are trying to do with that, but that rule is not entirely true. It’s true that you shouldn’t tailgate a truck but the sides are just as bad. I had a car riding on my right side the other day, just hanging out. That’s the worst thing any driver can do. We have a huge blindspot over there. I almost ran this guy off the road because I couldn’t see him. He was riding right in my tractor tires. According to that rule, he was okay because he could look up and see my mirror. But I couldn’t see him. He was nowhere to be found. I didn’t see the car until he popped up in another mirror as he was going off on the shoulder. He was right along my right-hand side. What can I do?
-Personally, I don’t understand why anyone would want to ride beside a truck at all. When I’m in my car, even before I was a trucker, I would get around those trucks as soon as possible. The tires are almost as tall as your car. If there’s a blowout, it’ll tear your car up. It just makes no sense to me.
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The old three-lane pass is a big problem.
-That’s when a car is way over in the left-hand lane and passes right in front of you at the last second to hit an exit ramp. You just dove over three lanes! And you have no idea what’s over there on the other side of me. A crotch rocket could have been whipping by me at 90 mph and you would have just killed him dead. It blows my mind, especially when you see it’s a soccer mom with a van full of kids. At least if they are doing that around a car, it makes more sense. At least you can see around a car. You can’t see around a truck. That’s just insane.
-Stupid is everywhere.
-It really is. Some areas are worse than others. I think LA has taken the Fast and Furious movies seriously. They drive crazy out there, especially when the bars are getting out. It’s nuts. You see crotch rockets going by you at 100 miles-per-hour, weaving in and out of traffic. The little souped-up cars do that, too. But the East Coast is bad, too. People in the Midwest seem to be more relaxed. The more crowded the area, the more stupid things you see.
-Construction areas are especially scary.
-If you get a construction area, no matter where you are, people are doing something stupid. Here’s the thing that makes me the maddest during construction: I’ll be cruising along in the left-hand lane of a two-lane highway going 50 mph because that’s what the signs say to do. I have people driving around me on the right-hand side, which is about the only time they should be doing that, but they are flipping me off. You can see the road rage because I’m in the left lane going 50. They could be doing it while they are passing the sign that says, “Trucks, left lane only. 50 mph.” They are just not paying attention to the signs. They think truckers are bad drivers. We are not. Two-thirds of accidents between a truck and a car are caused by the car. People think we are the safety hazards. But we’re not. We know how to drive defensively. If we drove like car drivers, changing lanes as quickly and as non-nonchalantly as they do, and slamming on the brakes, there would be a lot of accidents out on the road. There would be a lot of deaths.
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Be consistent with your speed.
-The fluctuating speed thing causes so many problems. People just don’t pay attention to how fast they are going. They take their foot off the gas and then put it back on. For a truck, that’s the worst, but it causes problems for everybody. I was coming up from Richmond, Virginia yesterday. There was a small Winnebago that was going 10 mph under the speed limit. It was causing all kinds of problems. One vehicle was backing up three lanes of traffic. I wish people would just pay attention.
-If a trucker is tailgating you, you’re probably going too slow.
-If you see a truck in your rearview, the first thing you need to do is put down your phone. The second thing you need to do is look at your speedometer. The majority of the time, if a trucker is tailgating you, you’re doing something wrong. My truck is limited at 64 mph. If I’m tailgating you because you’re going too slow, that’s a problem. I’m not talking tailgating like getting one car length behind them and flashing my lights. I’m talking three or four car lengths. Just enough to make them want to cuss me real bad. If they scoot over and get out of the fast lane, mission accomplished.
-This story originally appeared on Road and Track.
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