united truck

This incident occurred on Sunday, 4-Jan-2009 at 3:23 PM, northbound I-95 in South Carolina around mile marker 12, a little north of Savannah GA.

The highway is two lanes northbound at this point, with a posted speed limit of 70. I was tooling along in the right-hand lane doing around 65 MPH. Traffic was fairly dense, with a long "conga line" of vehicles in the left lane slowly passing me and other vehicles in the right lane. There was a fairly large gap in front of me [because there always is, I'm a strong proponent of safe following distance and smooth traffic flow] and also one behind me at the time. I spotted the United truck closing the gap behind me VERY rapidly with no sign of slowing down to match my speed.

As I sometimes do to try and remind truck drivers of safe following distance, I flashed my 4-way blinkers a couple of times. This didn't prevent him from coming within less than a second's worth of following distance behind me. The truck could not move into the left lane at the time due to traffic, but as many other trucks had done that afternoon if they really wanted to go faster, they could wait at a safe following distance with their left-turn signal on until a gap opened up. This driver instead chose to chew my butt and try to bully ME into going faster. There was nowhere I could go either, since I was pretty much matching the speed of traffic ahead of me and closing my gap ahead would have just made me unsafe too. My speed during this did not change in any significant way -- I know better than to try and play games with traffic or do anything abrupt.

I used my 4-ways again and motioned with my thumb out the window to the left, to try indicate that he really needed to back off or go around. Thumb, not finger, to be sure and disambiguate what the gesture means. At this point the driver took some sort of offense that I was trying to get him to be safe, and closed the distance between us even tighter. I'm talking LESS than a car length, in front of a full size TRUCK at highway speeds, filling my rear window with his grille. That is a blatant threat against my life, just because this guy copped some kind of attitude about me trying to communicate with him. Hardly the response anyone would expect from a true professional.

As he finally found a left-lane gap and passed me, he hung halfway across the lane divider while I had to go halfway into the breakdown land to avoid him. This was a clear attempt at some sort of vengeful act.

Early in this process I correctly anticipated that this one might be trouble, as these things can often be read by the "english" that drivers and vehicles exhibit on the roads. I had a camera handy and attempted to document as much of what was going on as I could, without compromising my own safety. Each small picture here is linked to a larger one, i.e. click on it to bring up the full-size version.

Rearview just after my request for the driver to back off failed; even though the mirror is dirty it's pretty clear already that he is way too close and not budging. He came much closer than this before it was over.

I think the cab was a late-model Kenworth with the narrow nose, but I don't really know truck models that well.

An attempt to get some info off the side of the cab after he finally found a left-lane gap to go by in; there are no unique numbers here, unfortunately.
This is all I have to identify the truck -- the trailer plate. There's no trailer number I can see. It is a Missouri plate, as shown in this larger detail.
I submit that someone who is even capable of bring that kind of attitude to his driving is not someone you want holding the steering wheels of your expensive equipment, let alone what such incidents do for your company's professional image out on the road. If psychological profiling were part of your hiring criteria, I really hope this guy would not have passed muster, and yet there he is out there threatening other users of the road with an eighty-thousand pound weapon that's listed on YOUR insurance. Please do what you can to get this person rendered harmless, and feel free to use this as an example to anyone else on your staff who would even consider such actions.

I strongly suggest looking at the training programs used by Wal-Mart and Swift, to name two examples whose drivers seem to understand the value of safety, courtesy, and lower fuel-saving speeds and which I cannot recall *ever* having problems from. I pay attention to traffic all around me and particularly to trucks, and really do try to accomodate their needs whenever possible -- I understand a reasonable amount of what they're up against, and while they've got a tough job to get done sometimes, trying to force other traffic to be unsafe is not the way to go about it. I see unsafe practices on the road all the time from all kinds of vehicles and do what I can to avoid it, but when it gets this personal and this deliberate then it's time to make the call. Thank you for whatever you can do to make sure this sort of thing NEVER happens again under your or your subsidiaries' nameplates.

_H* 090106