Rolf Lockwood
Rolf Lockwood is editor emeritus of Today's Trucking and a regular contributor to Trucknews.com.
Mental health in trucking needs serious attention
The mental health of truck drivers remains one of my biggest concerns. Ten years ago, I first wrote about what I thought was a monster issue hiding just below the surface of daily trucking life. “Hiding” was the key word there, and it still is. Are we making progress? Yes, but there’s much more to do.
Opinion: Governments failing us when it comes to driver training
Driver training should not be the huge problem that it is. It just shouldn't. If we were truly serious about it, we would have resolved the issue decades ago. Yet here we are, needing the Humboldt tragedy to focus our collective mind on solutions. And even with that impetus, we're really nowhere close to doing it right.
Opinion: Temporary Foreign Worker Program needs better policing
We now have unscrupulous immigration consultants feeding equally unscrupulous trucking companies with innocent newbie drivers who pay as much as $30,000 for the chance to become a Canadian. By first becoming a truck driver. Experience? Not important. Training? Not supplied.
Opinion: Truck driver shortage involves more than ‘churn’
Drivers, drivers, drivers. Is any subject more talked about in our industry? Nope. Of the seven issues recently cited as the biggest concerns of Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) members, six of them concerned drivers in one way or another, and the only other issue identified was carbon pricing. No mention of freight rates or aggressive enforcement or lousy roads or a zillion other possibilities. Just drivers.
Opinion: Rust never sleeps, but what’s your biggest truck maintenance headache?
What’s your biggest maintenance headache? I actually do want to know because, believe it or not, planning for next spring’s Canadian Fleet Maintenance Summit on April 15 is already underway. It’s at a preliminary stage, for sure, but we’re already at it. We haven’t yet held a meeting of the dozen or so members of the advisory council that helps us devise the program, but individually we’re creating short lists of subjects to cover.