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mr ed

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It takes a special type of person to be an OTR driver. Always away from home, strange surroundings, stranger people, LOL!
Crappy run companies Etc,Etc,
A friend of mine worked 10 years for Walmart made about $80k a year then got married and didn't want to be gone from home so he quit and got a local hauling job. Make's a bit less but he's home with his honey every night.
 

SoonerP226

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Unfortunately....just wait in a few years. I listen to the trucking channel on SirriusXm and alot of the drivers worries are going to be the driverless trucks. I don't know how far in the future that is but it's a BIG topic among the truck drivers when they call in to the SirriusXm DJ.
The lack of drivers is going to push automation in long-haul trucking. You won't see full-on SAE level 5 automation any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised to see convoys of semi-autonomous rigs slaved to one with a human driver. Even that won't be for several years; despite the insistence of Silicon Valley types, there are some big hurdles that must be overcome first, not the least of which is the question of liability.
 

TerryMiller

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Back in one of my earlier iterations of work, I was an 18-wheeler operator, running mostly in Oklahoma, Kansas, and a wee bit in Colorado and Texas. One of those jobs saw me living in Texas, but working full time in Kansas hauling Anhydrous Ammonia fertilizer. We only got to go home if our truck needed work done on it or if rain shut down all the farmers from working for several days.

We used to say then that trucking was a job for the single men/women. Divorce rates were high for drivers that were married and away from their families. My last trucking job was with a local company hauling feed to feedlots and then hauling ingredients for the feed back to the plant. I told them I wanted a job where I was home every night...

...in my case, I was always home every night....sometime in the night. (Usually after the kids were asleep. Then I was gone in the morning before they got up.)
 

emapples

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I think maybe the economy isn't as good as the politicians tell us. Whatever goes up has to come down.
Well lets be clear Trump hasn't removed any of the regulatory puke that has been placed on trucking companies over the previous 2 decades. So its not always the economy and do we know if they have any executives under indictment?
 

JD8

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That post only addresses the fact they have some Doug Pielsticker style leadership, but doesn’t mention the enormous regulatory burden placed on trucking companies for the last two years (which one reason so many truckers walked away)

Which regulations are you speaking of?
 

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