The joys and hazards of the London truck driver

A couple of weeks ago I posted on a Jewish blog called Adloyada that I lose a lot of posts because they come to me while I’m working, and by the time I get home I’m too tired to write much. Judy (the author) had called work “the curse of the blogging classes” in this post; I mentioned that a lot of the posts are whinges about the jobsworths I meet in an average driving day, and are best off not aired. I did post one a few months back which, when re-read, struck me as rather too whingey and was deleted (within an hour). She said she’d like to read about my jobsworths, and about “the joys of driving trucks”.

Jobsworth, for anyone who hasn’t heard the term, means someone who can help you but won’t; someone who won’t do anything beyond the call of duty, because it’s “more than his job’s worth”, although it’s come to mean an unreasonably diligent petty worker. Perhaps jobsworth isn’t the right term to use to describe the sort of behaviour I encounter when delivering the goods I deliver (usually building materials).

As an example, in a job a couple of weeks ago I pulled up outside a site in south London (I’m not going to be any more specific than is necessary, because there are only so many suppliers of any given material and only so many sites in any given area of south London). The material was heavy and awkward to carry, and the site supervisor was a woman. There were plenty of lads on site, but they were too busy doing “their work” to help bring their material in. Therefore, on two separate occasions, it was left to me and this woman to bring heavy materials in. Even my boss, when I told him, said this was not on, and that it was not part of my duty to carry goods onto sites, because I’m not insured if I break things.

Then, there is the total lack of communication between different groups of people on some building sites. You might bring a consignment of tiles onto a site, for example, and then ask people on site for a given tiling company, and people don’t know who you’re talking about or where they are. People won’t offload goods for other contractors, so you have to sit there and wait until they turn up. I mean, surely people on a building site are a team - they are all there for a particular job, namely putting up, or repairing, a building? So why can’t they work as a team? And why are site offices very often the other side of the site from the entrance, often across difficult terrain?

A few months ago I filled in one of those “meme” surverys, in which I was asked about what was enjoyable about driving trucks. I replied that there might not be anything, if it involved driving slowly around London in a battered old Iveco with a cab full of someone else’s junk (or worse, junk food remains). On the other hand, a long journey in a nice wagon (particularly DAFs and MANs) can be a pleasure. Bear in mind, I only drive small trucks - large trucks are built for longer journeys and are often more comfortable for that reason. But I get to drive an awful lot of nasty wagons and the problems are different from brand to brand.

With Ivecos, the problem is stiff clutches (one regular employer has a whole fleet of them and told me that clutch problems have been very costly for them) and stiff gearsticks, which take a real effort to put them into one gear or another. With Mercedes-Benz Atego trucks, it’s the weird technique necessary to put it in any gear, and the automatic testing routine it goes through every time you switch it on. (If you need to make a quick get-away, forget it.) But the trucks I hate the most are the Japanese wagons which have cabs and controls based on those of small vans, and they are cramped, flimsy and cheap, and are thus vastly less manoevrable than European 7.5-tonne trucks. I suspect that if driver unions were more powerful, they would have been driven off the roads years ago.

A major frustration is London’s “traffic management”, specifically bus lanes and the congestion charge. A few years ago I saw posters in Lordship Lane in Dulwich (south-east London) which were part of a campaign against a proposed bus lane. It showed two bus lanes on each side of a road on which the driving lanes were the size of cycle lane, with a bus heading only for the out-of-town shopping centre past a line of closed shops. The A23 from Kennington to the top of Brixton Hill reminds me of that. It’s the most dangerous road in London on which to drive a truck. The lanes are literally just wider than the width of a truck - it may well be impossible to drive a larger vehicle safely and legally on those lanes, because they are barely wide enough for my 7.5-tonner. The bus lane, of course, is wider, but you don’t want to get in front of those buses with their cameras. Brixton Road and Brixton Hill have four lanes painted on the road, but they are just not four lanes wide. It’s really dangerous.

I detest the congestion charge because it’s in my opinion a bad way of dealing with the congestion. I said before it was introduced that the way of dealing with it was to remove the commuter parking spaces in London. Let there be short-term parking (up to about an hour or two, with no return for four hours), and parking for residents, traders, the disabled and perhaps a few executives. The congestion charge is basically a tax, which hits people other than its intended target - commuters - in order to make it financially viable. The result is that people going from north to south (Camden to Croydon, for example) have to either pay a tax of £8 or go round the congested ring road. The charged area includes large residential areas south of the river, as well as Southwark Bridge, the best alternative route for trucks too big for Tower Bridge which has a weight limit. The area is now set to be extended westwards to the Grosvenor Road / Earl’s Court Road route, something I hope will be stopped by the committee set up to investigate the Finegold affair (not that I think that is enough reason to disqualify someone, but given that the person involved is Ken Livingstone, perhaps an exception could be made …).

And the final big frustration about driving trucks in London is parking. Or rather, the lack of it. People driving trucks bigger than 3.5 tonnes have to abide by what I call the “fours and fives” rule: 45 minutes break after four and a half (4.5) hours of actual driving. This does not mean that amount of work which includes driving, so it’s not just a question of timing yourself four and a half hours from when you start work (although that might make for a less stressful working day). So you might be driving on and off for six hours and not have passed your limit. The problem is that there is virtually nowhere in inner London where it’s possible to park a truck for that length of time - even normal parking spaces are too narrow for a van, let alone a truck. (Most of the space is in Southwark borough, to my knowledge; Wandsworth borough is worst.) That’s stupid. Society demands that truck drivers rest, and for good reasons, so why does it make it so difficult?

There are possibly two things that could be done about this particular problem. The first is to allow trucks to park in places where cars are normally able to park - in particular, places where there are facilities. We don’t want to park miles from any facilities - we want to park up and go to the shops as we may have business to do, much as office workers sometimes do during their lunch time. The second is up to the various industries, which is to allow their workers to park in each others’ yards during their compulsory breaks.

Anyway, I hope that satisfies anyone’s curiosity. Actually, in response to Umm Zaid’s driving peeves article a few months back I wrote a piece about some of my own in London, I wrote my own piece about London driving peeves, and have written another since then. It’s not just jobsworths, it’s the fact that driving in a major city can be a really quite stressful business, which is why I get home too tired to blog and why my blog often doesn’t get updated for three days at a time.

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