ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608230110
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: trucking
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON
Kristina Schwarz still shivers when she drives alongside the heavy truck traffic on Interstate 81, like the rest of us. But she has warmed to truckers since a strangely pleasant encounter with a veteran driver last spring.
Schwarz is a 37-year-old case manager for New River Valley Community Services. Working to provide services to mentally disabled adults, Schwarz drove a woman client from Radford to visit her mother in Abingdon.
It was the Friday before Easter and traffic was picking up. "All the big trucks were going so fast ... I was very nervous," she said. "I hated to be on the road."
To her surprise, one trucker seemed to want to comfort her. When she passed this driver in her minivan, he indicated with a blink of his headlights it was safe to return to the right lane.
At what seems a time of increasing competition for road space between passenger vehicles and trucks, here's the case of a truck driver who disproved the negative sterotype of them as reckless jerks. She thought to herself, why not give the guy a pat on the back? Schwarz scribbled a phone number off the mannerly driver's truck and called to get an address. She wrote him a thank-you letter.
In the trucking business, positive feedback about a driver from an average motorist is pretty unusual, said Timothy Shephard, safety and loss prevention director at Howell's Motor Freight Inc. of Roanoke, which received the letter.
The company sent a copy to Transport Topics, a weekly trucking industry tabloid based in Alexandria with about 30,000 readers. The magazine printed the letter, informing its national audience of the good deed by 10-year driver Allen D. Cremeans.
It had a snowball effect. An official of the federal government spotted the magazine version of the letter from Schwarz and put Cremeans under consideration for a federal driving award. He underwent a total career examination by the Office of Motor Carriers, a division of the Department of Transportation. The agency gave him a "star performance" award in June.
Howell's Motor Freight put out word of Cremeans' achievement to mark National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, an industry campaign which ended Saturday.
The industry maintains that most truckers drive responsibly, but the public doesn't realize this because the bad ones get the most attention.
Trucking firms are battling a mistaken public image of the truck driver as an "unclean drugged-up, doped-up person who doesn't follow any traffic rules, just runs wide open all that he can," Shephard said.
To be sure, the trucking industry has its bad apples and the conviction this month of a Southwest Virginia trucking executive is an example. R&B Express Inc. of Atkins and its owner, William D. Cress, 51, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Abingdon to "systematically" concealing hours drivers spent behind the wheel in excess of a 10-hour limit, federal prosecutors said.
Bob Neal, the federal Office of Motor Carriers's highest official in Virginia, said lapses in drug-testing procedures allowed drivers to drive high on drugs.
Neal says he also believes that in other cases, some trucking firms have given drivers destinations they can't reach without speeding.
However, "We see more good drivers than we do poor drivers," said Gary McCaskill, who investigates motor carriers in the Mid-Atlantic states. They do "a heckuva job" in terms of difficulty, maneuvering a vehicle more than three times as long as a car over long distances on crowded roads. The average driver makes $33,600.
It is also a hugely important industry, giving rise to the quip that if you eat it, a trucker probably hauled it. Trucking firms' combined revenues represent 5 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the American Trucking Association in Alexandria.
And despite a perception held by some that truckers are reckless, in a study of fatal car-truck accidents, motorists were found at fault 71 percent of the time, the association said.
Cremeans said he sees reckless motorists. He gives them room. He said motorists should give all trucks extra room because trucks need more time to stop. One of the things that makes motorists uncomfortable - a truck pulling up close behind - may stem from a truck's being unable to slow as fast as its driver would like, he said.
Cremeans said truck drivers mainly want to "leave on a Monday and be home on a Friday in one piece" and deliver their loads safely and on time in between.
"I got a wife and kids at home I'm trying to support and God knows I don't want to run over somebody else's wife and kids," he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Cremeans. color.by CNB