Commonwealth Chronicle

This story was originally published here.

Robin Steely’s used Freightliner truck is his “season pass” to see the country. In his 19-year career as a trucker he has gone deep sea fishing, seen Mount Rushmore, walked the same Black Hills that Crazy Horse once roamed, and attended more high-proile sporting events than he can count.

Robin Steely's son longs to be a long-haul trucker like his father. But the owner-operator hopes his 13-year-old quarterback completes his education instead. (HELEN COUPE/The Rockbridge Report)

“The best part is seeing the country. I’ve seen, I’ve been, I’ve driven all 48 [states],” he said. “Just seeing the country abroad is unbelievable.”

A Nashville, Tenn. native with a disarming smile and a diamond-studded left ear, Steely decided to satisfy his travel lust when the local music company he worked for went out of business. He bought his own truck and has hauled freight ever since.

But now he says he would get out if he could.

“Right now, it’s rough. The economy is rough. If I could find something around the house that paid I’d go do that. Park this [truck] in the yard right now and go do that.” Then he offered to sell his truck to a camerawoman.

A combination of wanderlust and the need for a stable income draws all kinds of people from all over the country to trucking.  But the income isn’t as steady as it once was. The deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980 may have quadrupled the number of truckers on the road, but it sliced their incomes.

Most truckers in the late 1960s made about $60,000 a year. Today, the average is barely more than half that — $35,000, according to the American Trucking Association. The recent recession has added insult to injury, forcing many truckers to drive more miles and retire later than they had planned.

Most truckers fall into one of two business models: the owner-operator, and the company trucker. Owner-operators buy their own cab and get their own contracts. Company truckers are paid on a wage per mile basis to work for one trucking company, which sets up contracts with different shippers.

Owner-operators can make a lot more than company truckers, but expenses and risks are a lot higher, too.

It’s now more affordable than it used to be for a trucker to start his own business as an owner-operator. Before the recession hit, a trucker could buy a new rig for about $120,000. Now that same truck costs only $90,000.

But life as an independent owner-operator isn’t free from financial stress.  Everything from fuel to oil changes to repair work comes out of the trucker’s pocket. Steely said he recently had to pay $4,000 to fix his truck and get it back on the road.

Those are costs that company drivers don’t have to worry about. The company covers all operating expenses and provides its drivers with in-truck communication satellite devices that tell drivers the most effective way to get from one place to another.

Big companies such as J. B. Hunt and Schneider pay their drivers the top-tier rate of about 45 cents per mile. With the economy the way it is, more truckers prefer to work as company drivers. As businesses with reduced output are cutting down their distribution costs, owner-operators, who are paid by the load, suffer.

Steely said business has never been worse in the almost two decades he’s driven as an owner-operator.

“What I’m seeing is that everyone has to cut costs,” Steely said. “I’d say one of the top four costs of your company is your freight, and they’re trying to cut it down, cut it down, cut it down, and they’re driving it down pretty good.”

Ray Chism, an owner-operator from Memphis, Tenn., found a way to cope with the economy while doing his part to protect the environment. Using cooking oil from restaurants like KFC, Chism makes his own bio-fuel once a month, when he returns home. The week he spends at home is enough time for him to make enough fuel to last him for a substantial part of his journey.

“If I can make my own fuel for a dollar-five a gallon, then I’m gonna win,” Chism said. (to be continued)

Cameron and I didn’t find Tammy Pendleton. She found us. We met her while we were interviewing another trucker at the Lee Hi Travel Plaza outside of Lexington, Va.

“You should get a woman’s perspective on this,” the ever-so-sassy Pendleton whispered into my ear, as she passed me.

Needless to say, I ran after her and asked for an interview. Shy at first but unstoppable later on, Pendleton told us shocking, sobering and hilarious stories from her travels across America. Watch the video and then read about a trucker’s life on the road here, here and here.

From Cameron’s blog:

Below is an in-depth broadcast piece on the dangers of Interstate 81 in Virginia that I created last spring.

I-81 used to be a state-of-the-art expressway in the 1960s, but now there’s an average of 20,000 trucks traveling  the road per day. High truck traffic, mountainous terrains and closed rest stops make I-81 one of the deadliest interstates, according to the Virginia Transportation Research Council. One family from Atlanta, Georgia understands the dangers of I-81 all too well.

Searching for safety: Short-term solutions?

In 2002, Steve Owings and his wife Susan made their way up the corridor only a few months after Cullum’s death. On their way to visit Pierce at W&L, they were shocked and sickened at the congestion and the speed with which vehicles flew past them.

Owings knew something had to change. In 2003, after the resolution of the criminal case against the man who hit his sons’ car, Owings founded Road Safe America, a research and advocacy group promoting safer interstate driving. Since then, the Owings family has worked tirelessly to spread their message through speeches, collaboration with the American Trucking Associations and the Road Safe America Web site.

The top, shared priority of Road Safe America and the ATA is to limit the speed that tractor-trailers can drive by requiring the use of speed governors. All trucks are required to have the regulators, but most trucking companies do not require their drivers to program them.

Owings said he thinks limiting a truck’s top speed to 65 mph is essential to make I-81 – and all interstates – safer.
“An 80,000-pound vehicle traveling just 60 mph has the force of the average car going over 300 mph,” he said.

He said that Road Safe America and the ATA have pursued mandatory programming of speed governors through state departments of transportation for years. But their best hope might lie with Congress. The Safe, Accountable, Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act – better known as the highway bill – is up for renewal in September. That’s the bill that is renewed every six years to authorize federal funding of all transportation in the United States. Owings hopes that the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress will support the speed governor proposal.

But Fontaine said that speed governors might not be as safe as Owings and the ATA suggest. Fontaine cites speed variance as a main crash cause on interstates like 81, and he thinks speed governors could create situations where tractor trailers act as “rolling road blocks.”

“I think you can’t really say that there should be a global blanket of 65 mph on the limiters,” said Fontaine. “Ideally, your safest mode of operation on the road is everybody’s driving about the same speed.”

Owings agrees that forcing trucks to drive at a slower speed in the right lane isn’t a quick fix. Ideally, he said, trucks and cars shouldn’t even share the same space. But for now, he’s lobbying for short-term solutions like the speed governors and adding a “sharing the road” program to driver education courses. The program would teach high school students how to drive around big trucks.

Del. Cline said part of his short-term safety solutions for I-81 includes those new driver education programs. But he thinks the best way to improve safety on the Interstate is stricter enforcement. He is trying to get money set aside in the General Assembly to put more troopers on patrol along I-81.

But it costs $100,000 to outfit one new trooper, Cline said.

VDOT is also working to put band-aids over some of I-81’s smaller safety wounds. Matt Shiley, a regional traffic engineer for VDOT, said that highway safety features like rumble strips, electronic message boards and the Highway Safety Corridor running through the Roanoke area of I-81 all improve safety day to day. The safety corridor, where speed limits are lower, is sometimes criticized for increasing area congestion. But it has helped bring the crash rate down, said Shiley.

Bridge and interstate redesign projects also help improve safety in the danger zones of I-81. In 2005, Buffalo Creek Bridge was one such project, put on the to-do list after the Owings tragedy. The bridge was rebuilt with wider shoulders, and a northbound truck climbing lane was added.

Visiting W&L for alumni weekends is always bittersweet, Pierce Owing said, partly because of the I-81 drive that will always haunt him.

“Is 81 a bad interstate? Absolutely,” he said. “In terms of the interstates I travel on, and you know I live in Atlanta – I travel on them every day – it’s one of the worst.” (to be continued)

The safety hazards: congestion, climate, conditions

I-81’s status as Virginia’s most dangerous interstate raises the stakes for students who attend the 29 universities along its 325-mile corridor in the state.

In 2002, Cullum Owings, then a senior at W&L, was one of those student drivers. Steve Owings said he and his wife Susan had talked with their sons before they left about the dangers of sitting still on the Interstate.

“We talked about it that morning: ‘When you come to stopped traffic, which you undoubtedly will, try to leave enough space in front of your car so that you can maneuver and look in the rear view mirror,’” Owings recalled.

And Pierce said that’s exactly what Cullum tried to do when he noticed the 18 wheeler’s headlights barreling toward them. But everything happened too fast. Cullum had only managed to turn the 1992 Lexus just enough for the driver’s side to take the brunt of the impact.

“I couldn’t even get him out,” Pierce said. “Ambulance was there within 10 to 15 minutes; they couldn’t get him out either. They tried to back up the truck. And I think he died in my arms.”

Robert Foresman, Rockbridge County’s emergency management and hazardous materials coordinator for the past seven years, can spin off a laundry list of I-81’s trucking horror stories.

“In 1999 there was a major crash on the Buffalo Creek Bridge that involved 17 vehicles. We had 35 patients with four fatalities,” he began. That was only a mile or so from the site of Cullum Owings’ death.

That accident claimed the life of another student, freshman Jonathan Nabors.

As Rockbridge County’s emergency management coordinator, Foresman responds to any big rig accidents on the Interstate between mile markers 173 and 205.

Four people were killed in this 1999 accident that happened around the I-81 Buffalo Creek Bridge. The pile-up involved eight tractor-trailers and eight cars. (Photo: THE NEWS-GAZETTE)

“I think that the mountainous terrain, the way the road is banked and designed causes problems for drivers,” said Foresman.

Fontaine agrees. He said the high density of truck traffic on the interstate’s hilly terrain creates a huge inconsistency in the speeds that cars and trucks drive.In his research Fontaine found that trucks sometimes go as slow as 45 mph in the left lane as they go up hills, causing mile-long back-ups.

“Trucks have a disproportionate impact on the traffic flow along I-81, particularly when you get into these locations where you’ve got the hills and valleys going up and down the road,” Fontaine said.

That speed inconsistency is a major factor in I-81 crashes, he said.

And those are safety hazards that threaten everyone on the road. Virginia Delegate for the 24th District Ben Cline said many of his constituents worry about driving on I-81.

“Environmental concerns or congestion concerns or safety concerns: Everybody’s got some concern that relates to 81,” he said.

Jennifer Leech, a  Rockbridge County resident who is her father’s right-hand on the famiy’s third-generation dairy farm, said she is always nervous when she drives on I-81. She tries to avoid the cluttered lanes of the interstate if she can, opting instead to take the parallel US Route 11.

“Especially if I’m driving a truck with like a livestock trailer or something, I just stay on 11,” said Leech.

A 2006 graduate of Virginia Tech, she had to drive the 100-mile stretch of the Interstate between Lexington and Blacksburg every weekend when she was still in school.

Playing bumper cars with big trucks and careless passenger car drivers every weekend scared Leech. One Sunday morning, she said, she was run off the road into the median by a truck that was merging onto the interstate around Troutville, north of Roanoke.

“I guess he didn’t see me. I was in his blind spot, driving a little black car,” she said.

Leech found some areas, such as the Buffalo Creek Bridge near the site of Cullum Owings’ death and the exits surrounding Roanoke, were worse than others.

“If you went around work hours, around Roanoke, it got really, really busy and dangerous,” she said.  “You definitely had to pay attention to what you were doing.”

That sitting duck feeling is one Leech said she doesn’t want to experience again. Now she always speeds up when she is passing a truck on I-81.

Cline said there are many others just like Leech who refuse to drive on the corridor.

“So many folks from this area are scared to get on 81 anymore, they don’t even use it. They take (Route) 11 wherever they go,” he said. (to be continued)

We are Cameron Steele and Becky Bratu. The madness began in the spring of 2009 with the In-depth Reporting class we took at Washington and Lee University. During the six-week term we reported on a series of  issues concerning Interstate 81, including excessive truck traffic and high crash rates.

At 325 miles, I-81 is the longest interstate in Virginia. It is one of the top eight trucking routes in the United States, according to the Virginia Department of Transportation. I-81 links southern economic hubs to northeast markets. But what was a state-of-the-art expressway in the 1960s became a clogged and perilous roadway. Now the Virginia corridor of I-81 has almost reached its capacity, with an average of 20,000 trucks traveling on the road every day. Originally designed to handle 15 percent truck traffic, I-81 sees up to 45 percent at peak times in busy hubs such as the Roanoke and Winchester areas.

Intrepidness and curiosity took us up and down the Virginia corridor of I-81, from truck stops to research centers, and from a VDOT traffic control room to, well, a morgue. We heard some amazing and, at times, shocking stories about the many ways in which the interstate has affected people’s lives. We told those stories in writing, to the best of our ability. And then the school year ended.

Bratu graduated with a degree in German and Journalism and Mass Communications and moved to Charlottesville. She couldn’t find a job in journalism. Steele, who still has one more year to go before she graduates, scored a summer internship at the Charlotte Observer. But we soon realized we missed our intrepid journeys, reporting for the Rockbridge Report and just writing the stories we cared about.

Enter Virginia Voice. With Bratu in Charlottesville and Steele in Lexington, we found a way to report on the issues we care about the most, such as transportation, business and education. But we’ll keep our eyes open for any other amazing stories waiting to be told.