New York shortchanged by elected officials

By now you may have heard about a recent report that showed roads and bridges in New York state are getting only one-third of the money they should be receiving.

That’s right. And while it’s no revelation that states raid one fund to help plug leaks elsewhere, it doesn’t make it any easier for the public – in this case, residents of the Empire State – to stomach such ghastly figures.

According to a report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, nearly $12 billion in highway and motor vehicle tax revenues the state has generated over the past two decades is siphoned off for other purposes.

In a report appropriately titled “Highway Robbery,” DiNapoli said the trend will continue to worsen unless changes are made.

It’s a grim outlook for road and bridge funding in New York. More money must be found. And it appears the desperate times are causing some state officials to crack under the weight of the burden.

That leads us to another point of contention in New York. The state is requiring drivers to buy new license plates this spring. Added to the current budget, the new $25 fee on plates – up from $15 – for car and truck drivers wasn’t scheduled to take effect until 2011, but it was pushed up a year to provide a $129 million shot in the arm for the state’s suffering economy.

Not only would the state budget get a jolt, but the Paterson administration said it was also a matter of safety. Apparently, the current plates’ reflectivity is fading, and the new $25 license plates – with dark blue and gold colors – were just what the doctor ordered to make the roadways safer.

Well, this is where things really started to get sticky for the administration. According to media reports, county clerks submitted more than 100,000 signatures earlier this week asking the state to abandon its pursuit of the fee.

The unrest couldn’t be ignored, and within a couple of days Gov. Paterson told an audience listening to WWRL-AM in New York City that the new fee on license plates was nothing more than a “revenue grab.” He said people don’t need new plates early.

Of course, there is no storybook ending to this tale. Paterson said the state still needs $129 million to make up for that revenue they were anticipating during this budget year.

It’s a travesty that taxpayers have to put up with these practices from their elected officials. No wonder they have lost our trust.

When it comes to rerouting revenues and fudging the facts to get what they want, lawmakers have long since crossed over the line in the sand. Who can blame us for being fed up with it all?

A refreshing change: TV tackles real trucking issues

All too often, it’s the fiery crash that grabs up media headlines and leaves audiences with an irrational fear or dislike for heavy trucks that share their roadways.

While crashes and fatalities do occur and are tragic, the viewer rarely gets to hear stories about other trucking issues or from the men and women behind the wheel.

Every so often, someone gets it right. Recently, that someone was Dan Rather, who dedicated two recent episodes of “Dan Rather Reports” on HDNet to trucking issues with an emphasis on driver training. Even though he did cover safety and crashes in his reports, he also asked truckers about training, experience and other topics such as the economy, driver pay and competition.

The latest was Episode 436, titled “Truck talk,” which aired Tuesday, Nov. 10. It was based on a trucking roundtable discussion that featured OOIDA Executive Vice President Todd Spencer and OOIDA Life Member Miles Verhoef.

Rather’s team invited the panelists to Willie’s Place Theater at Carl’s Corner, TX, to break new ground in addition to revisiting topics covered in a previous show (Episode 433, “Queen of the Road”) featuring OOIDA Member Desiree Wood.

Rather demonstrated his reporting experience by researching the issues and asking tough but fair questions of the panelists. Many of the subjects were ones that OOIDA and its trucking constituency have long been concerned with.

It was refreshing to see an established newsman like Rather asking the right questions and allowing the panelists time to answer without a lot of editing.

Spencer is no stranger to TV cameras, having appeared on CNN, Fox, C-SPAN and other networks through the years. Time constraints on many news or talk shows leave little time for much more than a sound bite or a brief discussion of a single issue. Not so with the Rather report.

So what made this latest report so darned good?

For one thing, the topics did not magically appear out of thin air, thanks to OOIDA Media Spokesperson Norita Taylor who fielded numerous calls from Rather’s producers during the months leading up to the taping. The time Rather and his staff put into the research paid off.

While we at Land Line Magazine and Land Line Now report on many of these topics extensively, it was quite refreshing to see Rather bring the dialogue into America’s living room.

He is not going to stop there. Rather said he will continue to pursue trucking stories for future episodes of his news program. On behalf of all highway users, let’s hope for a big audience.

In lieu of flowers

Trucker Larry Works, a longtime OOIDA member with a larger-than-life personality, died earlier this week.

Larry’s widow, Chris Works, told me that truckers and friends were welcome to make a donation to the American Lung Association in lieu of flowers.

I got to know Larry two years ago, when he called Land Line to talk about his 2006 arrest at a Joplin, MO truck stop.

As Land Line detailed in this news story, Larry was tasered multiple times, and both he and his wife were pepper sprayed while inside their truck cab after an argument with an apparently off-duty sheriff’s deputy from Newton County, MO.

With a booming voice and occasionally colorful language, Larry enjoyed talking about his work and all the friends he made. In fact, he had contact information for several witnesses he said backed up his side of the taser incident story.

Larry died from an apparent heart attack on Monday, something his family said stems from the 2006 tasing incident.

Like many truck drivers and OOIDA members, Larry was a military veteran and a self-made businessman. Larry didn’t mind telling me he had no problem sticking up for himself and his wife after what he termed an encounter with a “rogue, off-duty” cop that July day in south Missouri.

Unfortunately, the Works family was forever changed by the incident, and we’ve all now lost a good driver and a great character.

Sniper stalked truckers in 1953

In 1953, a roving sniper was on the loose terrorizing communities, shooting people to death at random. All the shots allegedly were fired from the same weapon. Detectives frantically pursued the killer, questioned suspects, analyzed clues, and followed countless leads.

The story dominated the national media, which called the shootings “an unprecedented wave of fear.” The story sounds a lot like the DC sniper story, but it happened about 56 years ago in Pennsylvania.

On July 25, 1953, trucker Lester Woodward, 30, was fatally shot while sleeping in his truck’s cab near the Irwin Interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Western Pennsylvania.

Three days later and 30 miles farther east on the turnpike, near Donegal, trucker Harry Pitts, 28, was slain by the same “phantom killer.”

Three days after that, trucker John Shepherd, 36, was shot and wounded as he slept in his truck’s cab near Lisbon, OH – 18 miles from the western end of the turnpike.

Truck driver and OOIDA Life Member John Taylor, of Cross Junction, VA, vividly remembered those events. He told me about it during the 2002 Beltway shooting spree prior to the arrests of John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. I wrote it up for Land Line in November 2002.

“It was a scary time,” said Taylor. In the summer of 1953, he said he was running the Pennsylvania Turnpike hauling apples out of Winchester, VA, into Pittsburgh. “Everybody was concerned. Most truckers, including myself, were carrying a firearm for protection.”

Drivers began bunching at service plazas and taking turns sleeping and standing guard. “The police discouraged us from sleeping along the turnpike so a lot of us began parking at Howard Johnsons,” said Taylor.

Suspects were questioned in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, as well as a gang from St. Louis.

A week after the third shooting, a 24-year-old farmhand from Fayette County, PA, was arrested on a minor assault charge in Uniontown, PA. John Wesley Wable told police he was the “Turnpike Phantom,” but they dismissed him as a “screwball” and let him go.

A week later, however, the wounded trucker’s stolen pocket watch turned up in a Cleveland pawnshop. Police traced it to a nearby rooming house where they found the .32-caliber German pistol used in the three shootings – and a woman who said she was Wabel’s girlfriend.

After a nationwide manhunt, Wable was arrested Oct. 13 near Albuquerque, NM.

Wable later was convicted in the shootings. He was executed by electrocution on Sept. 26, 1955.

“The police never said why he did it,” Taylor recalled, “but it must have been because the turnpike was in his area, and it just was easy access for him.”

Pass me a grape Nehi …

Truck writers are a nutty bunch. I got an e-mail today from Rufus Sideswipe, the gearjammin’ imaginary pal of Land Line columnist Bill Hudgins. This e-mail was a copy of a note sent to another Land Line columnist, Dave Sweetman.

Rufus, it seems, read Sweetman’s column in the October Land Line and liked it a lot. If you haven’t read it, it’s called “Blue Highways,” and I agree it’s one of Sweetman’s best. Good enough to bring a fictional character like Rufus “to life,” I guess.

Allow me to share this exchange. The fictional Rufus writes to Dave:

That was one fine journey back down the backroads in Land Line. That other writer fella, Bill Hudgins, what quotes me all the time – he says he read “Blue Highways” and “Travels With Charley” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and did some roaming, too. But then he got sidetracked and stuck in one place with that Wilma of his. Thanks for the trip! – RS

Now considering that Bill wrote this in the guise of Rufus, I really like the “Wilma” touch – seeing as how Bill’s wife is WILDA, not Wilma.

In fact, I couldn’t resist shooting off a totally fictitious note to Rufus myself, claiming to have run into Hudge back before we were truck editors. I said I thought I saw him once, standing on the corner in Winslow, AZ.

I copied Sweetman, who was quick with a reply to Rufus, copying me back, of course.

Awww, shucks! To get a word or three of kind encouragement from the well traveled Rufus, is plum flatterin’ alright. Guess that means I have nine readers now, including my dear old Mom.

And I always did like that Hudge feller’s writing. Met him a time or two, but not in Winslow, or Show Low or Tupelo. We talked once about sharing a couple pulls on some Lem Motlow, till we found out it costs more than the GNP of BearWhizBeckistan. When the subject of who was buying came about, the subject pert near changed fast as greased lightnin’. A bottle of grape Nehi was affordable and had the same effect.

Again, many thanks for the kind words and for being a Land Line reader.

That Dave feller

This Rufus Sideswipe stuff is all in fun, of course. Hudge says he invented the character years ago. Did you know that many readers actually DO think he is real?

OOIDA Member Bob “Cowpoke” Martin of Lafayette, IN, is one guy who doesn’t buy it, though. In fact, Hudgins’ literary leaping back and forth in and out of the Rufus character once prompted CP to e-mail me with the question “does Land Line have a random drug testing policy in place?”

SCR comes to cars in ‘Oz’

With all the hammering the diesel engine industry – which in the U.S. means trucking – has taken over emissions, it’s nice to see that attention is turning toward four-wheeled emitters. At least, it is in Australia (aka Oztralia or Oz), where Mazda is testing a car that uses SCR to reduce greenhouse gases in exhaust.

Selective catalyst reduction – SCR – is emerging as a popular choice for diesel engine makers to meet 2010 EPA emission requirements. Being Australian, The Age web site naturally reports on this with tongue in cheek (I’m surprised they didn't make some kind of pun about it running on pee-trol), but the intent is serious.

Trucks have taken the blame for being “the cause” of pollution too long.

It’s time for the rest of the driving population to shoulder some of the burden. Who knows – that might inspire better systems that don’t rob power or reduce fuel efficiency. Dare I say that the solution could come from some Wizard in Oz?

Truckers and flu

As noted in Land Line’s daily news, the White House, DOT and Centers for Disease Control are advising drivers how to try to keep the flu out of your rig – and presumably your home, your body and your loved ones.

Here’s my advice: Do it.

Health risks aside – and these may range from mild to serious, depending on how healthy you are to start with and perhaps how old you are – there’s a very practical, and powerful, economic reason for wanting to keep truckers and others in the nation’s transportation industry healthy.

In “The Great Influenza,” published in 2004, historian John M. Barry notes that today’s system of just-in-time delivery means that a significant drop in the transportation system’s capacity could ripple across the entire economy.

Writing about the 1918-19 flu that killed at least 650,000 people in America and sickened or even crippled millions more, he notes that many localities ran out of coffins for the dead.

Barry said the average time in 1968 between manufacture and use for coffins was five months; now, it’s about three and a half weeks. If H1N1 were to mutate into a far more lethal strain – as the 1918 flu did from a milder strain that hit that spring – some communities could run out of coffins.

Think also about the impact on produce and fresh food shipments. Anyone who has seen a stack of produce wilting on a dock because there was no truck to carry it can well imagine what that would look like multiplied many times.

Of course, it’s not just truckers. A serious pandemic could sideline people at every level of commerce for perhaps weeks at a time.

In a white paper for MIT’s Engineering Systems Division updated this past July, Barry extends that example to other critically needed medical supplies:

“Just-in-time, of course, discourages stockpiling supplies, not only for health care – and not just antibiotics but also syringes, gowns, gloves, and so on – but also for businesses. A mild pandemic could well infect the same proportion of the population as a severe one, and some workers would stay home to care for sick family members; this could easily cause peak absenteeism in the 20 percent or higher range for a week or more.

“This could ripple through the economy and create major bottlenecks.”

We don’t know if this flu will be the one that morphs into a serious killer. Plain old flu is bad enough, killing far more people each year in America than AIDS does, according to Barry. But it’s showing some eerie similarities to the 1918 virus. So keep the hand gel handy, try to stay out of crowds, and wash your hands.