Up Front- If Not Us, Then Who?

Shannon Newton
President, ATA

Earlier this week, at a nearby terminal, one of our newly minted Arkansas Road Team Captains did his first piece for a local news crew on distracted driving. There was excitement and nervousness.

Any opportunity to educate the public on how to safely share the road with tractor-trailers and demonstrate the industry’s commitment to safety is worth seizing.

I was fortunate to serve on the road team selection panel. It was one of my greatest days on the job. All the candidates gave compelling presentations. All spoke passionately, with pride and hard earned wisdom from years—if not decades—behind the wheel, about all that is right in trucking. It was truly moving. I cannot wait to get these captains in front of Arkansans to help educate motorists about safety and our industry.

 

This experience left me thinking, believing, how much our industry would benefit if just a tiny bit of their pride, their storytelling and passion for trucking rubbed off on the rest of us.

We have no shortage of challenges. Generally, the public still doesn’t make the critical connection between trucking and the standard of living we enjoy. They don’t recognize the millions spent and thousands employed to provide this service safely and efficiently for pennies per mile. How is this? With so many employees, not just drivers or executives but all of you reading along?

Whether you are responsible for making Friday’s payroll, auditing logs, selling trucking or products to the industry, you—WE—all of us—have opportunities to seize.

We all need to be trucking’s ambassadors. If we all had such industry pride and said so, we would have a more informed citizenry. Perhaps they would value safety and our commitment to it as much as we do.

Maybe more would consider a career in transportation, or better, encourage their children to. Perhaps legislators and policy makers would be more eager to address the infrastructure crisis and the other regulatory challenges facing our industry.

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had on airplanes, in elevators, hair salons, even during my recent trip to the pumpkin patch about trucking. “Yes, I work in trucking. And so do many other people that you know! “

Let us take pride in our industry; our profession is vital to the American way of life. That’s the easy one.

Listening to these drivers reminds us all that our profession is noble. And that’s a story to tell. If not us, then who?