Editorial: Hail Trucking's Linchpin

Our trusty Webster’s New World College Dictionary describes a linchpin as the pin that gets inserted through an axle outside the wheel to keep the wheel from falling off. However, the second definition, “anything serving to hold together the parts of a whole,” is the one we usually mean when employing the word.

Click here for more coverage of National Truck Driver Appreciation Week

Never is the word better employed than in describing the role drivers play in the giant industry that moves most of America’s freight, namely trucking. Today, trucking’s share of the nation’s freight billings is almost $372 billion, more than 81% of the total.

Despite all the improvements that have occurred in the evolution of the equipment, the roadways and the handling of freight, drivers remain the industry’s indispensable linchpin, without which the wheels would fall off.

And for one week a year, the industry and many of its customers unite in honoring the men and women who pilot the vehicles that carry the goods that enrich our lives.

The fourth annual National Truck Driver Appreciation Week is under way this week, through Aug. 28.

In the rush of doing so much business, we sometimes lose sight of the human aspects of trucking. Every load is delivered by at least one driver, and that driver is a person with a family, hobbies and aspirations. On the opposite page, one of those drivers relates in her own words what life on the road is like and what it does to one’s personal life.

Besides the demands of dispatchers and shippers, truck drivers also have to contend, on a full-time basis, with actions of others that make all of us cringe: the growing level of bad behavior that results from overcrowded highways and the frustrations generated by delays and congestion. And the professionals do it with upwards of 40 tons of responsibility in their hands.

All of us at Transport Topics want to take this opportunity to acknowledge all of you who bring our goods to market and fill our shelves — and make our industry the great one that it is. Thank you!