Opinion: Take Heed to Safety’s Early Adopters

By Howard S. Abramson

Editorial Director

Transport Topics Publishing Group

This Opinion piece appears in the July 6 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Every industry has its early adopters and its bellwethers — companies and executives who embrace new technologies and philosophies long before most of their competitors are willing to move.

Sometimes these companies are rewarded with tremendous gains in market share and net revenue, and sometimes they are punished for choosing a path that turns out not to be the best long-term solution.

When these ahead-of-the-pack companies talk, it’s important that the rest of us listen.

One of the best-known bellwether companies in trucking is Schneider National Inc., whose headquarters are in Green Bay, Wis. Suppliers vie hardest, I believe, to convince Schneider to buy its products, because they realize that the endorsement — “You know Schneider’s using this . . . ” — convinces lots of other purchasing executives to pull out their checkbooks.

And Schneider’s endorsement, it seems, is sought for products and services ranging from $100,000 tractors to 3-cent envelopes.

Another company that has proven to be an industry leader — especially in embracing safety and emission-control systems — is Maverick USA, the primarily flatbed operator based in Little Rock, Ark.

After I began my tenure here, the first voice I heard raised in a public meeting of truckers who urged his colleagues to abandon their long-held antipathy to environmental regulation was that of Maverick Chairman Steve Williams, at an American Trucking Associations gathering.

Williams said that since we all breathe the same air, and that virtually all of us truly supported the concept of improving life for all our countrymen, there was no reason to fight with the Environmental Protection Agency, even if we resented its attitudes toward trucking or its methods in achieving its objectives.

Rather, he said (if my memory can be trusted), we need to join with EPA to ensure that its policies made sense in the real world, since we all agreed that clean air and clean water are worthy and mutual goals.

Williams also was an early adopter — and perhaps the first fleet adopter in some cases — of safety technologies. These systems are designed to prevent rollovers, to warn drivers they are straying out of their lanes and to warn of obstructions in the road.

The early versions were sometimes bulky, expensive and not completely reliable.

But Williams plowed ahead, telling anyone who asked that he felt it was important that trucking be made as safe as it could be. He told most anyone who asked that he believed these systems would more than pay their own way over the long haul, both in lower operating costs and in societal gain. It was a classic case, he would say, of doing well by doing good.

Williams even became a poster boy for one safety-equipment supplier, being featured prominently in the company’s advertising campaign. He told colleagues that one of his favorite pastimes, his airplane, was paid for by the money he saved in lower insurance premiums resulting from his fleet’s use of the new safety equipment.

So it was very disturbing to hear Williams in mid-June give a speech at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in which he said:

“Unfortunately, the shipping community does not value the investments that we have made, and our idealism has put our company in peril, as we are at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace.”

He said, “The current challenge that we face is not only compounded by the investments that we voluntarily have made in communication and safety technology, but also by more expensive EPA mandates, which I also support.”

Williams told the audience that his fleet has “invested tens of millions of dollars voluntarily and stands as an example of what a carrier will need to look like in order to be part of the solution.”

Williams said acquiring Class 8 tractors for Maverick has “increased in cost by 50%,” from $75,000 in 1998 to more than $110,000 now, including the EPA-mandated changes and the safety systems he puts on his vehicles.

He went on to say, “If these technologies are critical pieces in the strategy” of highway safety and clean air, “then government should step up and mandate these technologies, or — at a minimum — encourage their early adoption with tax incentives.”

And, ominously, he said, “We are currently reevaluating our business model, because, frankly, the current one is not sustainable.”

He has even parked his beloved airplane, he told me after his speech at the meeting, which was titled, ironically, “The International Conference on Efficient, Safe and Sustainable Truck Transportation Systems for the Future.”

If companies like Maverick and executives like Steve Williams are questioning whether their investments in these systems are being appropriately recognized and rewarded, then the rest of us need to take heed and make some changes now. That “rest of us” includes Maverick’s competitors and colleagues, its shippers, the equipment supply industry and, perhaps most of all, the regulators.

If the early adopters end up abandoning the high road, trucking’s road to safer and cleaner operations is in jeopardy. At the very least, surely a retreat by Maverick would signal that we are still years away from the time when the very latest safety and emissions technology is part of every well-run fleet.

Cleaner air, lower fuel use and safer highways are for the benefit of us all and are therefore the responsibility of us all. Steve Williams is still carrying his lantern; we need to see what lies in the path ahead, before we travel too far down that road.