The world of transportation is growing here in the United States and in many other places all throughout the world as well. From the growth of e-commerce to greater access to internet access than ever before, shipping services for purchases made on line are needed now more than ever, and the amount of cargo that is being transported is climbing considerably. In fact, the amount of cargo that was transported in the year of 2013 was already at an impressive fifteen billion tons. But by the time that we reach the year of 2040, now only just more than twenty years away, this number is expected to climb to be more than eighteen and a half billion tons of cargo transport in the same mere twelve months.
Of course, with the need for transportation growing, so too is the need for skilled ruck drivers. Already, more than three and a half million people are employed in various truck driving jobs all throughout the country, according to data that was gathered in the year of 2015. And the need is growing, with more people than ever in truck driver training at truck driving school. You might ask, is truck driver training and CDL driver school really all that necessary for people who already know how to drive and who have likely been driving for many years at this point?
To put it shortly, the answer is yes. While it’s important to know how to drive a car before you drive a truck, there are many other components to driving a truck that requires extensive truck driver training in order to be able to do in a safe and efficient manner, with safety held above all else as an important quality for any truck driver in a course of truck driver training to be able to master. This can be seen the most clearly in a few aspects of truck driving. For one, the trucks that are driven in order to transport goods to locations all throughout the country are simply just so much larger than any car, meaning that they will take a while to get used to driving.
This can be clearly elaborated by the fact that the typical car will only weigh around five thousand pounds at the most. In comparison, a truck is so much more vast, weighing up to eighty thousand pounds. Knowing how to maneuver and drive such a vehicle as safely as possible will definitely take intensive training like what is conducted in truck driver school. In addition to this fact, it’s also important to note that trucks such as eighteen wheelers can have drastically different stopping and turning times than typical cars, typically taking up to forty percent longer to fully bring to a stop.
Unless a person has gone through truck driver school and truck driver training to gain the necessary skills and experience, this can prove dangerous even in the best of all driving conditions. During conditions of inclement weather such as rain and snow and ice, trying to stop a truck or even trying to turn it can be a hugely dangerous and risky endeavor for the driver that does not have truck driving experience and who has not been through truck driver school and truck driver training.
During truck driver training at truck driver school, it is a matter of importance for the truck drivers to be to learn how to manage their fatigue while on the road. Driving a truck carrying cargo often requires truck drivers to be on the road for long stretches of time, and unmanaged driver fatigue can prove to be a hugely dangerous thing, so much so that it is linked just under fifteen percent of all the car accidents that occur here in the United States. When truck drivers simply try to push through this fatigue, driving conditions can all too quickly become dangerous, which puts not only the truck driver him or herself at risk, but risks the lives of all who are around them as well.
For any prospective truck driver, truck driver training is important.