Mary (4). I think you’ve missed the point re the milk truck.
Until this week, when was the last time that you heard of a milk truck crashing? How about a petrol tanker, a bus, a cattle truck? It’s highly unusual to have any of these large vehicles crash.
We all share the road with many heavy vehicles. The drivers have a difficult, stressful job to perform and generally do it well. Log trucks represent only a fraction of those vehicles, yet we’ve had nine crashes involving log trucks reported in the media so far this year (comment 1 mentioning eight crashes was written three weeks ago).
I agree that “the amount of media attention to log-truck incidents is disproportionate”, however I feel the incidents involving these vehicles are actually under reported in the media, since they are no longer considered newsworthy. On more than one occasion, ABC Local Radio have reported a log truck crash, but then the incident hasn’t made the papers or the television news and I’ve been unable to find out any more about it. These are not included in my figure of nine crashes so far this year.
It could be argued that log trucks have more accidents because they are driven on gravel forestry roads, but most of the crashes (the ones that are reported by the media anyway) occur on sealed roads and a high number are single vehicle accidents (usually a roll-over).
