Have a look around you, wherever you are: at home, at work, on the train. Have a look at the things you can see furniture, computers, clothes, free copies of the Evening Standard, the loaf of bread you picked up on the way home. Every single item has one thing in common. How it got there. At some point it was on the back of a lorry. It may have arrived in a van for final delivery, but how did it get to the warehouse where that van was loaded? On the back of a lorry…

But this isn’t about lorries, it’s about the people at the wheel of them. Of course, a lorry is absolutely essential otherwise there is nothing to carry a multitude of goods, and luckily there isn’t a shortage of them. However, not having someone to drive it makes the lorry completely pointless.

So, this is about lorry drivers. Which is not to ignore the many bus and coach drivers who are also a fundamentally important part of our everyday lives, but they face a different set of operational issues which need to be discussed in their own right.

In fact, what this really is, is an appeal on behalf of lorry drivers to everyone who benefits from their efforts every single day. Which is all of us. And the appeal is for a little more understanding and appreciation, because first of all it really isn’t an easy job, and secondly there is no escaping the fact that we would be completely f***ed without them.

I am not going to claim that every single lorry driver is perfect, that would obviously be ridiculous, nobody is. And there have been enough high-profile, newsworthy incidents over the years that demonstrate all too well the tragedies that the truly baddest of bad apples have brought about. Inevitably, a vehicle that weighs so many tonnes can create utter devastation when not properly handled but it does have to be stressed that this is reflective of a very small minority of drivers, and not the huge number of diligent professionals that take their job, and the responsibilities that come with it, very seriously.

Let’s use the largest vehicle as an example: a tractor and semi-trailer combination, aka an articulated lorry. You know, the big one that bends in the middle. In a standard setup, it is roughly 54 feet (16.5 metres) long, nearly 8 ½ feet (2.55 metres) wide, usually somewhere between 13 and 16 feet high (up to 5 metres) and can weigh as much as 44 tonnes. Despite being articulated, it still has a massive turning circle and needs lots of room to manoeuvre at junctions and roundabouts. By law there must be 6 external mirrors, in addition to the increased fitment of cameras (giving the driver something else to have to monitor, as well as the mirrors, windscreen and side windows), and yet it is still teeming with blindspots on all four sides, some of which are large enough to make a car disappear.

Now imagine threading it through the mean streets of a major city. One which has evolved over hundreds of years (like most UK cities) and was never specifically designed for the volume of traffic or types of road users present. There are low bridges, width restrictions and weight limits that dictate the route along roads that can change day-to-day because of roadworks or unplanned closures. There are pedestrians, vans, cyclists, cars, motorbikes, buses, and other lorries everywhere, all of them trying to complete their own journey, all with their own attitudes and behaviours at play. Fancy it? Sadly, the driver of that lorry doesn’t have the luxury of choice. But they do have a job to do and a host of constantly changing factors that influence how they do it.

They also have a huge amount of responsibility on their shoulders. An HGV licence is deemed to be a ‘vocational’ licence, which means the holder is a professional and therefore is heavily regulated. Before even taking that 44-tonne lorry on the public highway, the driver will have had to check its condition because they are legally responsible for its roadworthiness. When the vehicle is loaded, the driver has to check the load weight and ensure it is properly positioned and restrained because they are legally responsible for it. During their shift the driver has to constantly be aware of how much driving and other work they have done, because they have a legal responsibility to ensure they take appropriate breaks and don’t exceed the daily, weekly, and fortnightly limits for these activities set by different regulations. By comparison, how often do the rest of us check the tyre pressures on our cars?

In addition to the size and weight of the vehicles they drive, the roads they have to drive on, the other road users they encounter and the many regulations they work under, lorry drivers face a host of other pressures and issues: long shifts often involving unsociable hours and/or driving at night, the effect this can have on their personal life, woeful facilities for break and rest periods (motorway services? Yuck!), operational demands such as timed deliveries, the list really does go on…

As I mentioned, it is not an easy job. But it is an essential one. It was no exaggeration to say that everything has been on the back of a lorry at some point. And not just the furniture, computers, clothes, newspapers, and bread we buy, but also the pharmaceuticals keeping people alive in hospitals. And the raw materials that went into making them in the first place. Even the stuff we throw away when we are done with it. Now imagine if the taps were turned off. There are lorries sitting there, with goods on board, raring to go. They are well maintained and fully roadworthy. They have road tax, insurance, and a valid MOT. Their diesel tanks are full to the brim. There is only one thing stopping them…no driver. I was also not exaggerating when I said that we are completely f***ed without lorry drivers.

In Sweden in 2009, the Swedish Association of Road Haulage Companies undertook a study called ‘A Week Without Truck Transport’. It was exactly as the name suggests, designed to see what would happen if all truck transport was suddenly stopped for one week. While it was a theoretical exercise, it was conducted using genuine statistics and information about the quantities of goods moved on a daily basis. The study concluded that by only day five, the country had not only ground to a halt, but food shortages were critical, waste was piling up in the streets creating a huge sanitation issue, and people in hospitals were seriously at risk because of a lack of medical supplies.

This is not a call for the revolution to start and for all HGV drivers to down tools, it is exactly what I said before, it is an appeal to all road users to be aware of the difficulties thousands of professional lorry drivers face every day so that we can have all the things we have and also give them a touch more appreciation for the job they do.

Anyway, rant over. I need to go, got to buy a loaf of bread on my way home…