The Source for Trucking News, Opinions and Trucking Jobs | Image is Everything

One of the problems that truckers have is image. We’ve kicked ourselves out of so many places by being inconsiderate, trashing and disrespecting people that are nice enough to allow us to park somewhere.

Unless I have a delivery to a mall. I usually get kicked out of a mall parking lot. Wal-mart parking lots are getting more strict. Police are getting more strict about parking on off ramps. Businesses and neighborhoods refuse to put up with overnight parking noise and trash.

A major industrial / warehouse district in Hayward, CA doesn’t allow overnight parking on the street. Just for commercial vehicles of course. I’ve seen signs in industrial areas that don’t allow truck parking at all! I could be parked on the street, next to the building I’m delivering at and I’m not allowed to park there overnight.

Now there’s a lot of press about a parking shortage! Like most of the problems in the trucking industry, we did it to ourselves. And I’m afraid even if we did clean up our act, there would always be a few inconsiderate idiots that would ruin it again for the rest of us. Have you seen a truck stop lately? Most are okay, even the nice ones work hard at trying to keep up with the garbage left in the parking lot. On and off ramps where there is enough space to park are always trashed. It’s truly embarrassing to be associated with some of the inconsiderate pigs out there.

Worse, I don’t know what the answer is. How to you treat an attitude? How can you change the attitude of, “someone else will get it?”. How do you fix laziness or… I don’t even know what else it could be? We can only police ourselves so much, but every little bit helps. Every little bit of trash dropped in a mall parking lot where the “general public” sees it ruins any effort all of us can do put together. I can’t give up! There has to be an answer somewhere!