It’s All About Safety at CDL School

When you are in trucking school be prepared to be bombarded about the importance of safety. Especially in a paid CDL training environment.

There is good reason for this. Those things you will be driving will weigh up to 40 tons. You can cause some serious death and destruction with a tractor-trailer. Also – and the cynical person will say this is the main reason – insurance rates can be insanely high for companies that have a lot of drivers with accidents on their records.

So let’s take a look at two of the safety measures that will be hammered into your head while you’re at trucking school.

Spacing between vehicles: Putting plenty of distance between yourself and the vehicle in front of you will be talked about often. Specifically, the formula is one truck length of space for every 10 mph. This sounds all well and good, but if you really think about it it’s pretty unrealistic. Even your trainers will acknowledge that this cannot be maintained most of the time.

Doing simple math we can figure that if the average truck is about 20 yards long then we would need to keep a distance of 120 yards between us and the vehicle in front of us if we were traveling 60 mph down the highway. That’s more than a football field of space. That’s a lot of space and it seems excessive.

There’s good reason for this formula, however. Maintaining lots of space gives you plenty of time to slow down quickly or come to a complete stop if you need to. Maintaining proper distance is one of the easiest ways to prevent an accident. You’ll never rear-end anybody if you’re behind them far enough.

Of course, it’s impossible to keep such a distance all the time. Cars will be changing lanes and pulling in front of you from time to time. You just need to be aware of what is happening in front of you and keep as much space as possible between you and other vehicles.

Braking correctly: One of the easiest ways to get into an accident is to lose your brakes. This can be done quite quickly if you don’t use them correctly when descending hills or mountains. You will learn to never – ever – ride your brakes. This can cause them to quickly burn out and you will be in a whole lot of trouble if this happens.

What you will be taught to do is to use the “stabbing” technique. This is where you apply near maximum pressure on the brakes for a couple of seconds before releasing the pressure, and repeating this process until you are back on level ground.

Obviously, downshifting into the correct gear also plays an important role. But this alone is not always enough to maintain a properly slow speed.

This can actually be pretty hairy at times. Once during my training we were driving through Pennsylvania on a secondary road. This road suddenly ascended to a pretty high elevation and then dropped down just as quickly. Neither me nor my trainer was familiar with this road.

As we descended I forgot everything I learned during my training and did what any car driver would do – I rode my brakes. My trainer quickly and loudly asked me what I learned in school about descending a hill. Then I remembered.

I began using the stab technique and we made it down without incident. But let me tell you, coming down a steep hill in 70,000 pounds of truck can be scary. The truck gains momentum very quickly and you wonder whether you can keep your speed under control simply by stabbing. But it does in fact work.

We will examine other safety issues you will learn in CDL school in other posts. For now, get a quick jump on your learning by remembering that lots of space between you and other vehicles, and absolutely no riding your brakes are two crucial things you must learn.

Lots more information about truck driving schools is available by visiting the website CDL Training Info.