Thread: 4WD myths, facts and stats

Originally Posted by JohnE

Started off alright with the myths and facts and now has got to the downright ridiculous,
As far as i am concerned freight and goods and anything large( this montrosity is Large) should be on a train, not on a road.
Now what kind of lunatic approved , recommended, allowed a monster like that fuel setup on a road.
Can't see the hazchem, plates to see what is in it, but that is nothing more than a moving bomb, regardless of whether it is in a remote area or not. How can the driver adequatley tell if anything is wrong with any of the back trailers.

More so how can a normal motorist avoid it, your driving along and comes up behind it or it comes up behind you??
How does it stop in a hurry, would be an interesting jackknife, the list can go on.

Sorry to those who like that sort of thing, but i detest trucks and the increasing sizes they put on the roads.

my rant


john

While I agree with you about the preference to ship things by rail, the fact has to be faced that the majority of places in Australia have no railway line to them - and most places where road trains are allowed have no rail service. The city based governments in most states have for many years closed non-urban railways wherever possible, often by running them down until the cost of making them safe becomes prohibitive. The reasons for this are simply that road transport is cheaper, because the infrastructure is shared among more users, and it lends itself less to the abuse of monopoly power, which was used by both unions and government railway owners to drive traffic onto the roads from WW2 onwards (although that wasn't their intention). Many main lines that do have heavy freight traffic are either close to or at saturation without significant investment.

As far as stopping large vehicles goes, I do not know of any laws of physics that make a multi-trailer vehicle harder to stop than a single trailer vehicle - since the axle loading is legally limited, every increase in mass is accompanied by a proportionate increase in braking capability. Although trucks do not in general have as good a brakes as typical cars, there is no reason why stopping distance should have any relation to the mass being stopped - the ultimate limit is tyre adhesion, and the mass that needs to be stopped is the same as the mass loading the tyre. Do you expect your Discovery at around three tonnes loaded to take longer to stop than a Honda Jazz or similar at a third the mass? In fact, I suspect that a modern B-double with ABS brakes can outbrake many cars on the road, although the brake's heat dissipation will not be as good as most cars, so they will avoid prolonged braking.

As far as being a moving bomb, the difference between one tanker and several is probably pretty irrelevant once you have an accident.

Certainly there is a problem with telling what is wrong further back - but not significantly worse than with a single trailer, and it is worth noting that truck fires are often the result of unnoticed flat tyres on the trailer!

I don't like trucks on the road either - but voters have for many years voted for governments that put them there, and in any case for most places in Australia, there is no alternative.

John

Hey JohnE, join 'TOOT' and help get a train back on our line Casino - Murwillumbah line!!!

GQ

Hey Johne, try stopping a train within 2 or 3 kms, they are just as if not more dangerous to our road users than the big trucks that are normally traveling on our less traveled roads.

If you dont like trucks then dont buy anything or use anything as it all goes on a truck at some point to get to where you buy it, you think that all shops have a their own personal train line going to their back door?

It is this sort of attitude that causes truck and car accidents as people think they can just pull in front of a truck and break to p!ss off the truckie in the hope he will give up and get off the road, I have heard several people come out with similar coments as that and so I drop my Heavy licence on the table/bar in front of them and ask them to repeat them selves.

You should respect the trucks and the drivers as much as possible as they have it alot harder than you do to thread the needle through the idiot traffic at peak hour to try and get into their slot to unload or load.

Your comments are impractical and unwarrented but I do understand that there are good and bad truck drivers as well but they are nessesary and you as well as everyone else has to work around them.

JohnE has a point, mcrover... and it is that we have unused rail lines in our area, but 'heavy traffic' is heavy.. more than 2,500 semis and b-doubles pass thru Ballina every day... much of which could go by rail.... the local service and supply of goods (ex Brisbane) is largely done by rigids...

but unlike John, the big fellas dont overly worry me, even tho' our little village of Alstonville sees 100s of b's and semis every day...

we see some fascinating gear passing thru the main street every day, (which is only two lanes wide) like diggers and houses and cranes, all on floats, the poor truckies hate running thru Alstonville....

John's a good guy and his point is valid.

GQ

Building more railways wiil do little to lessen the number of trucks on our roads as it is just too slow to send things by rail. No matter how quick you can get a train somewhere there is the logistics either end in the loading and unloading and sorting that would make it a nightmare. At least two of those B doubles that pass through Alstonville are from the company that i work for and it would be a nightmare to get the same amount of freight to leave sydney the previous night get it into a container, loaded onto a train, wait to get to destination, unload off train then get delivered to depot for sorting and distribution. You could not get an overnight service out of sydney by rail.

I travel down to Lismore from Brisbane every day and dont have a problem with trucks, 99% of them are pretty good. People have just got to realise that everyone is sharing the road and act accordingly.

Thats fine quiggers but if he got in with one of these blokes, it would change the his attitude towards them in a big way.

Im 100% sure that the truckies wouldnt want to have to drive down secondary roads battling traffic and traffic lights which not only annoy the crap out of them but cost most of them money any time they are standing still.

If he should be angry at anyone it should be the governments that A. Stopped the rail network and B. for not putting in more arterial roads that actually work.

I would be happier if cars were banned from driving on the monash and westgate FWY's or the ring road as they can quite easilly use secondary roads and then the car drivers wouldnt have to worry about trucks so much.

How about nobody have a hatered of any road users other than the antisocial type and show respect for the good truckies and report the bad ones.

This I think would be much more sensible than having back to back freight trains running on already full tracks and having train accidents that do 10s of millions of $ damage if they have an accident and grind everything to a halt for weeks on end until the line is cleared and repaired.

Im sure John is a good bloke, Im not having a personal go at him as a person (he does drive a Landy, must be a good bloke), I just dont agree with his Idea of having a dig at something that cant change and in some cases shouldnt be changed.

Originally Posted by twitchy

I have always been a firm believer of no place in the city for 4wheel drives, yes I know I own one, Unless they actually get dirty, properly!~! Just can't stand ******* who buy one & never use it, up here they are Kenmore Tractors....
However I do get P!ssed off that I can't park my Disco in a few car parks due to stupid heights ( or should that be lows???)
I know that my Disco isn't that much worse on fuel than my V6 Verada & I would rather hit another car in the Disco than the Verada.

personally i dont think that makes you any better than the people that say we shouldn't drive 4wd's at all, why not a 4wd in the city??? like people are proving the dont take up any more space then alot of other cars or fuel so why not????

i personally think people should be able to drive what ever car they like and should not be dictated by others just because of there beliefs so what if you want to drive a 4wd in the city so what if you want to drive a crapped out car on an outback road that would probably shake apart with in the first k, why cant people buy 4wd's and not take them off road could it possibly be that they buy them for a feel safe factor isn't that what the d3 got an award for.............

Some things wont change.
Road trains serve a purpose, if you drop the trailer numbers then you add more prime movers to the road. More fuel use etc.
4X4s in the city, if they get baned then what stops toyota/nissan removing the front diff and calling them a 2WD.

My 2 cents easo