What ever happenned to pre-trip planning?

[buzzy]

Remember when you'd get your bills of lading, get out your trusty road atlas, find the shortest route and compare it to the closest truck routes, look for rest areas en route and fuel stops, figure trip time by 90kph, then add an hour, possibly phone your delivery customer to get finally routing?

Now, it's program an unreliable computer, listen to GPS "Bertha" tell you every which way to turn, miss fuel stops, run in non-truck areas, discover the roads in the industrial park you are looking for haven't been assumed by the town and therefore aren't on a GPS system, and be late for deliveries but blame it on a computer problem.

The old days, when drivers knew how to think for themselves was much simpler and less costly.

[bikerboy]

that has never happened to me.

first thing i do is look on my atlas to find where the place is i am going, then i type the adress into gps and check and see how close the adress is to an interstate and figure out if they are major routes or not, or if it looks like it could be bad roads, then i will call and see what they say to do to get there.

then decide if i will go the way gps says or not, usually i do.

then i look in my truckstop book and decide where i will sleep that night and how many miles away that is. and how far away from delivery that will be. and what time i will arrive at delivery.

I can do all this in less than 10 minutes.


If you run into non truck roads or roads that are not on gps, that is because you did not properly research and check things before you started out.

That is not the gps fault, its the drivers fault for not properly comparing the gps route to an atlas or to customer directions.

As long as the driver checks the gps routing against something else and doesn't always assume the gps is right, they work fine.

[ralph]

Having used "Streets and Trips" in a laptop for years and now trying a "Garmin 255w" gps unit there is a huge difference between the two. Because the laptop has a larger screen it is easier to see all the street level mapping in a city where as the gps will only give you the closest streets. I also found that because the screen/map was bigger when you called the customer you could talk to/speak with the customer intelligently useing exact street names as you could see them all and move the map easier than a gps unit. There is a gps available for "Streets and Trips" I have not used it.

Calling a customer is imperative, not only to get good directions, but also to see what their hours of business are and also to let them know that you are in route to their destination. Technology is great, but it doesn't absolve the driver of making a call in advance and verifying their address and a proper way of getting there.

[1-800-bigtruck]

In my opinion a gps or lap top is probably one of the best tools to pre-plan a trip after getting loaded ect. Punch in the destination address and it tells you how many miles it is , eta in hours and minutes , get trusty old map out and compair the route , maps don't get you to the actual city address to often ,thats were the technology comes into action, . I also have the pocket sized truck stop book for the US and a couple of cat scale pamphlets to find truckstops in Ont. to help in pre planning my stops for the night. Now as far as getting a so called good calling card , we have a company one which is good in Canada which I can use with my personal cell phone , but in the US pay phones are sometimes at a premium, some times hard to find, I used my cell phone once in eastern NY state with the calling card and once I got the bill ,never again unless it is an actual emergency. ,still get dinged for the tower use. I'm sure driving the old school way is just fine, but any of the seasoned drivers that I have talked to that have switched over to a gps just love it. Personally, I think it also makes driving, not only easier , but safer, because now I can concentrate more on driving instead of looking at every street sign . 99% of the time , my unit has gotten me to my destination without issues. In short , I use my gps as a tool, not a cross country map, and it does save me a lot of time and greef.