Long Haul Paul reviews Gord Magill’s End of the Road.
Gord Magill has been on fire lately. His book, “End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers,” published by Creed and Culture, garnered the Canadian-born former steel hauler interviews with C-Span, Tucker Carlson and The Free Press.
He even recently lectured at Cornell University.
In “End of the Road,” Magill describes a kind of technocratic takeover of the industry he grew up loving, pushing longtime truckers out.
In today’s trucking, he writes, drivers fear surveillance while they sleep, poorly trained operators recently arrived to North America are dispatched over treacherous winter terrain with fatal consequences, and truckers are denied fundamental human needs by “spreadsheet brained” office staff.
Some of the story he tells will be readily familiar to Overdrive readers — he cites Overdrive‘s work several times. (Editor’s note: And since Long HauI Paul first wrote about Magill five years back, the pair have become friends; Magill actually calls LHP one in the book itself.)
Magill calls for a graduated licensing system similar to the Australian model, where driving privileges are issued in tiers beginning with cars, progressing to straight trucks, then semis, then multi-trailer road trains.
He cites the example of the Humboldt Tragedy in Canada, in which a driver named Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, with a mere one month’s trucking experience, ran a Super B train through a stop sign and plowed into a bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos hockey team, killing 16 and injuring 13 others. Magill cites published interviews with other poorly trained immigrant truck drivers who reported “feeling terrified [they] would lose control on an icy highway and kill someone.”
Another troubling account in Magill’s dystopian vision of our industry’s current state is that of a female driver, whose goes by the TikTok handle Original Trucking Barbie 2.0 and worries that the driver-facing camera in her truck never stops surveilling her.
Having never been tethered to a driver-facing camera myself, I wondered whether this was even a thing. Doesn’t the filming cease once you’re off duty? I reached out to the folks at our own outward facing camera provider, Netradyne, for clarification.
Crickets.
