End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is a third-generation trucker telling the truth about what was done to his profession and who did it. You should read it.
First, Gord Magill is a friend and a fellow driver with decades of tenure behind the wheel. I bought this the day it came out. I actually bought a second, so Gord could sign the second while at the Mid-America Trucking Show. That means you should apply whatever weight you think appropriate to the fact that I’m about to tell you it is one of the best books written about the trucking industry in a very long time, and that every carrier owner, fleet manager, compliance professional, broker, shipper, policy maker, and working driver in this country should read it. I am telling you that because I believe it, not because Gord asked me to say it. Gord didn’t pay Freightwaves or me for this article/review. This is just professionals telling you that this is real trucking professionals highlighting the real issues of our industry and why the State of our highways is an outrage.
“End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers” is written by Magill, a third-generation trucker who has driven the ice roads of northern Canada, the deserts of the Australian Outback, and the highways of the continental United States. The third-generation part is important to me, as someone raised by blue-collar farmers and workers born in the 1930s and 1910s. If you meet his father, you immediately know you’re dealing with real, very genuine, passionate people. These are the types of people I try to keep in my very small circle for very good reasons. Gord is Canadian by birth, an American citizen now living in upstate New York, and he has been in a truck cab in some form or another for more than 30 years. That biography is the book’s entire argument for its own credibility. This is not a consulting firm’s white paper. It is not a policy analysis from someone who has spent their career in a Washington office building, wondering why carriers struggle to find drivers. This is a man who knows what it costs to get a CDL, what it costs to lease a truck, what it feels like to be surveilled for 11 hours at a stretch, and what it means to watch your profession get systematically dismantled by people who have never sat in a truck seat.
