'How am I driving?' Don't call us, we'll call you
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Your support makes all the difference.The sign on the back of the lorry invites you to answer the question "How Am I Driving?" But if your reply is "like a roadhog" then you may find it hard to make your point.
Figures released by the Freight Transport Association (FTA) reveal that nearly half of the calls received by the "Well Driven?" scheme, which organises the stickers on the back of lorries, are complaints about being cut up.
But the FTA admitted that only a third of calls ever lead to reports being forwarded to the companies whose vehicles are complained about.
One group of comments that it does pass on, however, are the complimentary ones – which make up 13 per cent of calls.
Insurance figures show that 30 per cent of all road accidents in Britain are caused by company vehicles, although they make up only 15 per cent of the driving population.
Karen Packham, who oversees the "Well Driven?" scheme for the FTA, said "it's very hard to quantify" whether the scheme has led to any improvement at all in the quality of lorry driving. And she agreed that in many cases, lorry drivers dislike the scheme so much that they scratch off part of the phone number to make it impossible to complain about them. "I've seen that," she said. "The scheme does get a mixed reaction from drivers. The high-profile firms will check their stickers daily."
But some lorry drivers feel that scratching off the stickers is the only way to protect themselves from malicious calls.
"I was once backing a new truck out of a turning when someone completely ignored me and just drove through, nearly causing an accident," one commercial trucking director told The Independent. "And then I got a call complaining about my driving. I gave them a piece of my mind."
The "Well Driven?" scheme was introduced in 1996 and now covers 25,000 lorries.
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