Episode: 3978
Title: HPR3978: Driving in Virginia.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3978/hpr3978.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:13:39

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3978 for Wednesday, the 1st of November 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Driving in Virginia.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 30 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Scotty talks about driving in the state of Virginia.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host, some guy on the internet.
Welcome to a quick recording.
I'm just going to be chatting with you about driving today.
We've had shows where hosts have recorded while driving.
I'm not recording while driving, but I will be discussing driving.
And where I drive the most, I drive for a living.
We refer to it as operating.
I operate for a living, a commercial vehicle.
And I do that within the state of Virginia, currently.
I should probably also mention that I live in a United States for anyone who can't tell
or haven't listened to previous shows.
But here in the state of Virginia, we have some pretty interesting motorists around here.
And there are some very interesting behavior that happens.
Now throughout my years of driving, I've held different roles.
I was once a union president.
I was a shop steward before president, then I became president.
I served one term realized that it was not what I thought it was supposed to be.
You know, it seemed like it was going to be so much more.
And eventually I found out that I'm not happy and I may have even been deceived.
So as soon as I could get out of that, the next election came around.
It was like, look, somebody take this away.
I can talk about that another day.
But the reason I bring it up in my role as the president for our local, not for the region
or anything.
I wasn't that big, but just for our local.
We had to deal with lots of accidents and things of that nature.
Any kind of collisions, rather it'd be collision with fixed object or collision with another
motorist on highways, you know, wherever.
And all of our units were outfitted, what was called the Apollo system.
The Apollo system has, it was like between seven and nine cameras.
It depends on the unit that you were operating.
And like three of the cameras are on the driver.
So you'll have one that's mounted to the windshield to the, was it called the dash cam.
So the dash cam has two cameras on it, one facing outside the windshield so I can see
the road.
The other one facing inside the unit so it can see the driver and sort of everything
around it.
And it's kind of like that fisheye lens sort of has a very wide viewing angle.
Then you have another camera like directly above the operator's head.
So it's like looking right down on you, everything you're doing where your hands are, you know,
what you're doing if you're eating, drinking, anything.
And all of these also have audio, by the way.
So there's microphones and cameras all over the unit.
They can hear up to 15 feet away from the unit and they're surprisingly good.
We've had some interesting conversations have an outside of the unit that were caught
and investigations done to either prove something was done or wasn't done.
Then there's another unit by the service door, another camera by the service door that
looks directly at the operator from, from the side.
So there's, you know, you're covered in cameras.
This camera's all on the outside, all on the inside, just everywhere.
And if anything happens and I do mean anything, if somebody called and then said this vehicle
was driving all over the place, I think that the driver was drunk, they can tap into it
at real time and watch you as you're operating the vehicle.
So if anything is going on, obviously the dispatcher will then, you know, ring you, you will
be told, you'll be instructed to pull over somebody will come and meet with you and you'll
probably be taken to a facility to take a test.
Now there's different things that happen, you know, sometimes it's maybe the driver behind
you did not see what you were seeing because it could be something simple as there was debris
in a road and you move to avoid running over the debris or vehicle in front of you was
carrying trash and the trash fell off the back of the vehicle.
So you, you know, you, you tried to evade some of the, the trash without breaking your lane,
that kind of thing.
The person behind you may not know that yet and, you know, for whatever reason they just
call you in.
Now, we also have fraudsters here on the road in our area and here, there's some common
techniques that I've seen either in my position as the, I should still, I'll just say professional,
well, no, because then I am a professional operator, I do it for a living.
But I mean, as a union official or just an operator, I've seen numerous types of fraud.
There's the one where, you know, that the usual where you're in a straight lane.
This is a multi lane highway or roadway, whatever you want to call it.
We operate from the right lane on most, most of the time we operate from the right lane.
The vehicle will probably pace with you for a while.
You know, they'll, they'll probably be in, say, the, uh, the middle or the far right lane
as well.
Just kind of pacing with you and eventually what'll happen is they'll, they'll accelerate
as though they're going to pass and going about their business.
But what normally gives them away is you can see how they're positioning themselves in
the lane, unless you've seen it before.
And I know my explanation may not be the best here, but you can see the, the, the motorist,
the person operating the four wheeler, they're going to be targeting you, right, looking
at you in a certain way, like trying to, trying to make sure that they can get the angles
just right for what they're attempting.
And when you see the style of, um, acceleration is something that you notice over years.
You can tell when someone's accelerating to go about their business versus someone
who's accelerating to accomplish something.
And when you see the style of acceleration, they, they pull themselves up alongside your
vehicle, like think about right along where your front tire is.
They don't decrease speed.
They just don't accelerate as much.
And then eventually they tried to quickly merge in front of your vehicle.
Now, the reason why they do this is because if you're not paying attention and following
your training, what will happen is when you merge in front of you at that close distance,
you're going to hit them.
And that is going to be a rare end situation, which means when an officer arrives at the
scene, they'll probably attempt to ticket you for following too closely.
Now sometimes you can get a supervisor out to the location with video.
But often, no, the officer is there.
Then he has no proof of what has happened other than your vehicle smashed the back of
theirs in and they're claiming to be half dead.
They need an ambulance, you know, the whole night, um, and you're going to get a ticket
for that.
Now, not only that, whenever there's a collision in the street, one of the things you have
to understand is you're not only facing whatever you have to do, you know, for your license
for in the public, because you'll have to go to court and fight that.
You have to hire an attorney, you know, do whatever.
And the company will provide you with the video, but you have to go through the union
to request the video.
There's a process.
You don't just go run to someone, you know, hey, give me the video from today.
There's a process for that.
But once you get the video, you go fight that in court.
You know, hey, this guy is a fraudster, et cetera, et cetera.
And also your insurance is going to get involved with that as well.
You have to contact your insurance because even though this is a company vehicle dealing
with company insurance, this stuff still gets reported.
Your name still goes into a database somewhere as having that kind of a collision and you're
going to have to prove it to your own private insurance as well, because it will show up there.
Even though you have to do that fight publicly, that's, that's what I call like the public
style of fighting it in the courts and things of that nature.
You're going to have to also fight within the company as well.
Within the company, there is the, the argument of preventability, yeah, preventability that
other, I know I'm tongue tied and I'm saying it a little weird, but it is preventable.
That's what they're trying to argue.
Now what they do is they argue rather than you could basically, could you or could you
not have prevented that collision?
That's basically what they want to know.
And they have to do these different cases for insurance purposes, right?
Whenever an operator is having too many collisions of any type, we've got to get rid of them,
you know, you, you are a risk.
And as we know in the commercial game, insurance rules everything.
It does not matter if a company wishes to employ you to be an operator.
If the insurance company says we're not going to cover that guy, we'll drop you if you
attempt to let him operate those vehicles, well, clearly you're not going to be operating
vehicles.
There's nothing to do with the company.
The supervisor doesn't like you, the GM's a bum, all of that.
You say whatever you want, if they will not ensure you forget it, you're done for, right?
That's just as bad as not having a CDL, but still operating a commercial vehicle.
Before anyone that doesn't know CDL stands for commercial driver's license, which that's
a crime, by the way, if you operate a commercial vehicle without a, without a CDL, that's a crime.
So you get back to the base, after you just had this accident, you found out you either
do have a ticket for the accident, you know, the rear ending because this jerk pulled
in front of you and then you tapped him.
The company will then let you know, hey, we're going to schedule you for this call, the
accident review board in our company, that's what it was called, and you have X amount
of days to appeal, you know, well, well, first they'll charge you inside the company.
The company will charge you and say, we reviewed the evidence and we believe this accident
was preventable and they'll give you the paperwork letting you know that you've been officially
charged blah, blah, blah, you'll then have to appeal that through the union to request
that the accident go through the accident review board.
Now, again, if you've been charged, that's going to get forwarded to the insurance company
as the company's due diligence, right, they reviewed all the evidence and found out it
was not equipment failure, anything like that.
The operator did something wrong and that's why the accident occurred.
So we're blaming the operator for this kind of that's that's somewhat of how it will
go.
The operator now has to defend themselves not only from the ticket that he receives from
the police officer because that's bad enough getting that kind of ticket on your on your
CDL, but now you have to defend your job inside the company as well because you just got
a preventable accident.
You now have to get union representation to fight that case as well.
So you have to sit down with the union rep, fill out all that paperwork and yada yada, I'm
not going to go into that part too much right now.
And if you want to hear more about that in the future, I guess we can talk about that.
But that's one of the things you'll have to face when operating on roads around here.
That type of fraud where they pull in front of you and just kind of they they basically observe
how you operate your vehicle.
If you're very comfortable, relax, not paying attention, not keeping your head on a swivel.
One of the things I notice is if you spot them when you when you spot them and you look
directly at them, they just go on about their business most of the time, right?
When you give them that dead stare in the mirror and they see that you're looking at them,
they don't really pull it.
But if you're kind of just, you know, maybe you're eating chips or reaching for a bottle
of water or something like that, not really paying attention or they'll they'll swing
right in on you and it's game over when it happens.
Another type of fraud I've seen in our area and this one's very tricky.
This has happened to me and I swear I had hit this guy.
Imagine you're on a, I don't know, some side road and you're driving forward toward the
main road.
Now here in the US, we normally make a right onto the main road and in this particular
road, there was no, no left that you could make, right?
Like you, you had to make a right onto the main road.
So the side road is about let's just say 25 miles an hour, you're going through like
a neighborhood or something.
The main road goes up to about 45 miles an hour, maybe 50, something like that.
I don't know what that translates to in kilometers.
But you get to the intersection where there's like a stop sign or we call it a turn signal
or traffic signal.
That's what it's called traffic signal and you're waiting there because you, you may have
the option to make it right on red.
Sometimes there's a sign there that'll say no turn, no right on red, but in this particular
example, we have right on red, we can make a right turn.
There's a car in front of me.
He's prepared to make his right turn.
He's looking left to make sure that there's plenty of time and distance.
Those are the factors that we as professional operators deal with where we're prepared
to make this type of merger.
There's plenty of time and distance from me to merge on to the main road from the side
road and then accelerate to keep up with traffic.
So the motor is in front of me.
That's what he's doing.
Whether he knows it by that terminology or not, he's looking.
The coast is clear.
He thinks he can make it.
He goes right.
He guns it.
I pull up and this is partially on my fault right here, you know, I look to the left.
I did not come to a complete stop.
We were all at a complete stop because we're waiting to see if it's clear to go.
He went first.
He meant his right.
So I eased up while looking left to see if it's clear.
It's wide open.
So I started pulling forward and as I swivel my head back to the right, I realized the
guy in front of me came to a complete stop.
So here I am stepping on the accelerator, getting ready to pull into the into traffic and
the guy in front of me who appeared to, you know, at first he appeared to just have taken
off like made his right turn and go on about his business.
Instead, he pulled forward like he accelerated just a bit and then came to a stop because
I was looking left to ensure that the path was clear for me.
I did not realize he came to a stop until I swiveled back to the right.
However, I was already in a process of accelerating.
You understand?
I nearly ran right in the sky.
It wouldn't have been high speed or anything because we were both at a stop before making
this turn.
However, when you're getting ready to merge on to a, a road where the speed is significantly
higher than the one you're currently on, you got to gun it, you know what I mean?
So that's a scary situation to find yourself in and I've seen it from the Apollo system
with many other operators and yes, had I hit that guy that would have been 100% maybe
the cop would not have taken it in me had he seen the video or maybe I could have gone
to the judge and showed the judge with this guy done and they were thrown to take it out.
However, in the company, the argument of preventability, preventability would have 100% been
on me.
I would have been charged and found to be not guilty.
We didn't deal with guilt.
We dealt with preventability, right?
So yeah, they would have said I could have prevented that accident by basically keeping
your head on a swivel by before you accelerated outward and I should have, I should have came
to a complete stop after moving up to the line to view the traffic from the left before
turning right.
I did not, but I learned my lesson that day.
I've seen that type of accident numerous times, those type of collisions from frosters.
They pretend like, okay, you know, I want to make this right and get out of here, but
then they they accelerate aggressively just for a second.
So you hear the engine run, but then they come to a stop shortly afterward.
And it's always in a situation where there may not be the time, you know, a lot of people
are impatient.
They're on the gold.
They're trying to get where they need to be.
And when you hear that guy's engine like he took off, that's the only thing you're thinking.
He just got out of there.
It looks clear enough for me to get out of here too.
Let me go right behind them.
And that's, you know, you're looking left by the time you swing your head back around
right.
It's a tough time when that happens.
You're upset.
You know, he got you, you know, right?
There's no point in arguing with him.
There's also other policies you have to ask.
I mean, things you have to follow.
So when a collision like that happens and you know the scumbag set you up, you still have
to go and ask him if he's okay and call for a ambulance, you know, all the whole ring
maroo.
So these are just some of the type of fraud things that we deal with when driving in Virginia,
especially Northern Virginia.
When you go further south like below Richmond and stuff, I don't see anywhere near the type
of crap that I witnessed in Northern Virginia up toward Arlington, heading up toward DC,
especially in DC.
Oh my God.
DC in Maryland like the DMV.
It is terrible.
DMV.
I should specify there's there's the DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles.
That's where you go to get your driver's licenses and register to vote, know what sorts
of other things, things like that.
And then there's also what we refer to as DMV, which stands for DC, Maryland, Virginia
in the tri state area.
Now another bit of fraud that I noticed is, well, before before I go further, let me just
mention that one of the things we teach when operating, you're most vulnerable during
any form of acceleration, rather you're building speed or maintaining speed when you're interacting
with the accelerator and not the brake.
That's when you're most vulnerable is you're in a commercial vehicle vehicle, rather you're
keeping it at let's say 45 miles an hour or or bringing it up to 45 miles an hour.
There's a lot of power and remember, when you want to stop this thing, you need time
and distance as well as space to, you know, stop it without there being collisions.
One of the depending on the company that you work for, I know that every company is a
little bit different.
I've been with some companies that they really don't care so much as long as you don't
hit anything.
It's okay.
So I've, you know, if you're in a commercial game, you probably seen Swift trucks a lot.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't like the bash operators, but oh, boy there in our line of work, there's
a difference between a driver and an operator.
Swift's got a lot of drivers, not many operators.
All right.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
Yeah.
Now one of the things I want to also mention here, I got a little side track there.
When you're operating on a highway, and again, right lane, we're talking interstate and
you're just rolling nice, long straight road.
One of the things that I see a lot, I call it leapfrogging.
I don't know if there's another term for it.
Maybe the jerks that I actually performed this maneuvering have their own little name
for it.
I have no clue.
I saw it the most a few years back.
I guess there was a new, what do you call those movies, Fast and a Furies.
Whenever one of those movies come out, you always get these situations where these kids
come out with their little cars, they call them rice burners and things of that nature,
you know, little Honda Civics with, you know, maybe a rap on it or a custom paint job of
not just mufflers and all of the nonsense.
Well, one of the little, the games that they play on a highway is, imagine being in
right lane, you're operating going straight on the interstate.
The vehicle will be behind you, somewhere behind you either in the lane, behind you
or the lane, like say center lane or even a far left lane, but behind you, you're approaching
an exit.
It is not your exit, you do not need it.
However, the motorist, the bonehead does need that exit.
Now they could simply pull in the lane behind you because the exit, the exit is coming up
and they're actually behind you already.
What they do is wait to get significantly close to that exit and they aggressively accelerate
changing lanes to the left, accelerate around you and then quickly cut you off to make
that exit.
It is the most silly, dangerous, nonsensical thing you could do out there, especially dealing
with commercial vehicles, but it happens a lot, not even just two commercial operators.
I'm talking about just even in my private vehicle, I see this nonsense all the time, now
because I've seen it so many times, again, you learn to tell the driver by the way they
operate, right?
You can see when somebody's going to do something stupid, here's this guy, he's been
right, you know, say we're going 60 miles an hour, he's been doing 60 this entire time,
just cruising back there.
Now as River approaching this exit, this guy looks like he's doing 90 all of a sudden,
like, you know, you just know, just let off the accelerator, you may have to go, you
know, you may have to break and lose some speed here, but you know, he's going to do something
stupid.
So one thing, one thing that I can tell you as a professional operator, do not ever, do
not ever in your life, compete with stupid, all right, you're never going to win.
Stupid always wins.
I'm telling you, in a situation like I just described to you with this leapfrogging nonsense,
if you try to accelerate to prevent them from making that merger that they're trying
to do with merging off the highway onto that exit ramp, they are not going to do the smart
thing and slow down because you've beaten them and now they have to go up the road to
the next exit.
No, you're competing with stupid here, they're going to slam into you and both of you are
going off the road now.
That's if you're in a car, if you're in a commercial vehicle, obviously it's not going
to work quite that way, but I mean, you may be dealing with a fatality at that point.
I mean, do you really want to be on the side of the road with highway patrol dealing
with that?
If you've ever seen fatalities with commercial vehicles or been in one or understood
what you have to go through whenever there is a fatality as a commercial operator, you
don't want to know, you don't want to go through that, all right.
So whatever you do, do not compete with stupid, the moment you identify stupid and stupid
has very simple plans, all right.
Stupid goes fast, all right, DFN drive fast now.
That's what stupid does, all right.
You don't ever at any point think, all that guy is going to try to cut me off or he's
trying to cut the line, you know, you'll have people, they'll jump into the right turn
lane just to cut the traffic and then cut into the left even though the lane says right
lane must turn right.
You still use it just to cut left, do not ever compete with stupid, all right.
What you're going to find yourself is in a situation where you're going to probably
end up in a shootout on the highway because you don't know what stupid's prepared to
do the win.
All right.
I don't say I'm serious, do not compete with stupid.
It is not worth it in the long run, all right, people who will already play at that
game, you have to understand, there's a good chance that vehicles probably stolen.
They probably have no license, no insurance, possibly no other identifiable information
or whatever, you know, you'll be competing with stupid, just don't do it.
We have this mindset when operating in commercial vehicles, it's called the be my guest mindset.
Whenever you see somebody who knows they should merge over, so like, if there's construction
and there's like 100,000 signs and cones and things, making it abundantly clear that you
need to merge over into the right lane because the left lane ends or whatever, and you see
that jerk who's still trying to ride up that left lane, trying to cut the line, you know,
everybody in the right lane is moving nice and slow and he's hauling it up the left to
get up to the front of the line, maintain the be my guest mentality, let them in.
Don't try to tighten it up because you think you can stop stupid, right?
You can beat stupid in this race, don't do it. Let them in.
All right, you're going to save yourself and everybody else a lot of time by doing it.
Oh, another thing that I'm going to also point out to you, you may be licensed to carry
and Virginia is an open carry state, but as a commercial operator, you are not, you do not carry
in your commercial vehicle. I'm just, I'm just pointing that out. Now that does not mean that people
are not carrying in their commercial vehicle. I'm just telling you, if you are caught carrying
in your commercial vehicle, there's a problem for you. Now, none of that means anything when
you get into a shootout on the highway, and it has happened here in Virginia a couple of times,
as well as Maryland and DC. Well, DC, they shoot, they just shoot all over the place. So there's no,
they're killing each other for fun around there. I don't know what's happening in DC, but
we've had quite a few. I hadn't seen one recently, but that doesn't mean that we won't,
they won't decide to start the trend back up. So I run into a lot of guys who like to, you know,
talk about what they'll do if a situation were to occur, what they're not telling you is what's
going to happen to them. Yet, sure, you, you may survive that incident, right? You may survive,
but your livelihood is in great jeopardy. One of the things that's going to happen is you're
probably going to get sued even after that, even if the guy pulled on you first, you got to
understand how many witnesses are going to see it the way you saw it. Two, you know, his defense
is going to probably be arguing the most that you should not have had a weapon in that vehicle in
the first place. So, you know, you're going to lose your CDL at least for a certain period of
time. So you're not going to have income to continue paying a lawyer to, to, you know, deal with
that situation. It's going to be a nightmare situation. So just don't, don't compete with stupid
whatever you do. Let them in. It's much easier. We have this other saying is much easier to drive
around an accident than it is to drive away from one. All right. So I think I've, I think I've
rambled on for quite a bit here. I'm trying to think of anything else I can toss in real quick.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things I encourage everybody to do, learn about the different,
a lot of what I've learned came from, you know, the position as being in the union and in the union
official. We learned about what to do at accident scenes, like how to investigate them, learning about,
you know, how you should take your photos, catching the accident from the different angles,
the debris field on the ground, all these different things you have to capture. Because again,
when you go to court or not even gorgeous, when you have to return back to the company and then
fight that preventability charge, all of this, you have to use, right? So you, there's a lot that I
ended up learning. And I also learned it even in insurance, right? That preventability, that word
comes up a lot, right? A lot of people will argue that. What could you have done to prevent that,
right? Preventability will destroy you. So you need to be careful there. So I encourage you,
if your state issues any sort of motor vehicle books or anything, refresh yourself, learn about
different fraud that takes place even on your roadway, you know, fraudsters, they have these different
techniques that they use as well, where one of the fraudsters pulls in front of you. The other one
is on the side of you to the left kind of cutting you off where you can't change lanes very easily.
And the one in front of you would then kind of go on a break. And because you can't change lanes,
you're probably going to rear end them. So there's different techniques that are used by fraudsters.
I suggest you inform yourself, stay up to speed on all this stuff, and understand how your
phone works. Because when you have to start taking images of an accident scene or whatever to prove
that you were in your lane, the debris field means a lot. Trust me, wherever the debris fell,
that can help you in your case, improving where you were at the time of the incident. Because
you know, sometimes you have to move out of the street to allow traffic to flow that kind of thing,
depending on your state and what laws are. So yeah. So that's all I got time for today. I hope
you guys enjoyed the show. This is just a rant. All right, I'll catch you guys in the next episode. Take
it easy. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. It doesn't work.
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