Jackknifed trucks, collisions slows traffic around GTA

Watch the video above: Jackknifed trucks, collisions slows traffic around GTA. Mark Carcasole reports. 

TORONTO – As commuters in the GTA made their way to and from work Thursday morning, over 150 collisions and at least six jackknifed tractor-trailers helped slow everyone down.

But while most accidents can be safely driven around, a jackknifed tractor-trailer is likely to stop traffic for hours.

And according to police and experts alike, they are completely avoidable.

“We always talk about motorists slowing down and when we talk about motorists we are also talking about tractor-trailer drivers,” OPP Sgt. Dave Woodford said in an interview. “We see far too many times where their travelling at highway speeds when they shouldn’t be.”

He added that some jackknifes Thursday morning were a result of truck drivers “going too fast for those conditions.”

Woodford suggested that some – but definitely not all – truck drivers sometimes think that the heavy weight of their vehicles remove any danger of losing control on snow or ice.

Six jackknifed trucks and over 100 collisions caused havoc on the roads around the GTA Thursday. But in the last few weeks there’s also been pileups on Highway 400 and jackknifed trucks elsewhere.

And Rob Jackson, a trainer of truck drivers at Humber College transportation centre agrees that crashes are usually caused by driver error – but points out truck drivers are sometimes the victims of other people’s poor driving habits.

“A lot of the time it is driver error, whether it be on the truck driver’s behalf or a car causing the truck driver to do it,” he said.

Often, he said, car drivers will try to avoid large trucks during adverse road conditions because they kick up snow but lose control when switching lanes or passing. That causes the truck driver to react and sometimes makes them lose control.

Jackson admitted, however, that a professional truck driver should be able to control their vehicle “regardless of road conditions.”

And if the weather is just too bad, he said some companies will pull drivers off the road. But if they don’t, he advised drivers to use “common sense.”

“Freight, if it doesn’t get there, we have problems. But at the end of the day, if you’re an hour late, it’s a phone call, under those road conditions, it’s to be expected.”

Salting and plowing the roads

But defensive driving can only take someone so far if the roads aren’t properly plowed and salted.

And NDP MPP Gilles Bisson said that’s exactly what’s happening on many Ontario roads, in large part due to the Liberal government’s outsourcing of road maintenance.

“The big problem that we have is the government when they privatized the winter road maintenance but they actually privatized the people who patrol to inspect the highways as to what need to be done what equipment needs to be dispatched, then also privatized the dispatching,” he said in an interview Thursday “The highways across Ontario have been in terrible condition since this happened.”

Bisson also suggested pileups, jackknifed tractor trailers and crashes are happening more often, as was seen over as snow blanketed the GTA over the last 24 hours, because of the botched salting and plowing procedures.

The Ministry of Transportation didn’t comment on the effects of privatization but did say in a statement to Global News that the contractors “were plowing and salting/sanding continuously” during yesterday`s storm.

“There were some collisions in some areas and that seemed to interfere with the salting/sanding operations and further worsened the situation,” the statement read. “We will be following up and reviewing maintenance records to ascertain that the maintenance contractors carried out operations properly.”