December 2, 2015 Vol. 12 No. 23

Oh, no… are we slipping? It seems that truck and trailer wheel separations have hit the press again, at least in Ontario. This really isn’t good.

There’s no obvious reason to think that much is different elsewhere but I’m not aware of the issue reaching the mainstream media in other parts of the country. Correct me if I’m wrong, dear readers, though I’m not sure I want to know.

Two recent wheel-off incidents along Highway 401 in western Ontario, one of which left a car-driving woman dead, prompted Ontario Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca to call on the trucking industry to step up once again and address the problem before more people are hurt or killed.

According to the London Free Press newspaper, Del Duca is asking the Transportation Ministry to look into ways to improve wheel integrity.

THIS TAKES ME BACK to 1990 or thereabouts when the problem of flying truck wheels reached near-epidemic proportions in Ontario, after which the province responded with tougher laws, including mandatory training for wheel technicians, and eventually much increased, even rather draconian fines.

I was much involved in the issue at the time and helped create an early version of that wheel-management course that later became the provincial and ultimately the national standard. I’ve been writing about it ever since.

But have we learned nothing? Truck wheel separations in Ontario have increased dramatically from just 47 in 2010 to 148 in 2014.

Back in 1990 the industry simply didn’t understand how easily a truck or trailer wheel-and-tire assembly can come adrift. There was no excuse for such ignorance, but that’s what it was. It certainly wasn’t that the problem appeared overnight, rather that an unhappy set of coincidental circumstances had wheels coming off on busy urban highways, not rolling harmlessly from the Trans Canada into Saskatchewan wheat fields.