MONTREAL — As it turns out, truckers’ biggest fans are men living in rural areas, while women living in urban centres are a little harder to please.

A recent poll in Quebec discovered those attitudes towards truckers in the province, as well as the fact that more than half of the people who were questioned felt big rigs need to slow down on the highway (60 percent) and follow too closely to cars in front of them (58 percent).

Despite the criticism, the poll found that 83 percent of the 2,002 respondents – half of them living in rural areas – possessed a positive view toward truckers and the trucking industry.

According to a story in the Montreal Gazette, a Léger Marketing poll was commissioned to provide an overview of how the public perceives the Quebec’s trucking industry. The survey had been scheduled to be made public during a forum on the industry later this year, but its details were revealed after La Presse filed an access-to-information request to see its contents.

The head of Quebec’s largest trucking association says the survey also suggests that those of us who worry most about trucks are driving on an urban road net already tangled by construction and choked with traffic.

“When you’re stuck in traffic, whether the truck is to your right or your left, you feel like it’s about to come into your window. If it’s in the back of you, you feel it’s going to come into your trunk,” Marc Cadieux, head of the Association du camionnage du Québec, told the local media.

"But the fact remains that whenever a truck tries to leave a sufficient distance between itself and the car in front of it, another car comes in and fills the gap … thinking that a truck can stop on a dime."