This week is National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, which runs from 13 to 19 September. The American Trucking Associations has run it every year since 1988, and this year's theme is "From Highways to Homes: We Appreciate Truckers."

We want to be precise about who we are thanking, because it matters.

These are business owners

T. Disney Trucking does not own trucks and does not employ drivers. The hauling is carried by a network of more than a thousand independent owner-operators. Each one owns their equipment, carries their own insurance, manages their own DOT compliance, and decides which work to take.

That is not a technicality. It means the person backing a loaded tri-axle onto your site is running a small business, with a payment on the truck and a family depending on it going well. When a load runs late because a site was not ready, that is not an inconvenience to a big company somewhere. It comes out of somebody's week.

What appreciation actually looks like on a site

The gestures that get talked about this week tend to involve free coffee. Here is what the haulers we dispatch would probably rank higher, based on what comes back to dispatch:

  • Be ready when the truck arrives. Waiting time is unpaid time for an owner-operator. A site that consistently turns trucks around quickly gets better service, and not because anyone is playing favourites — it is just easier to say yes to.
  • Give clear access and clear direction. Somebody who knows where the material goes, standing where the driver can see them, solves more problems than a phone call from the gate.
  • Say where the facilities are. It is a long day. This is a low bar and a surprising number of sites do not clear it.
  • Do not push an unsafe load. Asking for "just a bit more on top" puts their licence and their record at risk, not yours.
  • Say thanks. Ordinary courtesy is rarer on a job site than it should be.

Why we care about this beyond the week

The reason this company has been able to move material anywhere in Florida since 1980 is that haulers keep choosing to work with us. That is a choice they make, load by load, and it is influenced by whether the sites we send them to treat them decently.

So this is partly self-interested and we will say so plainly. Sites that are good to work on get trucks faster, especially when capacity is tight after a storm. Word travels quickly in a network this size.

But mostly it is just right. The material for every road, pad, and foundation in this state arrives on the back of a truck, driven by somebody who chose a hard job. One week a year to say so is not much.

To every hauler who has run for us this year: thank you. Get home safe.