The main one being the desire to get ahead, just as it is for anyone else.
It’s how it’s done by a minority that causes the problems for the majority, as it is in many aspects of life….
As an HGV driver it’s annoying to me too believe it or not, if you can’t judge when to pull out and get past without causing a huge holdup you simply don’t do it, of course there’s many a moron who can’t appreciate this or simply does not care, just as there’s plenty of morons in cars also….
What really gets me is drivers will try to overtake when pulling a lot of weight and therefore once they reach an incline they’ll lose momentum and the cycle repeats itself which annoys everyone.
What I do is if I’m loaded I use my weight to build speed on downhill sections and get past another truck quickly rather than trying to edge past on the flat where my speed limiter may only give me .5 mph over the guy holding me up.
Why do we try to get ahead? Many reasons, we are limited in our driving hours and you are frequently run right to your driving hours limit, over a 9 or 10 hour accumulated drive (as in time spent moving rather than a working day as such) those few minutes you gain can be the difference between getting to a delivery on time or not (having a whole load rejected for being 5 minutes late is not unheard of) or equally it can be the difference between a night at home in your own bed or a lay-by with zero facilities and zero security for both the load and driver..
On a 3 lane motorway it’s a non issue as far as I’m concerned, HGV’s can’t legally use lane 3 (although a few muppets do!) so you have a free lane to get past the commercials, on roads like the A14 which is predominantly dual carriageway they have weight limits for lane 2 on some sections and this should be implemented more IMO and I say that as a commercial driver.
Ultimately though, we’re simply carrying the crap us all as consumers need, be it your bog roll or GPU or house bricks, you name it, and unfortunately as much as many car drivers may not like it, we’ve got just as much right to be on the road as they have.
I’d love to see logistics shut down completely for 7 days, once people realised that they all of a sudden have nothing (predominantly through our just in time supply chain which is already teetering on collapse) I suspect they’d rather quickly change their perception of trucks and why they are holding them up or not.
