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Breaker 1-9, it’s a convoy, good buddy!
Owner operators and fleet managers staged a protest against
the high price of fuel today in the streets of Indianapolis. Around 60 drivers left the Cloverdale Auto Truck Plaza ( a truckstop I once worked for about 40 miles west of Indy) and proceeded in a convoy toward the Statehouse in Indianapolis. Fuel prices have soared in Indiana with the price of diesel averaging $4.16 per gallon as of this writing.
Unfortunately, only about a dozen drivers veered off of I-70 to parade around the Statehouse an hour or so before lunch. While they were loud, honking their horns and waving to the crowds of smokers arrayed around the government buildings, lawmakers did not meet with the drivers.
On the other hand, the truck drivers may have a friend in John McCain who has offered to suspend the gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day, during the peak driving months. While the call for suspension smacks of populist pandering, it may well help to bring truck drivers around to the McCain camp. Granted, some of the drivers may well have already been in the camp, but any accretion to McCain’s numbers will be an added benefit.
Aside from the fact that dead-heading from Cloverdale to Indianapolis is a somewhat ironic gesture, since it probably cost these drivers about $40 - $50 a piece, while they hauled no load (weren’t getting paid), the sheer amount of noise they generated was impressive. At $4.16 per gallon , it now takes over $1,250 to fill the tanks of a big rig. It will be interesting to see whether law makers respond since eliminating the petroleum tax would work to eliminate the funds to maintain roads. However, since those taxes are proportional to the price of fuel and were enacted while fuel prices were much lower, the amount of tax that needs to be collected in order to maintain roads today is a much smaller percentage of the price of fuel than when the tax was enacted. It will be interesting to see whether lawmakers will lower the tax to keep it neutral and to give truck driver (and the ultimate consumers of every product that is shipped) a break.
