Share the Road is heading to the Boy Scouts of America San Diego – Imperial Council Scout Fair 2008 on Saturday, April 19, at Qualcomm Stadium to show scouts and their families how to safely share the road with tractor-trailers and, in the process, help them earn their Truck Transportation merit badge. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 3:30 pm and expects more than 10,000 attendees.
Professional drivers Manny Franco (UPS Freight) and Mack McAdory (FedEx Ground) will have a tractor-trailer set up for the scouts to climb into and see the road from a truck driver’s eye-view. They will talk to the scouts and families about the blind spots around trucks and how to safely pass a large commercial vehicle on the highway. In addition, the drivers will talk about what it takes to be a professional driver and how the scouts can get involved in the industry.
“I’m looking forward to Scout Fair 2008 and talking to the kids about trucking,” Franco says. “My kids are involved with scouting, and I work a lot with our local troop, so this means a lot to me. We’ll really get to spread our safety message to a lot of people.”
Through this experience, Scouts will be able to complete several steps necessary to earn the Boy Scout Truck Transportation merit badge, which was developed in conjunction with ATA. The badge requires that scouts be able to describe the role of truck transportation within commerce, talk with a professional truck driver about safety, learn about the truck driver’s rules of the road for safe driving and list five safe-driving rules every professional truck driver must follow, among other things.
Share the Road is ATA’s highway safety outreach program that educates all drivers about sharing the roads safely with large trucks. An elite team of professional truck drivers with millions of accident-free miles deliver lifesaving messages to millions of motorists annually. The safety program is sponsored by Mack Trucks Inc. and Michelin North America. For more information, go to www.atastr.org.
