Elliott alerted me to this story a while back about truckers planning a convoy to DC to protest fuel prices. Well, apparently it's happening on Monday.
What I didn't know was that Maine had the "honor" of being the start of the convoy route. Oh, and that "Requests to speak have been received from Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain, among others."
Chief organizer Mark Kirsch said, "We're now looking at participation from at least 26 states, with an estimated five thousand trucks and an additional two to five thousand protesters."
The planned convoy and protest is scheduled to begin Sunday night in Maine, where trucks will assemble and begin their trip to Washington, DC. As they roll, other convoys will approach from the West and South, until they converge on RFK Stadium. From there the protest will continue on foot to the Reflecting Pool area, where the protest is scheduled to take place.
Scary. I mean, it'd make sense to me if these truckers took buses down to DC. Or maybe even rented cars, riding 4 per car. But driving 5,000 trucks to protest fuel prices?!?! Surely they aren't hurting that bad. According to the Press-Herald, 15 trucks are heading out of Maine. With some googling I found that big rigs get 5-6 mpg with freight. I can't seem to find the mpg without freight, so let's quadruple it, let's say they get 25 mpg. A straight trip from Lincoln, ME (where the route begins) to Washington, DC is 725 miles. So that means the Maine convoy is spending 435 gallons of diesel. At $4.34/gal, that's almost $2,000 just in fuel costs. For 15 trucks to drive to DC for a protest. That's 15 out of the predicted "five thousand" trucks.
You know what makes a lot more sense? Truckers slowing down to save fuel.
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