Today's society offers many conveniences. If you need food, you drive a few miles to the store and buy some. If your car needs gas, you stop by the local gas station and fill up. When your trash can is full, you take it out to the curb, and it gets emptied the next morning. If you want to buy something on the internet, you click the “free shipping” option, and it arrives on your doorstep a few days later. Unfortunately, we rarely think about the infrastructure that makes all of these conveniences possible — each of these systems relies on trucks.

Trucks are responsible for delivering fresh food to your grocery store, refilling the gas station's reserves, taking your trash to the dump, and delivering those packages to your home. If for any reason the trucks ground to a halt, so too would these services. Now imagine what your city would be like with no food in the grocery stores, no fuel at the pumps, and rancid trash piling up on the sidewalk. Our civil society would quickly spiral into chaos.

A disabled transportation infrastructure could also mean no access to fire trucks or emergency services.

A documentary called Be Prepared to Stop examines the potential consequences if every truck in America stopped rolling. Check out the clip below, which lists a rough timeline of the day-by-day effects a catastrophic shutdown of America's highways might have:

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“Basically, to the general public, we are invisible unless something goes wrong.” – Stephanie Klang, a truck driver

Like many documentaries, it appears that there may be a political motivation behind elements of this film. However, the core message holds true: our current system of roadways, trucks, and truck drivers is essential to many of the conveniences we enjoy. If something interrupts that system, things could go downhill quickly, so it's important to support that infrastructure and prepare ourselves for the worst.

To learn more about Be Prepared to Stop, or watch the full-length documentary, go to BePreparedtoStop.org.

Written by Patrick McCarthy