Driving on I5 from Seattle to Portland is now a long line of semis, one after the other. Trucks, even loaded to the legal limit, cause 9,000 times as much fatigue damage to the road as a car (fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the weight).
It's inefficient and environmentally absurd to use trucks that way. Railroad tracks parallel I5. The solution is to pick the container off the semi, put it on a railcar, do the intercity haul on the rails (which are made for heavy loads) with minimal fuel and manpower costs, pick it up and put it on a truck to do the last mile in the destination city.
So why isn't this done now? Highways are subsidized by cars (fuel taxes), and railroads are taxed. The incentives are backwards.
What I'd do is significantly raise the weight taxes on trucks on the interstates, and use that money to subsidize the rail right-of-way.
Tiny nit, but from Wikipedia and [0], road damage goes up closer to the fourth power of axle weight. Just further support of your point: rail is absolutely the way to go, especially as it's all in place already.
I agree that rail seems ideal and much more economical and environmentally friendly, but is the system designed to handle consumer shipping with its demands for quick delivery with tight deadlines? (Which I'd argue constitutes a large portion of truck-based freight)
How much longer does it take to load/unload a freight train versus a truck? How much slower is the train and how longer does it take to ship? (and how does that affect cost or product quality when shipping items that must be refrigerated in transit?) Is it a realistic option for same-day or overnight shipping required for services like Amazon Prime in the volume that is currently being carried by trucks?
For items where delivery is not urgent, I'm all for using rail, but with expectations from consumers for quick delivery, its hard to see how they will be able to compete on the current system for rail-based freight.
An alternative (at least in the short-term), might be to create truck-only traffic lanes or highways with tolls and fewer exits. (and other lanes or highways just for cars) The lanes could be built to withstand the additional weight from the trucks, and non-truck traffic would run more efficiently and safely.
If people are willing to pay weight fees that reflect the true cost of fixing the road damage, they can continue to use the trucks. But why should taxpayers pay for 2 day delivery instead of 3 day by rail?
I'm not suggesting they should. My alternate solution was a toll based system where the trucks would pay extra for roads that can withstand the extra weight.
You could just increase the weigh station fees, but then you'd have to make all the lanes be able to withstand the extra weight, and you wouldn't have the extra benefits of safety (a car doesn't stand a chance against a truck in an accident) and efficiency (trucks can't accelerate/decelerate as fast as cars, so they contribute more to traffic congestion).
Figuring 44 hours to drive across the country (NYC to SF), and a maximum of 11 hours long-haul driving per day, gives 4 days. That's for a single driver; a team with a sleeper can go further. Call it 2x faster with a truck.
Certainly, but that's different topic than the same-day or overnight shipping that you were asking about, no?
Currently those fulfillment centers only use trucks. (I spot checked a few Amazon fulfillment areal photographs on Google Maps.) They would have to be relocated on rail lines, or lines moved to them. There would need to be about 4x more centers, since trucks are about 2x faster. Probably more like 6x more, since trucks and roads go places that trains can't get to because of grade limitations.
Only you know what 'realistic' means to you. We know it's possible to have a rail system that reaches most towns in the US - that's what we had until the automobile. Many of the right-of-ways still exist, but they were also designed for slower, lighter trains than we have now. And for days with more canned and pickled goods that weren't so time sensitive.
Trains don't scale down. Consider a small town grocery store. Currently it will get several different trucks making deliveries - soda, beer, fruit and veg, etc. These make deliveries to many different stores in the area. How does it work if we switch to delivery by rail? Does the train drop off a trailer bundled with all of the daily deliveries? If so, how are thing kept cool that need to be cool? Or are multiple trailers dropped off, and if so, where are they stored and how much room is needed? Does the store need to be next to the tracks?
Not true, unless the train is only hauling a single container (highly inefficient and impractical). Once a truck is loaded, it can leave. A train may have thousands of containers to load before departing, and may have to wait for other rail traffic before leaving. A truck could be probably be loaded in under an hour. A train would probably still require that the items be loaded on a truck first (unless you have a warehouse on the rail line) and then transferred to a train. That's got to be multi-hour process for both loading and unloading.
You could also build the roads properly to withstand truck traffic. The Canadians do a much better job at this than the U.S. does, from what I have seen. In Quebec, they've been rebuilding sections of the road north-east along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and extending down towards the Maine border from Quebec City. They go in and build the road bed up from ledge, blasting out sections to create more gentle grades. When they fix a section of road, it stays fixed, whereas all too often, we just go in and resurface the top layer every four or five years.
A toll for semis on the highway could be a good start. It would at least let them pay for the damage they cause. Weigh stations are already in place which should make tolling pretty simple to enact and it could even be variable based on the size of the truck / weight of the load.
The motor-fuels tax is proportional to the usage (until we have electric trucks, anyway) The problem is 20-25% of it is being redirected into the general fund. That's money that could be used to repair crumbling roads and decaying bridges but is going to pork-barrel projects.
In my region , I have been told the top drivers pulling Heavy loads . . steel coils 28,000 lbs, if overloaded are capable of using a maneuver . . when entering the scales of perching a back wheel on the curb . . reducing weigh in's . I was told these drivers are recruited , for these tax cheating skills , and highly paid.
Enforcement of rules, inspections, paperwork, etc. Fuel is taxed, not a toll for the road usage. In the OPs example where there is a rail line literally next to the interstate it would make sense to charge a large toll. For other highways that don't have parallel railways it would not make sense to charge a hefty freight toll.
For trips over 150-600 miles (depending on the region), Rail is absolutely the way to go - the issue with rail in say a SEA to PDX (or for that matter a YVR to PDX) trip is the load/unload times at each end, which can add up to more than the total transit time for the freight movement.
I believe that they use this, but that only accounts for the movement, not, switching the traincars onto the correct siding, locating a chassis, staging it, moving the chassis/container to a parking area, and the coordinating it to be picked up by a tractor. It's more than just the load/unload.
That's because they closed the shipping terminal down in Portland so they have to ship it all via semi. From what I understand train has much higher latency(and its being taken up by coal/oil cars).
Over the last 6 months its really driven ip traffic on I-5.
I would assume that shifting the truck traffic to the rails would entail improving the rail infrastructure, such as increasing capacity and adding convenient stations optimized for transferring loads between semis and flatcars.
But that's still got to be an order of magnitude cheaper than increasing freeway capacity, and of course all the money spent on constantly rebuilding them.
I'm all for the safety arguments being made by the author but he does paint the trucking industry as this huge money making business when that really isn't the case.
Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs. It's an industry where innovation is very hard because you really need to justify every dollar spent on R&D.
Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there's room to spend on safety is meaningless... Would love to see a more in depth analysis on the issue from a financial perspective.
The article bothered me because of the presumption that the author made about hours of service, and as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule - so while you can be compliant with the HOS, you've still not slept any - because you just spent 4 days working days, and now you're expected to pick up a shipment at 11pm and run with it until out of hours for the day.. not practical or safe.
The other thing that irritated me was the presumption that trucks have no safety hardware - I personally wouldn't want to drive a truck with collision avoidance stuff, not unless I had a ton of time to spend with it to understand what it does in an activated situation - that said, most trucks do have ABS, airbags are meaningless in a truck, you're so much larger than the other vehicles that a driver doesn't need airbags to stay safe, and airbags do nothing to enhance the other drivers safety, they just add cost for no real benefit.
What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)
It would be resoundingly ignored, and its utterly unenforceable.
Right now, if you're a driver and you decline a load, it may be days to get another one at times, especially if you're stuck in a city with a ton of inbound freight, but not too much outbound freight - so you take what you can, push your endurance, and hope you can get far enough out of town that they wont try to swap it on you.
I think it's unenforceable with the current infrastructure.
In Europe, trucks are required to have chart recorders called tachographs. You put one chart in the machine per day and that's your log. I think this makes it a lot more difficult to keep two logs, and now there are computerized tachograph recorders which should be even more resistant to tampering (ie. they can get the current date and time from a trusted source such as mobile network, tv broadcast, or GPS.)
It still doesn't help if you switch driver's schedule from night to day.
If monday tuesday and wednesday you drove through the day, and then friday evening they tell you to take a night course, then the tahoraph will say thay you had enough rest, while you will still get sleepy in the middle of night.
In other words - tachograph will tell you whether the driver had a break, not whether he slept properly during that break.
It's more or less the same situation you see in health-care providers doing a night shift immediately after the day shift. Not ideal, but they do get more free time to compensate afterwards.
"It would be resoundingly ignored, and its utterly unenforceable."
My understanding is that currently, a driver has essentially three states: on-duty, driving; on-duty, not driving; and off-duty. Further, as I understand it, strictness about maintaining logs and electronic log books (which drivers like, judging by the ads I see for it) have made fudging duty hours much less of a problem now than in the good ol' amphetamine days.
You can force a driver to go off duty, but you can't force him to sleep. And the driver hours-of-service regulations are insane.[1]
In 2013 there were 32,719 vehicle related deaths in the US, 3,964 of them involved a 'large truck' in other words about 12.5% of total deaths.
According to the IIHS - the number of fatalities per 100 million miles traveled is significantly lower (.88 for passenger vehicles in a large truck involved crash and .21 for occupants of large trucks) than the average for all vehicle (1.10) - and in just 15 (1998) years the numbers have declined significantly (from 1.67 and .37, and 1.8 respectively).
I'd be happy to hear what your solution to the problem is, I realize any death at all is a shame, but nothing can be made 100% safe - statistically, you're at a greater risk of dying of stomach cancer, suicide or malaria - than you are to die in a vehicle accident of any kind (11.6 deaths per 100,000 in the US), or for that matter you're more likely to die of Melanoma, Hepatitis B or an Upper Respiratory Infection then you are to die in an accident with a large truck (.9 deaths per 100,000 in the US are involving a large truck).
The solutions are neither clear, nor easy, but if you have one, I'd be open to ideas.
Drivers are fallible human beings. With families. And car payments. And mortgages. Many of them own their own trucks, and have to make payments on those as well. I'm pretty damned sure that nobody goes out on the road thinking that they're going to kill someone, while destroying their livelihood and injuring themselves in the process.
If you knew that the difference between working today and not being able to work for another several days was to put in a few extra hours, are you telling me you'd never make that same decision yourself?
In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?
Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.
If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.
They do, in all western countries I know of. But that log can't check hours of sleep by the driver. On the other hand, this might be a whole new business segment for Fitbit and the like.
I only know about this 'cause I know some of their sysadmins. but there's a whole industry of automated truck-tracking and truck-activity logging out there.
Most of it, I think, is focused on reducing liability/reducing insurance costs, I think; I don't think most of it is legally mandated.
Note, I've also heard from other people who's pagers go off when certain devices can't resolve GPS signals that a common cause of their pager going off is a trucker driving by with a GPS jammer that was being used to defeat one of these automatic truck logging deals.
So... yeah, it's not legally mandated or anything, but automatic logging of truck activity and speed is pretty common.
It is legally mandated now, and the fleets have till 2018 to implement automated truck-tracking. I work at an enterprise hardware company and we get lots of inbound customer inquiries from logistics companies in the trucking space.
Pilots have rules like that and they seem to work. But I suppose the massive regulation of airline safety makes it rather much easier to implement.
But how are they enforcing the anti drug stuff? A relative is a trucker and I recall him telling me it wasn't worth screwing around with alertness meds (speed, modafinil, etc) due to risks of getting caught. (And some similar stuff for taking on passengers/hitchhikers?) Seems like if that kind of oversight is in place then adding sleep restrictions is not hard.
Or do you mean that they'd technically have had enough time to sleep, but in reality they weren't actually sleeping, but short of invasive biomonitoring it's impossible to tell? (One could be in bed, reading, for example.)
Easy enough, with the help of a GPS you can check that the driver can't be on the move for more than 16 hours straigh without an 8-hours reccess. If he wants to do something else instead of sleep that's his problem.
even if you enforce that it's still not gonna help with the fact that as much as people would like it circadian rhythms don't adjust instantly. Ever changing shifts are the bane of a good existence, working nights all the time is fine, working nights a week every 2-3 or worse, 2-3 days a week, is going to cause a lot of problems for everybody.
From my perspective I would totally gamify cars/trucks for everybody, every time you want to go somewhere you get your reflexes tested, if your reaction time is higher than a certain amount the car won't start. This will catch anybody who is too tired just as well as anybody who has been drinking I would think, which in the end works about the same when it comes to road safety.
Sounds foolproof. The first time someone can't start their car when they need it because of a glitch in your software/inaccuracies in the testing method, you are in serious trouble.
isn't there already plenty of software involved in starting your car that could have bugs and prevent it from starting? I don't think an embedded reaction time test is that hard to get right compared to the software that has to deal with the engine internals and so on.
you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule
The same thing happened to me when I was working the Halibut opener in Alaska. Switching to a midnight to noon shift can wreak havoc with your sleep cycle, and it is very hard to avoid falling asleep while driving. Happened to me.
* its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule*
Yeah, that is ridiculous, and it would only take some slight adjustment in the dispatch software to keep people on their accustomed schedules. It might require drawing potential drivers from a slightly larger area or something.
It sounds like just about the last thing on these companies minds is the safety of road users. Maybe their needs to be a fine imposed on them for every accident above the already too high non-truck accident rate.
as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers
I don't doubt you about the dispatch issues. The article itself mentioned that the driver of the truck that caused a fatal accident had spent 12 hours driving from his home to pick up the truck before then spending 13.5 of the permitted 14 hours driving the truck at the time of the accident, and had been awake for 28 hours straight.
But isn't the idea that anyone can safely handle that kind of vehicle for 82 hours per week also a bit crazy? That's roughly working 14 hours/day for 6 days/week. That's almost double what we'd allow here in the UK, for example.
11 Hours driving maximum per day, 14 hours on duty maximum per day, and 70 hours maximum per rolling 8 day period (or 60 hours per rolling 7 day period).
Between driving periods, you must take 8 hours + 2 hours (most drivers just do a 10 hour rest period) in the sleeper berth. If you take 34 hours (knows as a reset) off duty, your rolling HOS clock resets to 0 and you can drive a full 70 again.
Being awake for me, and functional for 14-18 hours continuous is never a problem for me, but when I drove I avoided being in a urban area when I was that tired - I'd stop short, sleep outside of town, and head in in the morning to drop the load at the receiver usually.
"I personally wouldn't want to drive a truck with collision avoidance stuff, not unless I had a ton of time to spend with it to understand what it does in an activated situation..."
I have no solid information about this, but I recently heard a driver complaining about some form of collision avoidance technology that had a tendency to malfunction on a loaded vehicle and was responsible for "putting trucks is the ditch".
I don't - I've been out of the industry for a while now. But, I can tell you, the vehicle dynamics of a large truck are significantly different than a car, and in many situations such an unexpected change could cause an accident.
With a car, you're only concerned about keeping one braking system in repair, when hauling a trailer you get a roll of the die every time you pick up a new trailer, some of them track straight, some of them don't - some of them brake asymmetrically side to side too.
Air Brakes are also a completely different dynamic then hydraulic brakes used in cars, in a way I can't even reasonably explain, its just something you need to experience - but to give you a clue, you don't feel brake fade as a difference in pedal back pressure, your brakes just don't work as well.
Consider this - the old adage when driving a combined tractor trailer is - "you're driving the trailer, not the truck"
If the government is going to regulate the hours per week, they should be regulating the schedule too. They wouldn't let a commercial jet pilot switch schedules like that.
1. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses compete with each other. In this case, increasing safety standards in a uniform way, will not change profits since the costs can be passed on to consumers.
2. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses are competing with other forms of transport. In that case, imposing more safety standards will result in less business being done by truck, and more by other means. As long as these don't have worse safety issues, this would be a good thing.
You are right the revenue is a meaningless figure in both cases.
Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs.
Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there's room to spend on safety is meaningless... Would love to see a more in depth analysis on the issue from a financial perspective.
And fta:
The industry also bases its opposition to safety-rule changes on money, saying that increasing costs will hurt profits
Excuse my bluntness, but this is a terrible argument.
Saying that safety measures are too costly is ridiculous, because what is happening is that all the other road users are bearing the cost in death and dismemberment when the trucking companies should be bearing the cost in dollars spent on the available safety measures.
Trucking companies absolutely should not be seeking out slightly higher profits on the back of death and destruction. It's a net negative for the entirety of society. You have the truck companies sucking out this little bit of extra profit through their regulatory capture at a much greater cost to the rest of society.
Think about the slight difference improved safety measures would make to the bottom lines of these companies. Then think about all the years of life they are destroying through negligent safety measures, and think about all the things those years of life could have contributed to the world.
The more I type this out the more I realize how absolutely indefensible this argument is, "Yeah, we'll just carry on killing people, because preventing it would cost us a little bit of money..." That is just stomach churning in its crass indecency.
In an Efficent market it's to buyers not the industry that pays for regulation. The only way raising rates hurts an industry is when it reduces demand.
Full disclosure I have relatives that own and operate a fairly large shipping company they really don't care about industry wide effects like fuel costs. Thinks like software integration with their customers are compeditive advantages, regulation just gets passed along. Though, the overall economy is also important as people don't avoid shipping a PC because transportation is adding an extra 1/20th of a percent to the cost, but of nobody is buying then there is no need to ship.
Regulatory capture and efficient markets can't coexist.
(My impression of regulatory capture on this matter comes from the OP, it's the first I've really heard of this safety issue.)
I already explained in my above post that it is society at large that is currently paying for this with death and destruction on the highways.
And that's why this is such a barbaric position.
Say that the needed measures are put in place and this problem is alleviated. And during the implementation of the needed measures, costs get passed along the line and a few extra cents are tacked on to consumer products.
Well, significantly reduced highway deaths and people paying a little extra for whatever is obviously the preferred situation.
But then what will likely happen is that somewhere in the cost chain someone will improve/innovate something that lowers the cost of some particular element in the cost chain, then what the market will bear will adjust and we'll be back to the same or lower consumer product prices plus reduced highway deaths. What's blocking this process from happening is, according to this article, the short-term thinking and profits over lives stance of the trucking companies.
Suppose 1/3 of shipping cost is fuel and suddenly that increases by 100%. That's a 33% increase in cost. And with 3% margins no shipping company can eat that. So, the industry raises prices by 33%. OMFG that's got to have a huge impact right?
Now step back, If a 3 percent of a TV's cost is shipping that increases 33% to 4% then the TV now costs ~1% extra which has minimal impact on demand. So, people are shipping about as many TV's.
Net result increases in costs only impact customers when shipping is a major component in the total cost. Which is fairly rare. In the end the industry is tied to the overall economy much more than there specific costs.
As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depressed over the last three decades and have seen a drop in real wages in many segments of the trucking industry. I saw many drivers keeping multiple log books, skipping or cutting-short rest breaks.
Professional drivers can and do operate safely. But with some carriers paying as little as 20 cents per mile, you can do the math and figure out what a typical work-week looks like if you want to eek out a very meager living as a trucker today.
Migrant workers from asia / south america. whom might not speak enough english to do other work. I say this by hanging around my fathers freight forwarding company for the past 15 years.
Maybe you can answer a question I've been wondering about: what valuable things do truck drivers do besides driving trucks?
There's a lot of hype around self-driving trucks these days. But there's this common tendency to assume that if you can replace the visible part of a job with technology, then those jobs are doomed. The classic example for me is a restaurant replacing waitstaff with computers screens so that people order without talking to a human. But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around.
So what else is in the job description of a trucker that's valuable?
When automation is not complete, humans can hang around for a bit longer, but there will still be fewer of them than before. If all restaurants did was automate order-taking and paying (some are painfully close to this already with on-table tablets that it's actually annoying they haven't already), they just need a human who doesn't speak to the customers to make the food, deliver the requests, and clean up. Maybe a traditional waitress or two if they wish to serve the occasional customer who can't or won't use the new technology. The needed staff size to run a restaurant is lower in any case...
I'm also curious what truck drivers' value is besides the driving. The main thing I see is doubling as role of security guard -- a minor deterrent to anyone wanting to rob the contents of the truck. So there may be some value for them as ride-along security once automated driving is here, but perhaps only if the problem of people blocking the road to trigger the truck's automated driver to stop and be robbed is serious enough or happens roughly equally along all routes at all times (unlikely).
"In the future factories will only have 2 employees: a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog, while the dog's job will be to bite the man if he dares to touch the controls."
my dad said "sometimes they just wonder around the area looking at nature"
"They think shit why did i become a truck driver"
For the younger guys / girls that work there my dad says he's trying to get them to go to school.
as for the last question he said " they are going to at some point be replaced, although situationally i can think of times where a person is nicer to have, rather than a computer"
" i can see drivers getting replaced, or becoming operators for the machinery, theres needs to be someone there to be liable for the cargo and freight"
personally i think that we can solve a ton of traffic related issues with self-driving vehicles
Perhaps for high-end places where the human touch is important. But for your run of the mill, fast food and cheap chain restaurants, hiring staff is a liability, if you are forced to hire the kind of staff that is willing to work for $8/hour. I've never decided to frequent a particular establishment because their staff was better than average, but there are a lot I won't go back to because they had awful, incompetent staff. Average here means that they deliver something vaguely resembling what you asked for, within a reasonable timeframe, and they can total the order up on the cash register without over or undercharging by an order of magnitude, or crashing the entire POS system of the restaurant.
Uh, there is money to spend on safety. It is the money that the customers of the trucking companies pay. When every company's costs increase, they will all pass those costs on to their customers.
Of course, the truck manufacturers would be the ones who would have to spend beforehand on research to satisfy the various requirement. Moreover, the article mentions that much of the technology already exists.
Edit: As the other poster notes, reducing hours while maintain the same ultra-low-pay is a recipe for disaster too. It seems reason to demand that increased safety would involve more driver professionalization, which would require higher pay, which again would have to be pushed to the customers.
There are pretty massive economic implications when you're talking about raising freight rates across the board. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it's a decision that isn't to be made lightly.
So... without subsidies (in the form of tolerating fatalies as well as monetary burdens imposed on the rest of the citizenry) it wouldn't be a viable industry?
Sounds like there's a simple solution to the problem.
the idea that there is maybe not "room to spend" on safety seems absurd. Safety should something that only happens if you can afford it. If the cost of shipping needs to increase to accomodate the cost of safety, then let's do that, but trucking needs to be safe, both for the truckers and the other road users, no matter what the financial cost is.
If paying for safety hurts the trucking industry by making rail or air freight more attractive, i don't see that as a bad thing. We should not all have to subsidize the trucking industry by compromising our own safety on the roads.
The $700B may be a bit stupid from the article authors.
However. A point to bring across is that if the government mandates something to add a bit of safety that isn't ridiculous then shipping costs just simply go up across the board.
As long as everyone has to abide by the new laws, no one will have a competitive advantage.
It's like abolishing slavery. Sure, the slavers will say they can't compete anymore because they have to pay for labour, but after a few years everyone has to pay for labour and the market equalises.
Changing the rules and making it apply uniformly if nothing else, should increase the cost for the consumer.
Given the low margins, the beneficiary is not the trucking company, but the consumer, who then makes small savings in the price of goods but incurs a disproportionate cost in trucking accidents.
Case in point of a driver who has not slept for 28hours - it is a matter of public hazard to allow someone in that condition to operate a heavy vehicle.
I second this. The working hours and toll sitting in a tractor like that all day are bad, but if you do things like cut hours for drivers, especially the drivers that aren't owner-operators, and continue them at the same pay, you unfortunately will push a huge contingent of people further out into the margins. I am all for increased safety, and very much think the drivers are on the road way too much, but I fear additional safety or hours cuts will be disproportionately borne by the drivers, who really usually can't afford it anyways. Apparently truck driving is a very common job to work too[1].
I guess I'd like to understand why people don't agree. Just to be clear, it's really important that we shore up tractor trailer safety (I've been hit by a class 8 rig twice now, once where the driver was asleep at wheel), but the cost of this really needs to be borne by the companies and not the drivers; as a consequence, you know, in order to get more safety on the road, product prices may go up. I am OK with this though.
Self-driving trucks seem to have such great promise to improve the safety and efficiency of the trucking industry and our highways in general. Even if they're only self-driving during the long haul sections and human drivers take over for local deliveries it would make a huge difference.
Hopefully the various interested lobbies don't try to put too many artificial barriers in the way of self driving trucks becoming a reality.
I'm a former over the road truck driver who hauled truckload freight.
I disagree profoundly that self driving trucks are the future, the future is multimodal transport, even now a significant proportion of long haul (greater than 3-600 miles) is already on the rail, either in the form of a container or piggyback.
The issue that keeps the remaining long haul (greater than 600 miles) on the road (vs rail) is timing, when you put something on the rail, you loose a day or so at one end in loading/classifying and another in classifying/unloading. That time loss is something that in all but a few situations can be accommodated for by extra planning - but it requires the planning and consent of the shipper and consignee to do so - the trucking and rail companies are already on board as shipping by rail is much cheaper/easier.
For LTL companies, most of their drivers only run from terminal to terminal, and the distance driven and time spent is much much lower, but even with them, a crossdock transload facility where one side is a truck dock, and the other is a railcar could for example cut down on some logistics pain - but it still would incur additional delay due to the machinations required by the railroad to switch and deliver cars in their network.
Another complicating factor is reefers, right now each refer either has a generator attached (for containers) to it powered by diesel fuel, or has a diesel powered refrigeration unit on the trailer - this for the rail could be replaced by freight trains with HEP (head end power) to power the refrigeration units - but to do so requires a sizable investment by everyone involved (rail cars that support such a system, cans and trailers that support such a system, and transit yards that can supply the power to keep everything cold)
Even with the challenges, in 20-30 years, I'd expect only 10% of truckload miles to be actually hauled end to end by a truck, the rest of it should go on the rail, then be carried the proverbial last mile (in reality couple hundred miles) by a truck.
As a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule.
The issue that keeps the remaining long haul (greater than 600 miles) on the road (vs rail) is timing, when you put something on the rail, you loose a day or so at one end in loading/classifying and another in classifying/unloading.
That's an interesting comment. Modern container ships and the infrastructure that supports them are surely one of the most effective logistical developments in human history, transferring huge volumes of cargo between the ships and road/rail at either end with impressive efficiency. It seems like you're suggesting that road/rail links bring in more of an overhead, despite the lower volumes on a train vs. a ship. Is that a fair conclusion from what you're saying?
If that's reasonably accurate, what do you think causes those extra overheads? Is it the wider variety of loads instead of everything being in standard shipping containers, the need for power to support some of them that you mentioned, or maybe just the need for better loading/unloading systems at road/rail transfers?
I think any multimodal transport has an inherent lag - and I don't think its worth the effort to get the lag out - beyond that because of the inherent delays (you gotta sort the railcar onto a siding, then unload the trailer (if its a can, it needs to be unloaded and mated with a chassis), put it somewhere so it can be picked up, the coordinate to have it picked up by a tractor.)
I'd put the effort on getting shippers to accept the longer shipment times - a little less JIT inventory for example, its a change that needs to be made at all levels.
Why wouldn't the trucks in your future scenario be self driving? Once a container is off the rails a self driving truck would take it to the local distribution center. It would be fantastically more efficient.
I don't think the technology will evolve fast enough to solve the problems of driving a combo-tractor trailer in an urbann environment because of the greater size of the vehicle (and greater sensor load). You'd be better off having a rail spur at the local distribution center.
I'm carefully optimistic since this would be in there interest of the trucking industry and they already seem to be succeeding at pushing laws through that are bad for the drivers.
I would love a system where the trucks get driven to a lot outside of the city where they get set on a automatic course to the equivalent lot at the destination. During transit no person is onboard at all. At the destination lot a human enters and drives it downtown. If the truck goes to some industrial facility outside the city you shouldn't even need the human driver.
Also I wish there was done way to go after those congress people who are in essence committing murder.
> I'm carefully optimistic since this would be in there interest of the trucking industry
How would self-driving trucks help the trucking industry?
It seems like driverless technology will only make the business even more commoditized than it already is, and the only ones that make any money will be the one or two companies with the iPhone apps where you push the button to get your truck.
> How would self-driving trucks help the trucking industry?
The people running the companies will be looking at labor as a major expense and human employees as a high source of variability and day-to-day complication. Trading labor cost (typically seen as an expense) for fixed asset costs (typically seen as investment) is hugely appealing to a lot of executives.
> It seems like driverless technology will only make the business even more commoditized than it already is [...]
Sure, and buying a $1 lottery ticket is financially equivalent to asking the store clerk to change $1 and then throwing $0.40 into the nearest sewer grate. But everybody buying a lottery ticket thinks they'll one of the few winners. Executives are generally like that too. But worse, because they get to gamble with other people's money and then take a slice of any winnings.
"Industry" is both ambiguous and nebulous. It would seem to help the stakeholders whom depend on trucking, perhaps the fleets of trucks and most definitely not the drivers. There are far too many truckers' jobs at risk to retrain and place in nonexistent "freeing" jobs that just don't exist. Loads of unemployed people with no job prospects to feed their families would be an idiotic situation rife with discontent bordering on insurrection.
> There are far too many [...] jobs at risk to retrain and place in nonexistent "freeing" jobs that just don't exist. Loads of unemployed people with no job prospects to feed their families would be an idiotic situation rife with discontent bordering on insurrection.
This is an argument against nearly every technological development ever.
I agree with practically everything you said. However, I expect that the companies that do most of the lobbying are larger and are all the ones expecting to be one of the one out two companies with the iPhone apps that now also don't have to deal with drivers anymore. The big companies will be able to upgrade their first, small companies won't be able to. The small companies get pushed out of the market. So I expect large companies to push for this.
Lots of decisions at the government level require putting a value on human lives. It's a feature, not a bug, that congressmen aren't usually held accountable for indirect death like this.
> Hopefully the various interested lobbies don't try to put too many artificial barriers in the way of self driving trucks becoming a reality.
I just don't see this happening. A qualified truck driver costs a trucking company upwards of $30K/year in salary alone. The cost of running a truck capable of driving itself even partially is obviously going to be higher, but at $30K/year + other human-related expenses, it will pay for itself very quickly. Even if regulation drives up the cost a lot it will still be cost-effective to run self-driving trucks.
I think a bigger concern is that self-driving trucks create a high up-front cost and low long-term cost: the ideal conditions for large businesses to drive out small businesses and make it impossible to start a trucking business.
1. Banks may not choose to finance small businesses at all, because they can finance bigger businesses which are a lower risk.
2. If banks do finance small businesses, they charge them higher interest rates than a larger business, again, because a larger, more established business is lower risk. A small business that has to finance at a higher interest rate will have to make larger gross profits to pay their financing costs.
3. Larger businesses may have enough cash on hand that they don't require financing at all, which makes it even harder for small businesses to compete.
I wasn't ignoring financing when I said that high up-front costs and low long-term costs create the ideal conditions for large businesses to drive out small businesses. Financing simply doesn't solve this problem.
If you're talking about the general problem, that society is bent in many different ways to favor large firms managed by professional executives and owned by clueless investors, then yes, I agree that financing is not the solution. At times I despair that any solution short of large-scale violence and reappropriation may be found. On the more particular issue of capital goods requiring up-front investment, don't lose hope. This phenomenon has inhered in the capitalist system for centuries, and certainly longer than "banks" as such have. Over that whole time, however, small nimble innovative firms have regularly thrived and even grown large, lax, and lethargic themselves.
Part of the problem is the assumption that banks control all business lending. (They love that otherwise smart people assume so!) I know an investor who is currently dissatisfied with real estate opportunities available to occupy his considerable wealth. For several years he has been financing, among other things, consumer purchase of water softeners. He actually has to hire someone to examine long lists of loans of several hundred to a thousand dollars! He would love to be able to help a few firms purchase a dozen self-driving tractors apiece, once insurers figure out how it will work.
Various entities have nibbled at the margins of "bank" business for decades now. This is not a phenomenon that will cease before banks themselves do. They only exist because we believe they must.
Couldn't there be an intermediate step with speed limiter sensors. When in crowded places or approaching slow objects too fast, reduce speed to say 20mph.
I think that the trucking industry is one of the biggest employers in the US. Are you OK with devastating these people's lives for extra efficiency promised safety?
Before we push for more automation and job losses, we need to revamp the whole political/economic/social system to ensure a more egalitarian income distribution since the vast majority of the Earth's population are proletariat who exchange their labor in return for capital to make a living.
Truck driving is a devastating profession. My dad drove trucks for the better part of 2 decades. It hurt his physical health (immobility for hours on end punctuated by the occasional food/rest break)and did ridiculous damage to his psychological and emotional health. In the end, if you account for the number of hours he had to drive to rack up those mile-dollars, he probably made just north of minimum wage.
There are lots of professions I would be saddened to see made obsolete by automation. Long haul truck driving would not be anywhere on that list.
"It hurt his physical health (immobility for hours on end punctuated by the occasional food/rest break)and did ridiculous damage to his psychological and emotional health."
You realize you're posting this on a site largely dedicated to computer programmers.
"You realize you're posting this on a site largely dedicated to computer programmers."
Yes I do. And for any programmer (or any other person) who thinks there's even a remote similarity of experience, I invite you to find the most comfortable chair you can and then sit in it 15 hours a day uninterrupted (minus time to run to your local truck stop for a tasty meal) for a month straight watching you tube videos of a highway. And then rest for 1-2 days and repeat. That will give you a not-so-close approximation of the trucker's experience.
Having said all of this, there's an immense challenge/opportunity here for smart hackers to improve the experience of these truckers...they're not going to get replaced by robots anytime soon.
My father-in-law has had his health ruined to the point of having is commercial license revoked, from a multitude of largely immobility caused health issues(including a blood clot that ran literally his entire lower leg). As a programmer/computer person, I do sit a lot, but not in conditions anywhere approaching his. I can stand up and stretch every 45 minutes, I have a standing desk, I can move around in my chair. Not to mention my chair is ridiculously comfortable compared to just about any car/truck seat I've sat in, including his work truck.
If everything was going to be automated all at once, this "devastation" might be the case. But it won't happen all at once, it happens over the course of a decade or two.
In almost every case in history, automation has increased jobs and increased the quality of life.
Your post reminds me of this story:
"Prof. Friedman visited China in the early 1960s and was taken by a government official to see a public works project. Chinese workers were building a canal. Friedman was struck by seeing everyone digging the canal with shovels. Friedman asked the official, "why no heavy earth-moving equipment?" The official said, "oh, this is a jobs program." So Friedman then says to the official, "then why don't you just give them spoons instead of shovels to create even more jobs?"
Any job that is created by automation will later be automated anyway. That's the whole point of automation. It's a recursive function, and in the past it was so that the jobs were created faster that they were automated away. But I don't think it's reasonable to assume this will continue. There's a great qualitative difference between automating muscle power (what we did in past centuries) and brain power (what we're doing now).
Even now more and more jobs that are created are jobs that are harmful to society and shouldn't exist in the first place. Imagine a slight modification of your story - that there are two public works projects; one is digging a canal, the other is filling it up. More and more fuel, material and man hours are being used up as both sides gain access to additional workers and better technologies, and yet the canal stays half-built, as one group cancels out the work of the other.
Now replace canal building with advertising industry, and it's exactly what we have today in the real world. Hell, I'd argue that half of the web industry is also such useless waste of time and resources. This is what we get because we still keep the meme that you need to work to be a decent human being. A lot of unsustainable make-believe work. The so-called "bullshit jobs".
It's high time for the world to embrace that jobs are going away, as they should.
Since you quoted that super villain Friedman, it's a futile exercise to discuss this issue with you but touching on the silly analogy cited by Dr. Evil:
Abandoning spoons to shovels ==> 1000X efficiency gain and net positive mass-scale job opportunities
Abandoning shovels to heavy equipment ===> 100X efficiency gain and net positive of mass-scale specialized job opportunities.
Abandoning manual trucks to fully auto ===> ~1X efficiency (disputed) and net negative of job opportunities for the masses save for highly specialized super white collar jobs such as for engineers and developers like us.
Do you really think that it's OK from an economic point of view and not politically as this is almost settled to destroy the livelihoods of these poor & lower middle class people just to get an estimated albeit unrealistic 100% efficiency boost?
Are you ready to pay the price in terms of increasing crime rates and lower median quality of life and seeing decrepit hoods everywhere except inside your gated community where you plan to hide from all those poor people and truckers-turned-criminals on the street?
Look at this the other way - humans shouldn't even be doing this task, the only reason we have truck drivers is because we didn't know how to make trucks drive themselves. Now we do, so there's no point in keeping humans doing what machines could do better.
Yes, this generalizes to all jobs and the entire economy. It's about time we accepted it.
They can band together and start their own transportation companies. It will be significantly cheaper, now that the trucks don't require wages and health coverage.
History is what it is when it comes to changes in technology. However there have been moments in history which were R3voltionary, where a great deal of people were no longer necessary and that change came with periods of upheaval
One of the things we need to do, as a society, is to stop yapping about "creating jobs" and start caring more about "ensuring that if your job goes away, you're fine". For most of us, our job will go away at some point.
As a whole, making work less dependent on manpower is progress. And it's a critical failure that societal progress comes with the effect of "devastating lives". And that's because of crappy laws, not because of the technology.
>Before we push for more automation and job losses, we need to revamp the whole political/economic/social system to ensure a more egalitarian income distribution since the vast majority of the Earth's population are proletariat who exchange their labor in return for capital to make a living.
I certainly agree that we're going to need to rework our concepts of work and income to fit a more automated world, but I think that the automation will have to come first, to get people to realize that something needs to be done to make our society more balanced. Artificially limiting the rollout of self driving trucks for the sake of preserving jobs will just cost in lives lost to accidents, and delay what seems to be an inevitable outcome (that trucks will drive themselves and truck driving jobs will start to disappear).
It won't happen all at once because there would be massive pushback.
Even so, the handwriting is on the wall: the meat-guided truck-driving era is almost over and will gradually shrink to niches as automated truck driving systems are deployed across fleets.
Perhaps a private person will be able to invest in a private automated truck as investment, trick it out with chrome and send it out in the world to make money while that owner sleeps in?
That argument can be applied to all automation. I completely agree that it's a huge political and economical problem that owning the means of production becomes more and more important whereas actual labor becomes less important. To me the obvious solution is more socialism and eventually once everything is automated even some form of capitalism. However, especially in the US where due to the cold war anything social is a red flag for many we aren't going to be able to solve this before it becomes a much larger problem. So we either have to play this through and force action or stop all innovation because anything else just slows the process down and makes us less competitive.
A top surgeon in Boston was recently crushed under a semi in city traffic. The truck should have had sensors that prevent "right hooking" a cyclist, and the driver should be monitored for standards of sleep and on-duty time, and for alertness behind the wheel.
But really, what most people are calling for here would improve truckers' working conditions.
Cyclists and tractor-trailer trucks really shouldn't be sharing the same roads. But then again, that's Boston, a hellacious death-trap of a city to drive in.
I'm the CEO of SpeedGauge - a safety and performance company that uses data from 3rd party GPS trackers to monitor and coach hundreds of thousands of commercial vehicles in the US. We use standard GPS tracking data to understand and improve driver speeding behavior - clearly the cause of the crash that critically injured Tracy Morgan and killed James McNair.
From our experience with fleet customers we can see that there is a split in the US trucking industry between those companies that eagerly spend to improve safety and fuel economy and those that think they can't afford it and therefore fight regulation and mandates.
Many companies are way ahead of the regulators when it comes to safety and fuel saving technology and practices. Just look at which companies voluntarily govern their vehicles to a fuel efficient max speed (say 62 mph) vs those that let trucks roll at higher inefficient speeds. Or, look at those companies that have invested in telematics to get improvements in safety, operations and fuel economy and those that resist any such mandate.
Police and inspection based monitoring system (ie. current US DOT CSA regime) allow effective comparison of risk patterns at the aggregate level for large fleets but statistically are invalid at the single driver level because of the paucity of data (even risky drivers don't get in accidents very often). Fleets need more granular data to evaluate individual drivers. Sadly in this incident, it was Walmart, who maintains one of the highest aggregate safety ratings in the industry, that failed to identify the granulal events that put their driver, and the driving public at risk.
Transportation is a tight margin business and solutions need to work within the capital and operational constraints of the market and the reality is that smaller and independent players often don't have the capital to invest (nor do many telematic solution providers direct efforts to micro-fleets). Our customers' experience is that safest drivers are the most profitable drivers (and the best paid). While I am a strong supporter of fair government regulation, I remain hopeful that technology can in fact lead that way by pointing out that safe operations are profitable operations.
I am a strong supporter of intermodal; trucks & trains have got to work together. I think that trains are part of the solution to truck driver shortage plus they have lots of other benefits (environmental etc..).
I think that there is a great opportunity to make intermodal more efficient and to create more truck/train interface points and to make them more efficient. A lot of work to do. Opportunity for big application of capital AND software.
I'm a former OTR driver now working in telecom and as a sysadmin (still with active CDL however).
How do you propose to solve the delay issues at each end of the rail journey, do you think shippers can be made to accept longer transit times? I'd love to see the median length for a TL trip come down to like 150 miles.
How do I propose to solve the delay issue? I don't have a solution but I think that there is a lot of value in finding one!
I guess that that is part of what I was hinting at when I said that the solution needed a lot of capital investment and software. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of investment to be made.
I wish that some of the effort that was going into self driving vehicles would go into making intermodal operations smoother. I think there would be a huge payoff.
Pay rates are certainly part of the driver shortage problem; but it's not the only reason for shortage. My company is trying to help trucking companies identify their best drivers so that they can know where to focus their employee retention efforts (pay, recognition etc...)
I'm not able to comment on all parts of the article, but one thing stuck out at me: deaths were up from 2009-2013, but so was the volume of freight being shipped: http://www.transtats.bts.gov/osea/seasonaladjustment/?PageVa.... That makes that particular statistic quite dubious.
Disclosure: I work for a SAAS company serving the logistics industry, which is why I knew that. I don't really have an opinion about how regulated the industry is. My personal work doesn't deal with that, and I'm pretty ignorant of it. I'm quite willing to believe that this article is accurate at the big picture level.
"While heavy trucks accounted for less than 10 percent of total miles traveled in the United States during 2013, according to federal data, the N.T.S.B. recently reported that they were involved in one in eight of all fatal accidents..."
I would like to point out that "one in eight" is 12.5%.
They are also only using fatal accidents and not all accidents. I'm assuming that truck accidents are more likely to be fatal than non truck accidents but I have no data.
That's the kind of data I was looking for too! I'm also on the software fringes of trucking, and that was my reaction to the 2009-2013 statistic. Pretty much anything driven by economic activity is up over that period, we should be looking at accidents per kiloton or something like that.
Yeah, that would be more informative. But we still need to know about the baseline rates. Trucks are very big, so dangerous to other drivers, and there's a lot of miles driven. On the other hand, there's industry capital to potentially finance safety upgrades, and they're driven by professionals. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of what the acceptable risk is, given all those factors.
At least some of that risk needs to be realized by the other drivers on the road. I don't know how many times I've seen a little shit-box commuter car zip into the safe following distance that a heavily-laden truck is maintaining, then stomp on the brakes, forcing the truck driver to burn their brakes and down-shift abruptly to avoid going right over the top of them. You don't stop 100,000 pounds in the same distance you can stop 2000.
Definitely. Seems like way too many drivers in traffic only see road space in front of another vehicle as "an opportunity to change lanes and go faster" rather than "that vehicle's following distance". I drove a moving truck halfway across the country one time and was amazed at just how often in the cities small cars sped in to fill whatever following distance I created in front of me. And yes, a couple of them nearly got rear-ended as a direct result of their driving, not mine. I can only imagine dealing with the same scenario but with a semi instead. Scary thought!
I'd like to see a comparison of accidents, (or better, deaths), per million miles of personal vehicles vs. trucks. I'm pretty sure trucks will come out as causing fewer accidents/deaths.
I actually did the math for the 2009 - 2013 thing, and truck tonnage increased by 21.75%, so a 17% increase in accidents means that trucks got safer over that time.
From the tables of fatalities per 100 million miles that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration compiles [0], the accident rate for trucks went up from 1.03 to 1.29. Passenger vehicle crashes are actually lower, going from 1.03 to 1. These are still on the low end historically: both rates were around 1.36 15 years ago.
Thanks for the tables. They also show that the 2012 rates were somewhat lower than the 2007 rates, and much lower than they ever were before 2007 (>= 1.95).
I still think it's right to expect sustained improvement over the long-term.
Over the years, I've actually come to think those kind of statistics are kind of irrelevant. It comes off as rationalisation in the end. As soon as you start inputting people's lives in a cost/benefit analysis, I get really sad.
> I'd like to see a comparison of accidents, (or better, deaths), per million miles of personal vehicles vs. trucks. I'm pretty sure trucks will come out as causing fewer accidents/deaths.
Possibly true but irrelevant. You could go a trillion miles per fatality, but only the total fatalities matter, perhaps as a percentage of all road fatalities.
The trucking industry... insists that it needs longer work weeks... so that more trucks will not be needed on the road, which it says could result in more accidents. That logic is laughable, but Congress seems to be buying it.
Yeah that makes zero sense. If drivers are driving more, trucks will be on the road more. The actual result of sane work hours would be that more drivers would share trucks and drive in shifts, which is already fairly common. If sharing trucks is somehow impossible, then the industry could buy more trucks, to be parked waiting for their drivers to become available. Neither truck sharing nor additional parked trucks are a danger to the public.
It's my understanding that drivers are typically paid by the mile. Therefore, it's difficult to see why trucking companies care about lower speeds or shorter work weeks. If a driver drives less, she'll be paid less. It's almost as if they're saying that there are no more drivers available at current mileage compensation rates. Since this is HN, I won't suggest higher compensation, but perhaps they could investigate the H-1B program?
> It has pushed to allow truck drivers to work 82 hours a week, up from the current 70 hours over eight days, by eliminating the requirement that drivers take a two-day rest break each week;
There was a different problem with the two-day rest break:
> Must include two periods from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. home terminal time.
Because obviously the trucking industry shouldn't be working graveyard. That's the part that was suspended. It screws with scheduling. 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. is arbitrary.
> discouraged the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from investing in wireless technology designed to improve the monitoring of drivers and their vehicles;
Either this is VERY recent news or just misleading. This is happening as far as everyone can tell. The mandate for electronic logging devices in all vehicles should be coming down late September, with a deadline of October 2017.
Shouldn't the trucking industry be working mostly graveyard? I mean, what's the better time for trucks to drive fast and safe if not night, when everyone else is not on the road?
Maybe he's realized the inevitability of the situation and decided to jump ship. Can't completely blame him, but makes it difficult to take his opinions seriously.
Be very careful with that line of thinking. It amounts to 'he's a bad person, so we should punish him by assigning him low status, and part of that is to refuse to take his opinion seriously.' It's instinctively appealing, but it's also an area where human instinct is terribly wrong.
A better way to react would be 'it looks like he's done bad things, so when he talks about those bad things, he knows what he's talking about and we should take his opinion very seriously. Whether he should be punished is a separate question, but if so, that punishment should take a form that doesn't cripple our ability to stop the other people who are continuing to do those bad things.'
This is why many people believe self-driving trucks will be even more significant than self-driving cars. Especially as we start to commute less as telepresence improves and more jobs can go remote.
OK, just as long as trucks aren't driven through telepresence. Drone operators in the trucking industry might challenge their military brethren in terms of innocent people killed.
I think drones will leapfrog over self-driving trucks. Why even bother having things that drive on roads when you could fly them directly to a warehouse, over hills, forests, rivers, etc?
There are a lot more technical challenges associated with self-driving cars than self-driving drones. Self-driving cars aren't even fully solved at this point. However, even very cheap hobby drones can accurately fly to specific GPS coordinates. Even most plane flights are auto-piloted and even auto-land, so I believe that drones are a lot closer in terms of implementation than self-driving cars.
If there is a business case that determines that drones, while being potentially more energy-intensive, can save a company money due to speed, I believe it will win. For example, imagine Amazon could redistribute inventory between two warehouses with a click of a button and overnight, that sounds like a definite competitive advantage to me.
I would expect trucks with drivers to continue to beat drones on cost for a long time, a single trailer load is at least hundreds of drone trips, maybe thousands.
The comparison was between self-driving trucks vs drones, not human-driven trucks vs drones. Obviously those are going to be cheaper than whatever current technology we have.
And there's nothing preventing drones on the rough order of magnitude of trailers from flying around, as long as it's done in a safe and regulated way.
Driving while tired can be as dangerous as driving drunk. The occasional 14hr drive isn't horrible, but if you do that several days in a row, you're going to be really tired. So limiting the hours per day a truck driver drives seems like a good idea. As does "shift" driving.
Collision avoidance tech also seems like a good idea.
That said, I don't think we need the government to do anything.
Drivers can unionize and demand better hours. Insurance companies can require collision avoidance tech be installed. Etc.
And if you really believe the government needs to be involved, then it doesn't hurt to try both the government regulation route, and the self-regulation route at the same time. The latter could get implemented faster than the government....
Driving while tired can be as dangerous as driving drunk.
Absolutely true. [1] The problem is cultural: While we've successfully established shaming around DUI, I think there's a certain kind of deeper, Protestant-work-ethic-derived rationalization we seem to make for drowsy driving. "You're working hard, so it's all right."
Perhaps the same ethical framework that was used to make DUI popularly unacceptable can be used for drowsy driving: To drive in this condition is to indulge one's self at others' peril.
The hard part is that it often seems like you "have" to drive at times. I'm a single guy living alone, so when my fridge is empty, I "have" to get food. Even when tired or sick. Sure I could use public transportation, but when you're that tired, is it even available? Or would you have the energy to use it?
Anyway, that's part of why people still drive while tired. They have to do something important, not necessarily work. So it would be hard to make it publicly unacceptable.
Drivers are frequently the ones complaining about the hours-of-service regulations. They get paid by the mile but many of their working hours are non-driving, so more hours on the road is more money.
Drivers unionizing (That would be the Teamsters, right?) to demand fewer hours seems roughly as likely as programmers unionizing to demand something better than their 80-hour weeks.
Would an awareness campaign about the dangers of drowsy driving help?
As for unionizing, why mention Teamsters? Just have each companies employees get together and negotiate with management. (Yes, I'm being purposefully naive. Even if this really won't work, it should still be tried first.)
> (Yes, I'm being purposefully naive. Even if this really won't work, it should still be tried first.)
Why should it be tried first? This kind of experimentation takes decades and meanwhile people are dying. How many times do we have to try waiting for corporations to do the right thing before we acknowledge that corporations are amoral and aren't going to do the right thing? How many unions do we have to try before we see that they don't really promote progress?
> I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion looking at this data.
What data? The article is an opinion piece, not a data analysis.
> Many things can happen, but they aren't happening, so...
Aren't they? The opinion doesn't say anything about private efforts to fix things. It focuses on government regulations. It doesn't indicate if truckers have made efforts to get better hours, or companies efforts to make things safer while staying on budget, or insurance companies studying if lower hours/better tech would help or not.
Now, if that stuff has been tried, and failed, then what have states done? Why do we have to go directly to Federal level?
Ultimately, we should never give more power to one group unless it really is the only way to do what is needed. No matter how much we trust that group. Thus, whenever someone suggests new regulations, I always question if they are really needed. Especially when we're talking about the USA Federal Government.
> What data? The article is an opinion piece, not a data analysis.
Ugh. Did you even read it?
"More people will be killed in traffic accidents involving large trucks this year than have died in all of the domestic commercial airline crashes over the past 45 years, if past trends hold true."
"In recent months, Congress has pursued a number of steps to roll back safety improvements ordered by federal regulators. It has pushed to allow truck drivers to work 82 hours a week, up from the current 70 hours over eight days, by eliminating the requirement that drivers take a two-day rest break each week; discouraged the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from investing in wireless technology designed to improve the monitoring of drivers and their vehicles; and signaled its willingness to allow longer and heavier trucks despite widespread public opposition. Congress also wants to lower the minimum age for drivers of large trucks that are allowed to travel from state to state to 18, from 21."
"The death toll in truck-involved crashes rose 17 percent from 2009 to 2013. Fatalities in truck-involved crashes have risen four years in a row, reaching 3,964 in 2013, the latest data available. Those crashes are killing not only car drivers but also, during 2013 alone, 586 people who were truck drivers or passengers."
"And while a more than 3 percent drop in car deaths over the same period was largely accomplished by technological improvements like airbags, electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes, the trucking industry has resisted most of those safety devices. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the annual cost to the economy of truck and bus crashes to be $99 billion."
There's plenty of data in there.
> The opinion doesn't say anything about private efforts to fix things.
"And while a more than 3 percent drop in car deaths over the same period was largely accomplished by technological improvements like airbags, electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes, the trucking industry has resisted most of those safety devices."
"Most automakers now include or offer anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, airbags and collision-avoidance devices in their vehicles, and the technology is included in many of the heavy trucks sold in Europe. But the United States trucking industry has largely avoided using the safety technologies available for vehicles sold here, because of their cost."
"The trucking industry, through its chief trade group, the American Trucking Associations, insists that it needs longer work weeks and bigger vehicles so that more trucks will not be needed on the road, which it says could result in more accidents."
> Now, if that stuff has been tried, and failed, then what have states done? Why do we have to go directly to Federal level?
Because the interstates are exactly that: inster-state. The trucking industry isn't a problem that affects just a few states. This is clearly not a problem that will be solved by fighting it out individually in each state individually.
> Ultimately, we should never give more power to one group unless it really is the only way to do what is needed.
I see you've decided to exclude the trucking industry, which holds all the cards in this situation, from your definition of "group".
> No matter how much we trust that group.
I don't trust the trucking industry at all.
> Thus, whenever someone suggests new regulations, I always question if they are really needed. Especially when we're talking about the USA Federal Government.
It appears that you only question giving a group more power when that group is the US Federal Government. Every solution you've suggested trying gives a group more power.
Let's stop pretending this is about logic or data and recognize that you'll just say whatever to push your anti-government ideology.
Have you actually talked with any truck drivers? Are you sure they want it?
Most deaths are not truck drivers, but drivers of cars who enter in collisions with trucks. And truck drivers would like to make more money in shorter periods of time and not spend this time resting someplace away from home.
I hope autopilots will replace truck drivers soon.
I would assume truck drivers don't want to kill people. No matter how it's done, one person accidentally killing another person tends to fuck up that first person pretty well.
Being involved in a fatal accident is very rare for an individual driver. What is being proposed would be seen as a theoretical good for overall society that paid for by the individual.
They are trying self-regulation, right now, and the article is arguing that it's not working well enough. They've been self-regulating as long as we've had trucks.
Yes, so why is air travel so much more heavily regulated for safety than all the other things? The perception is skewed, and people just don't think about motor vehicle collisions as being a big problem, even though they kill tons of people every year (more than firearm homicides, too, for what it's worth). Pointing that out is reasonable.
It's because those people die all at once in a way they can't control or escape. With car accidents, people are perfectly content to believe they are skilled enough drivers to be able to avoid death.
Air travel used to be very dangerous. This created the demand for safety which has continued as a culture within the airline industry to the point that air travel is the safest way to travel.
The author makes several good points, but never mentions fault. From a 1998 study on car-truck collisions:
> the car driver's behavior was more than three times as likely to contribute to the fatal crash than was the truck driver's behavior. In addition, the car driver was solely responsible for 70 percent of the fatal crashes, compared to 16 percent for the truck driver.
The cost of running rail to supply all the routes currently served by truck now (and generally in the last 50-60 years) is so high that it's infeasible. The less populated and poor the destination, the higher the costs (and most remote areas are both sparsely populated and poor). I think you're seriously underestimating the vastness of the US and the remoteness of the majority of it. Sure, given enough investment and dedication, a nationwide rail network would have been possible but the decision to build America as a car/truck country was taken in the late 40's/early 50's and it's too late to reverse that, even at a governmental level. People expect to live in remote areas now and have all the comforts of a city. That's simply not possible with rail at a sane cost. Not only are cars and trucks more flexible, but the transportation expenses can be shared between commercial and personal transportation. People in America generally don't take trains (and don't like them) and outside of small regional areas, passenger trains are mostly a novelty that run sometimes days late. Between the geography and people's attitudes/expectations, there is no room for trains in America and it shows.
Ah, but road transport isn't really shared between commercial and personal transportation. Road maintenance is in large part funded by fuel tax. Fuel use is roughly proportional to vehicle weight at low speed, or frontal area at high speed. While wear to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.
So trucking is heavily subsidised by smaller cars. If the costs created by trucking were internalized, the market share in the shipping industry would likely shift considerably toward rail transport.
(Didn't downvote.) There is rarely, if ever, a singular "the solution" to an issue. Trains, boats, planes, trucks, couriers, etc. serve semi-overlapping needs. Trains did dominate the U.S. before the auto industry convinced people cars and highways were "better," and local commuter trains were scrapped over large parts of America. Yes, Europe has loads of them and you can't book an actual train ticket from Paris to Amsterdam (Thalys) online ahead-of-time either.
As a result of this indoctrination, a cultural allergy to trains became a core value of Americanism... single-occupant car == freedom, train/bus == low class.
Well, we already have one of the worlds most extensive road systems. Building the same with rails would be a monumental undertaking, but putting smarter trucks on the road would be almost free. So there's that...
Trucks offer vertical integration. You get to a certain size, you own your own trucks. Can't do that with rail, you're always under the thumb of the rail companies.
> It has pushed to allow truck drivers to work 82 hours a week, up from the current 70 hours over eight days.
Please tell me that's a typo. PLEASE tell me that's a typo. 82 hours a week is insanity. Driving any vehicle requires a lot of attention, driving a large one requires a LOT more attention. And I just have a strong certainty that, if it's anything like every other industry, it'll be 82 hours a week, every week, no breaks.
You want accidents and injuries? Make people drive more than 16 hours a day (5 days a week). Or maybe 13.67 hours a day (6 days a week), or even still 11.71 hours a day (7 days a week). Every week.
FTA: "The trucking industry, through its chief trade group, the American Trucking Associations, insists that it needs longer work weeks and bigger vehicles so that more trucks will not be needed on the road, which it says could result in more accidents. That logic is laughable, but Congress seems to be buying it." .... and later:
"Howard Abramson is a freelance writer who was an executive at American Trucking Associations from 1998 to 2014."
Man, I have always hated trucks, and this is yet another proof of why! But in all seriousness, this is yet another narrative of Congress' rolling back of regulations that prove quite beneficial by way of safety and overall welfare of the nation in favor of vicious profit margins for those warlords of industry. I certainly hope to see restored a body of lawmakers that can get their act together and promote the welfare of a healthy, vibrant nation before the end of my lifetime. We have too many clowns now who are willing to pass laws or not pass laws in downright stupidity, and I'm not sure if it's out of sheer corruption or debased philosophical convictions. For myself, this issue serves as an ideal example of where the government can and should intervene with laws and regulations and oversight in order to promote general safety and welfare, not to mention economic fairness, in preventing the exploitation of the have-nots by the haves. I'm just as weary of government getting too large and intervening in our private lives as anybody else, but who can argue that in cases such as truck driving and highway safety in general, the government cannot easily play a part in saving not only lives but tons of money?
>More people will be killed in traffic accidents involving large trucks this year than have died in all of the domestic commercial airline crashes over the past 45 years
This is such a slimy apples to oranges comparison. Clearly commercial airfare is far safer than ANY road ground transit.
After this comparison, I don't feel like reading the rest of the article.
I have to drive an interstate on my daily commute. I always wonder why the state troopers, almost without fail, have a semi pulled over on the way in.
Also, I have noticed that truck drivers seem to be as dumb/bad as the average driver, and there is no particular need to single them out. People in general are fucking stupid behind the wheel.
Until self driving machines become a reality, there are startups like Maven Machines in Pittsburgh that are tackling the problem of driver fatigue thru innovative use of machine learning.
> the N.T.S.B. recently reported that they were involved in one in eight of all fatal accidents and about one-quarter of all fatal accidents in work zones
Involved or at fault? It seems like these stats are including accidents where trucks did not even contribute to the fatalities but were simply part of the collateral damage.
Moose are involved in around 80% of fatal vehicle-animal collisions in the state of Maine over a five year period[1]. Clearly, moose are a menace, and we need to dramatically invest in moose-diverting safety features on our roads!
Except... moose-vehicle collisions were only 15% of all animal-vehicle collisions. Even a cursory look at the physics of what happens in a moose-car collision explains why moose collisions are disproportionately fatal. Look at a moose, standing next to a typical compact-to-midsize car[2]. Now look at what happens when that compact-midsize car hits a moose[3]. The animal's legs get swept out by the hood/bumper of the vehicle, and the animal's heavy body crashes down through the windshield and the relatively flimsy roof of the vehicle, crushing the driver.
A similar thing happens with semi trucks. In many cases, the front bumper of a truck, and the rear bumper on the trailer, are higher off the ground than the hood or trunk of a car. So if a truck is involved in a rear-end collision with a car in front, as often as not the truck goes right over the top of the car, crushing the occupants of the car underneath.. Or if the car is rear-ending the truck, the hood and engine mass goes underneath the trailer, but the windshield and roof is sheared off by the steel bumper and trailer deck, along with the upper portions of the car's occupants.
I'm not sure you're going to make those physics much safer.
I can't think of many worse jobs than truck driving. Long hours, low pay, threat to lose your job from self-driving cars, high risk... These guys deserve a higher salary and they should start looking for something else to do IMHO.
Interesting, are they outright deaths tho? As far as I'm aware the most common result of car/bicycle collision is not death but some kind of head trauma for the cyclist, often resulting in brain damage.
I agree most especially in the city as a cyclist and a pedestrian. The more I've thought about it ", the more absurd cars, at least as currently configured, are as a means for transportation in high density zones.
As a stepping stone towards automated vehicles, I wish there were a way to electronically put a car into "city mode" when traveling within city limits. This "city mode" would give motor vehicles the speed, power and acceleration profile of basically a golf cart. 15mph/25kph max speed - which I think is the effective travel speed anyway given how cars tend to race up to the next red light. It would force cars into a more equal footing with other modes of transportation on the public travel ways. And this could be done with existing technology. Granted, it will never happen but the city would be s much more relaxed place.
It might be unfair assume accidents involving trucks are necessarily due to truck drivers. I think self-driving trucks have many more benefits however other than possibly reducing accidents.
Over 90% of accidents are caused by human error. That doesn't mean it's necessarily the truck driver's fault, as there are other drivers on the road. But if it isn't his fault, it's the fault of another driver. Considering how long truck drivers drive for and in what conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if much of that 90% is actually attributed to the truck drivers themselves instead of other drivers.
I'm not convinced this guy isn't on some vendetta. He only quotes total numbers, not accidents per thousand miles / deaths per thousand miles.
If I understand the these DOT numbers[1,2] properly the number of truck miles from 2009 to 2013 has dropped, which would be especially bad if the number of accidents has ridden, but that doesn't jibe with a) the 2008 recession ending and b) increased truck sales over the past 5 years[3]. The trucking industry publications I've been reading are generally in agreement that trucking demand exceeds capacity, and that demand has been steadily increasing since 2008.
He's right that some of the safety regulations have changed recently, and to the layman it appears that they have changed to be less safe. For example, as of this past June, drivers hauling oversize/overweight loads no longer have to take a 30-minute break that was formerly required. However, part of that reasoning was that it can be more dangerous for oversize trucks to be parked, especially at night, than it is for them to continue driving straight through[4].
The 30-minute break exemption has been granted in several other situations as well, for example when hauling HazMat that requires the driver to "attend," or supervise the vehicle even when it's stopped, since this is defined as an on-duty activity the driver would either have to eliminate the break, or stop supervising the load, so he/she would have to break a law no matter what, so it was decided that the 30-minute break would become optional.
About on-truck technology to make the road safer, it's a good idea, but it needs to work right every time. I've spoken to my business partner about it, (he's the one who's been through the whole trucking industry from driving right up to management), and in his other job, where he manages a trucking company, they've had demonstration units with all kinds of collision warnings, lane departure warnings, blind-spot warnings, and so on. They found that the alarms went off way too often when there was no problem - to the point where none of the drivers wanted to take these brand-new demonstration trucks out on a run. And the article's posterboy crash - the Tracy Morgan accident, was a new truck with those bells & whistles installed. The problem there was the driver's commute time to get to work.
Finally, the article reads as if the trucking industry wants to be unsafe. This is simply not true. There are jerks that drive trucks, just like there are jerks that drive 4-wheelers, but there's a culture of safety in trucking that really impresses me. Safety records for both drivers and companies, including inspection results, are tracked by the US government. If a driver's record is too bad no company will take them on, and if a carrier's record is too bad it will be prohibited from operating. Most of the "trucking industry" is truck drivers, and a truck driver's top priority is arriving alive and uninjured.
This is why drone technology is very interesting to me. If you have drones flying around that deliver things directly from docks to warehouses, or warehouse to warehouse, not only would it be faster, but potentially safer too (the drone could take paths that have no or minimal human population). There's probably a bunch of ways to regulate this as well, such that in the case of disaster, the cost of human life is extremely unlikely.
Drones have the capability of delivering directly to the final destination, unlike railways.
In fact,Amazon could redistribute their inventory between warehouses overnight depending on predicted popularity of various items. Or it allows them to have a gigantic single warehouse with every single item in it, and just worry about distribution centers as opposed to warehouses that hold inventory. Then every hour they could send the packages via drones from their central warehouse to distribution centers where they are immediately put on trucks and sent out.
Signs like those could be a godsend to teenagers out for a prank. Steal one from a road with a speed limit of 25, and put it on the interstate where the speed limit's 55, or the opposite, a speed limit of 55 in a 25 zone. I guess you could potentially add geofencing to the signs, but that means tacking up a roadsign becomes a lot more difficult as you suddenly need to spend the time to reprogram signs when you post them.
Theres no reason they have to be physical signs, just link it to the speed limit database companies like TomTom seem to have for their GPS units and use that. There's always the problem of keeping that up to date, but its no harder than the problems that would have to be solved for physical signs.
I'm sure it depends on local driving culture and varies from place to place, but there are many stretches of road where local drivers completely ignore posted construction speeds, except for a small percentage who cause dangerous backups and lane changes. Since worker safety is paramount, the best approach is using concrete barriers instead of orange barrels in these high speed zones, not just ignoring the majority of drivers.
It's inefficient and environmentally absurd to use trucks that way. Railroad tracks parallel I5. The solution is to pick the container off the semi, put it on a railcar, do the intercity haul on the rails (which are made for heavy loads) with minimal fuel and manpower costs, pick it up and put it on a truck to do the last mile in the destination city.
So why isn't this done now? Highways are subsidized by cars (fuel taxes), and railroads are taxed. The incentives are backwards.
What I'd do is significantly raise the weight taxes on trucks on the interstates, and use that money to subsidize the rail right-of-way.