Trucks Are Killing Us
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
[0] - http://www.pavementinteractive.org/article/equivalent-single...
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.
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.
Amazon has fulfillment locations all around the US, so even with ground-only shipping they don't need two full days on average to deliver. (Map at http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/amazon-fulfillment/l... )
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?
To the extent that both use shipping containers, the process should be identical.
Over the last 6 months its really driven ip traffic on I-5.
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.
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.
[1] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
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.
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?
Yeah, they do it poorly and inaccurately, with lots of latency between requests.
That's rarer than you might imagine...
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).
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
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.
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.
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.)
Maybe people with no experience of insomnia just don't consider the possibility.
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.
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 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.
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]
[1] http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-h...
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.)
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.
European trucking laws are quite sane. From http://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/users/professional... :
"Driving time should not exceed 9 hours a day or 56 hours a week. After 4½ hours, drivers must take a break of at least 45 minutes."
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.
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.
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.
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".
Any idea what he was talking about?
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
This is an argument against nearly every technological development ever.
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.
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.
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?"
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?
Yes, this generalizes to all jobs and the entire economy. It's about time we accepted it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
Place the blame where blame is due.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
...financing? An industry as well-understood and predictable as trucking will not want for lenders.
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.
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.
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.
What are your thoughts on rail as an alternative to trucks?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-tr.... I'm using tables 4 and 5.
I still think it's right to expect sustained improvement over the long-term.
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.
What changed my mind? The effectiveness of Sweden's Vision Zero project: http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/en/Concept/Does-the-visi... http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/11/the-swedish-approach-...
"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%.
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?
They are not buying it, but being bought.
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.
http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-h...
> 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.
http://www.ccjdigital.com/e-log-mandate-advances-fmcsa-sends...
http://www.overdriveonline.com/eld-mandate-poised-to-begin-t...
So the same guy who wrote the piece has for 16 years been directly responsible for the lobbying he is decrying. Anyone know what's going on there?
I don't think anyone is arguing with 1.
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.'
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.
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.
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....
I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion looking at this data.
> Drivers can unionize and demand better hours. Insurance companies can require collision avoidance tech be installed. Etc.
Many things can happen, but they aren't happening, so...
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Driving while tired can be as dangerous as driving drunk.
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.
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.
By self-regulation, I mean something like a set of guidelines multiple trucking companies voluntarily sign on to. Or employment contracts.
Not just unwritten "goodwill", which is what your comment seems to be equating to "self-regulating". Apologies if I'm wrong about that.
> 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.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...
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.
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.
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.
Wow.
"Howard Abramson is a freelance writer who was an executive at American Trucking Associations from 1998 to 2014."
Gee, I wonder what's the backstory there?
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.
Maybe the author should have added the percentage of these truck accidents compared to all road accidents.
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.
(Thanks for letting me use one of my favorite quotes!)
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.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5547a3.htm [2] http://boredomtherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/animal-... [3] http://cdn.wideopenspaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/las...
In London, for instance, every single cyclist death in 2015 has been due to the cyclist getting crushed by a truck. [1]
I don't know about the US, but I suspect the statistics would be similar, at least in cities.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/recreational-cycling/1...
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.
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.
[1]https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/v... [2]https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/v... [3]http://www.ttnews.com/articles/printopt.aspx?storyid=37081 [4]http://www.ccjdigital.com/oversizeoverweight-interstate-haul...
You mean like 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.
What was expected here, honestly? Should he have made a note in his notebook?
> About a half-mile later, the posted speed limit dropped to 45 m.p.h. from the usual 65, which the driver also ignored.
Truly more often than not the people who do slow down are in the vast minority and arguably the bigger road hazard.