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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem.

This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.

Edit: Just want to add some additional information. Trucking companies at least were my friends worked, were extremely toxic. They made close to $100k. However, their personal life suffered greatly. Dispatchers would call them non-stop, even when they had doctor visits/family gatherings scheduled. The dispatchers would give them loads, that were basically humanely impossible to be delivered on-time by the book. Some of them would be awake all day, and leave in the evening then drive 24 hours+. Dispatchers would often scream at them, when they would call because they were falling asleep and were not going to make the delivery on-time because they needed a nap.

Some of them actually crashed, because they saw a "deer" lol.....they fell asleep.

These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings. This put them in an awful position in which they had to keep driving no matter how toxic the environment was. Unfortunately, I don't really know how they are doing today, as we grew apart.

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> This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.

I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the next 50 years. We have a lot of laws and standards that, in effect, allowed people to cheat a little but not too much (or break a few traffic laws but not too many, etc). All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.

We are going to need to do a lot of work to find new equilibrium points where the various parties can cheat less. It will be made especially difficult because technology penetrates industries more quickly these days so it would be best if everything changed at once, but that also makes it more difficult.

Maybe the state will have to outsource enforcement of these issues so that it doesn't have to admit to allowing some rule breaking. Anyone want to co-found Selective-Enforcement-as-a-Service?

That's called "the cops".

Also Public Service Commissions.

The anecdotes I hear about "cheating the system" before electronic logs are mostly along the lines of: stuck in stand-still traffic for 30 minutes, I'll log it as a break. Whereas according to the electronic log you're still driving.

That’s not even close to how it used to work.

Say you have a truck governed at 68mph which means you can log an average of 65mph without raising any eyebrows. So what we would do is log the miles you drove/65 and not the actual time you drove.

Or, how I used to run, keep your logbook behind so you can backfill the driving hours and breaks so you can eventually be legal again — usually at a shipper or receiver you could catch up as they commonly would keep you there for 6-8 hours. What’s the buzzword, eventually consistency?

Not even mentioning “loose leaf” logbooks where one could rewrite whole days to gain hours.

Those days are long gone now…

I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules. I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.

I hope we never reach a state where technology actively defeats us.

The only time that I think it’s responsible to have total enforcement is when the rules perfectly capture reality and every facet of it …which to say is never.

> I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.

A longish life has confirmed this to me, over and over.

I agree in general but there are some places where gray areas benefit the employer more than the employee and I think this is one of them. If everyone is forced to cheat the regulations to get their jobs done then it's no longer just a gray area and the regulations are pointless.

> Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born.

Gray areas are also where all manner of corruption is born. Officials soliciting bribes, nepotism, exploitative labor practices, these things love gray areas.

They also keep bad rules around and encourage selective enforcement to target the disadvantaged. Lincoln said it best: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.

For example, I encounter far less discrimination and less racism living in where I do now than in other places, and yet the laws are practically the same here as in anywhere else. The reason I experience less discrimination here is due to the encompassing framework that everyone here is subjected to as part of their experience growing up. The strictness of the laws is irrelevant to that issue.

If you want to change how people act, you need to change the entire framework that people are growing within.

I may be missing something, but increased enforcement sounds like a great way to solve the corruption problem?

Eg. Public servants make ends meet by fudging timesheets => Enforcement clamps down on practice => Employees bargain for higher pay to make up for difference => Public gets a more transparent accounting of their labor costs

To me adjusting the level of enforcement is like the “fine” knob. It absolutely needs to be adjusted according to the situation.

But it’s not the “coarse” knob. You can only turn enforcement up or down so much before you need a paradigm shift.

You make it sound like you have convincing evidence that is the case. Do you?

There's no set of laws that can efficiently govern dishonest people. Or in "low trust" environments, if you prefer think of it amorally.

Enforcement just moves around where the corruption is incentivized to happen. Is it at the bottom -- workers stealing extra pay or higher up where the enforcement happens?

Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.

That's sometimes true but I'd just note this has nothing to do with the original argument made praising gray areas.

The drug war is a place where there's an escalating war between dealing and enforcement, yes. But most dealers aren't having a lot of fun in this gray area.

I have mixed feelings on this. I actually think this is a reasonable response to overly rigid systems but also creates fertile ground for unethical behavior. Ideally, I think we need systems with rigid guardrails, but that the distance between them is proportional to the amount of risk incurred by what you call the practice of "art".

Bending the rules is great in some areas, but I don't think it should apply across the board. Ignoring rules is fine in low-risk scenarios (particularly when the risk is not borne by someone else) but I don't want, for example, my commercial airline pilot to get too artsy when it comes to his approach for landing, or the programmer writing critical code for the autonomous vehicle to unilaterally decide they know better, or the electrician I hire to flagrantly disregard consensus standards.

From previous work in safety critical code, I regularly confronted situations where rule-breaking was done as a means to an end, while not being cognizant confronting the risks that incurred because of cognitive biases. People also loved gray areas in this role because it limits accountability. I'm sure there were people who at Enron thought they were playing the gray areas as an artistic endeavor to maximize profit, but I don't think incentivizing that behavior is the best for society.

> vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules

The new rules save lives. Crash accidents involving large trucks statistic: https://zarzaurlaw.com/category/blog/trucking-accidents/

'Sure, that will save a few lives but millions will be late.' is a Simpsons quote, not a good argument.

For some reason the number of accidents has been increasing since 2008 (which is a min point, by the way).

Hmm, this sounds so appealing, yet I think it's terribly confused. I think you're confusing the "gray area" between what people and rules say and what people do, with "areas of slack". Slack areas are where people can take initiative to do what they want (following the rules or not). Gray areas can be that sometimes, were more like that in the past, but today, gray areas are often areas of over-determination - the rules are contradictory, you could be punished or suffer for violating any of them and you have to carefully calculate which violation will let you survive. There's no joy in that kind of shit. And, as mentioned by other posters, breaking some rules can kill people.

At least in this case, breaking the rules kills a lot of people - IIRC out of all the truck-caused fatalities, more than 1000 deaths/year in USA can be directly attributed to drowsy driving.

Sleep-deprived truckers should not be a thing, it has pretty much the same effects as driving drunk, but much more common so causes more crashes and more deaths. Breaching the rules for that should have as much tolerance as those intentionally driving drunk and endangering others that way.

In systems that are safety-critical? Yikes.

The reason we now have electronic tracking of freight truckers is because they used to be notorious for taking uppers and driving as long as possible, causing all sorts of nasty accidents. That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.

> That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.

I believe it's "selfish greed" on behalf of the company, but a reasonable response to difficult constraints, on behalf of the driver.

Massively endangering others by the thousands is not a reasonable response just so they can shave a few hours off their trip

I think the argument more is that truckers ignore safety rules around maximum hours out of perceived (or actual) economic necessity.

Exactly. I want absolutely zero gray areas when I'm on a highway in the middle of Indiana at night and cross paths with at least a few hundred semi trucks. The less gray the better.

Hey some of us live here :)

To your point, a few winters ago I was driving up the NY Northway (north of Albany) in January, in a heavy snow storm, and cargo trucks were consistently passing me at 70+ mph.

One deer or one owl into traffic...it would have been a complete charlie foxtrot.

That’s great until we’re talking about safety. I’m not willing to have my family run over by a semi truck with a drowsy and over worked driver for the sake of protecting these grey areas.

Safety rules are written in blood, after all.

A good regulatory scheme will give people flexibility in how they comply with the rules so that productivity and innovation aren't (overly) constrained. If you find that you constantly need to break rules to be productive then it means you need regulatory reform, not less oversight or enforcement within the current regulatory context.

> I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules.

I think we agree actually. I didn't say it was good that rule breaking is getting harder, just that it's a fact.

We have a lot of enculturation around a certain level of surveillance and visibility. Things are quickly becoming more visible and we will need to adjust. Preserving grey area can be part of that, but only if we decide to preserve it.

The breaking of the rules here is not for the driver's benefit, though. Its the owners greed pushing serious costs on their employees. Disruptive innovation doesn't always make things better.

What are some examples of artistic and ingenious rule breaking?

If there's a useful gray area, then the law should change to legalize it.

Would you support speed limit enforcement by checking license plates at the beginning of a stretch of highway and at the end and auto-ticketing anyone who averaged over the speed limit?

If you raise the speed limit 15% to where it should be, sure.

To what, 55 mph? It's the most fuel-efficient speed for the majority of vehicles, and is far less likely to kill people in an accident, than a collision at 70*1.15 = 80mph.

why stop there? pretty much any form of transportation is more dangerous and/or generates more emissions that humans on their own two legs. collectively, we have decided to trade some of that away to actually get places in a reasonable amount of time. but if you don't feel comfortable driving in 65+ mph traffic, there are plenty of surface roads that run parallel to interstates.

Average speed cameras? They already exist in the UK and certain parts of Europe I’m familiar with.

Yes, can confirm, such cameras exist in Serbia and generate electronic tickets available to the vehicle owner on a government website if the calculated average speed is above allowed.

I do not think the method you are describing would usefully increase safety so it seems like a bad idea to me.

All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.

- I think stability depends on what time frame you look at. Pushing how much time you spend driving, how little you sleep and so-forth may be stable for some period (weeks, months, a few years..) but it's not stable for a person longish term. Letting wages drift downward, so you wind-up hiring people with more problems (say, amphetamine addiction) may also be short-term stable but not long term stable.

The actually instability of the situation I think is illustrated by "chameleon carrier". Companies that shutdown and restart when they accumulate too safety violations.[1]

The thing about the situation is when things are being continually jury rigged to keep people working in the most profitable conditions for the carriers and the worst conditions for them, it's the opposite of stable, it's extremely fragile.

[1] https://www.teletracnavman.com/resources/blog/the-hunt-for-c...

Saying the system as a whole is stable does not mean there are no unstable parts. Goods get delivered at an acceptable cost with an acceptable loss rate - even with chameleon carriers and any other bad actors that exist. Suddenly changing how easy it is to break the rules, without changing anything else, could destabilize that equilibrium.

> I think stability depends on what time frame you look at.

What is the timeframe that you are thinking of where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?

What is the timeframe that you are thinking of...

-- When we're talking of a system, "stability" is roughly the property that a small perturbation in the system causes it to return to the position that it was previously in. The pandemic was significant shock but the notable thing we see is that the system.

...where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?

The individual rule-breaking (working more hours than a person could stand) still allowed day functioning of the system but it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them. Hence, the system was fragile to shock.

> it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them

That situation seems pretty exceptional to me. I think it's fair to call an equilibrium that requires a covid pandemic to disrupt "stable." I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.

If you just mean that capitalism is inherently unstable, then yes of course, but that doesn't seem closely related to the space for rule breaking as the space varies from place to place and industry to industry.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.

I never said trucking was unusually fragile for the America today. Many other industries follow the paradigm of barely paying enough and relying on a trickle of people willing to put with their framework and all of them are whining but not actually changing [2]. The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1] is also a description of how a lot of industries operates. It's fragile, ugly and profitable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28918853 [2] https://coloradosun.com/2021/10/03/labor-shortage-missing-wo...

> The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1]

Look, are you talking about trucking or are you talking about capitalism writ large? The larger capitalistic structure is both unjust and deeply unstable - but that topic is outside of the specific conditions of trucking and the accuracy of monitoring systems. The limits of the accuracy of surveillance systems are relevant, as far as I know, to all economic systems.

Or, to put it another way, I will ask again: what period do you see this system being unstable over? If it's just the covid pandemic then I see the disruption, but I disagree that the system was not 'stable' before. It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.

> It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.

It really wasn't, though; IIRC, the current reading of the evidence is that the mass extinction started about 10 million years before the impact delivered the coup de grace.

But I think you were assuming the somewhat popular fiction where things were stable, but then the meteorite wiped them out.

Next 50 yrs? This will be lucky to still be an issue in 5 to 10 yrs. Soon enough, the long haul routes will be autonomous. Humans will handle the short haul from some rural / suburban hub to the suburban / urban final destination. Autonomous might not be able to do "the last mile" but that's not what cause ppl to not want to be drivers.

I'm personally skeptical about the immediate practicality of autonomous driving, but either way, I was not just speaking about driving. I was talking about nearly every area of rule around 'public order.'

Long haul is practical and doable. Full door to door autonomous is unnecessary in the short term. Simply cracking the long haul nut is going to be significant.

I think we will see "micro fines" and electronic car systems in the next 10 years. Go over the speed limit for a certain period of time (eg, 10 mins)? Microfine. $5. Park in a no parking area for too long? Microfine. Don't signal your turn? Microfine, $0.50.

Yes, a nightmare.

Thankfully, in the context of laws in the US, I believe the 4th amendment may be helpful here. But other places will not be as lucky.

This is a terrible idea. It fixes the cost for speeding or not signaling to something that a well off person can easily afford. Even I would consider just paying a $5 fine in order to speed to get to an important meeting, etc. A $500 fine for 10 minutes of speeding would make me think twice

I think that actually illustrates the above commenter's point about gray areas? the highway does not devolve into lethal chaos when people exceed the limit by 10 mph. even 20 mph over is not so bad when the relative speed among vehicles is low. or on the other hand, a few outliers are not a huge problem when proper lane discipline is maintained (ie, don't pass on the right, keep right except to pass). it's not a big deal if most people occasionally speed to get to an important appointment. it's also not catastrophic if a few people who can afford it take the hit and speed everywhere. mostly, it just offends our sense of fairness.

The thing that would hold that back is the huge stock of existing analogue/gas vehicles. For all the talk of going electric, no one is going to buy everyone a new electric car and no one is going to just prevent the gas cars from driving since the economy needs people to work. Not that I'm in favor of the CO2 pollution this implies - though I'm not in favor of your Orwellian scenario either, which would be plausible otherwise.

Nah, you don't need a fancy car for the nightmare. Insurance companies are already letting you put in a device that measures your driving. It connects to the OBD-II port - standard on all vehicles since 1996.

Microfines was tested in Israel and backfired: https://priceonomics.com/effectiveness-of-fines-for-late-pic...

Reminds me of driving a cab in 5th Element :-/

But, if this were to come to pass, rich people would just speed and pay the fines as the cost of running the business. It's why fines to pick up late from the daycare backfired badly.

That's really interesting. I've a similar anecdote from a different industry: pizza delivery.

I'm old enough that my first job was right at the cusp of computerized order entry (as opposed to handwritten tickets) at the small pizza shop I worked at in high school.

Prior to the computer order entry system drivers would routinely "lose" one or two tickets a shift and just pocket the cash for the order. One of them told me that the computerized ticketing basically halved their actual take home pay.

Electronic payments and accounting remove the ability for a lot of low level corruption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz7Gu6agA

I take your point but I wouldn’t call theft “take home pay”…

Except if everyone does it and nobody really gets busted for it, then it is. You just don't like business being run that way.

The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can.

Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.

I understand that the dictionary follows usage, and i get that you have a rhetorical goal, but with that logic Enron was simply overpaying its employees.

I think there's an aspect of whether it's expected or not here.

If the culture of the delivery drivers was that this was a perk of the job that everyone sort of knew about, then I think it's reasonable to call it a type of compensation.

Sort of like how unreported cash tips are a type of perkany rely on, even though no contract could ever stipulate that.

The question, to me, is whether the people with "lost" orders actually got a pizza in the end. If they didn't, then it is theft—if not by the individual, then by the company whose structure incentivizes the individual's behavior. (Similar to how Wall-street investment-auditing firms were ultimately responsible for incentivizing their auditors to mischaracterize the risk of certain asset classes in 2008.)

I thought it was obvious that the delivery person takes the cash at the door in exchange for the pizza and pockets it. If the pizza isn't delivered, there's no cash to pocket.

Oh and I'm not arguing it isn't theft. I'm arguing that the system we've built basically demands that people steal from their employers in order to survive.

If you don't like our sort of downwards spiral into a trustless third-world society where everyone is trying to scam everyone else then you might want to look at what policies you support that crush wages for people who aren't at least software devs.

Good. Fuck people who make normalize theft and dishonesty.

Manager must have been in on the scam then.

I worked at a pizza shop with paper tickets. Every single one was accounted for at the end of the day. If any tickets were missing, that was out of the manager's pocket, so he made sure he had them all.

In the EU it got harder and harder to cheat the digital tachographs. The latest generation of smart tachographs record GPS coordinates of start/stop points so one can no longer cheat with a magnet on the wheel's Hall sensor. Everything is signed cryptograpghcally, even the wheel sensors have a crypto seal, the only way to cheat is to use tampered firmware, which carries huge penalties. I'm surprised at how deregulated the US transportation market is by comparison.

EU is way ahead of the US when it comes to trucking safety.

US is a weird place sometimes. Business/Money trumps safety. Regulations are often met with huge push back even when they can potentially save lives.

EU and US is just fundamentally different. It is hard to overstate that. But it comes with trade-offs. Workers in EU, in general, have better standards at work than in US. It helps that in EU, healthcare is not directly part of employer cost ( everyone pays into it ). EU tends ( I do mean tends, because it seems to vary greatly ) toward unions, whereas US truckers seeem un-unionized by and large.

    > ICC is a checking on down the line
    > Well I'm a little overweight and my logbook's way behind

- Dave Dudley, "Six Days on the Road" 1963

The give-and-take between making a living and obeying the law in truck driving is well established in our culture.

Anyone who's interested I'd encourage to check out Dave Dudley's music. It's all there: racing time, avoiding the law, fatigue, loneliness, bodily harm, drug abuse, etc.

The electronic logs are probably the reason these rules have been relaxed recently. When you could cheat, everyone just cheated because you needed to in order to make a living. Now you can't cheat and the industry is speaking up about it.

Yup, there was a big hit to guys driving extra hours when it became easier to spot them.

It was easy to make extra money, but it was at the cost of all of their time. It kinda inflated how good a living you could make...at least looking at the end results. But it also wasn't very realistic.

Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into.

>Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into.

Do you really think a middle aged truck driver is (was) holding the steering wheel for 16hr straight as a matter of routine business? Of course not.

Tropes like that make for easy online virtue points but that wasn't the reality for the overwhelming majority of people who were cooking the books.

These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order.

And occasionally someone would go overboard, drive 36hr straight and cause a crash. And because that's an easy thing for people who have zero knowledge of industry incentives and feedback loops to get their panties in a knot over they made it "extra illegal" because you can't make being an idiot illegal.

And so now the industry cuts far less tasteful corners and pays everyone crap and you have drivers who have barely memorized the pre-trip, have barely and hours behind the wheel, can't read english, and who choose a different career in short order and are likewise treated as disposable.

So the net effect is more or less a wash but a handful of people get to get big raises and some politicians can pat themselves on the back for "solving" logbook fraud.

> These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order.

And how does this justify as something safe? When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. Safely behind a computer. If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives.

I really don't understand your counterpoint here.

>When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while.

>If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives.

I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?

Why would you assume that they drive home? Regardless, there would hypothetically be massive differences such as distance and size of vehicle. Both are bad.

Not the OP but guessing the difference is that he wasn't driving a loaded tractor trailer at freeway speeds to get home from work.

I worked 12 hour shifts as a 911 dispatcher and was mentally exhausted after those shifts. I had an hour drive home each of those shifts. There were definitely many shifts I wasn't driving home safe. Luckily my hour drive was like that because I was "temporarily relocated". The employer gave us the option to go book a hotel stay so I had some days where I was too tired to drive home safely and would stay in the hotel 5 minutes away.

And that's just me in a small little sedan, not an overloaded 18 wheeler. For context, I also do have a commercial drivers license. Driving for 60-80 hours in a week is just not safe. There is no way to try and justify that it is.

The only people doing that many hours of driving a week "safely" were probably high on cocaine. Cocaine usage was quite prevalent in the trucking industry because of this huge push to have drivers fudging logs and overdriving.

There are tons of studies out there that prove that driving while tired can be just as bad as driving drunk, if not worse depending on how deprived of sleep you are and how long you've been going.

Here's the current rules. They seem pretty reasonable

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/freight-trucking-dot-hours-136...

For example, drivers who transport property in the same state are subject to state regulations but not federal regulations. Whereas drivers who deliver materials from state to state must comply with federal regulations. Among the regulations:

  A reset occurs when a driver has had marked 34 consecutive hours off duty. The workweek starts after the last legal reset. For example, if you begin at 1 a.m. on Monday, then the workweek continues until 1 a.m. the following Monday.

  Each duty period must begin with at least 10 hours off-duty.

  Drivers may work no more than 60 hours on-duty over seven consecutive days or 70 hours over eight days. And they need to maintain a driver's log for seven days and eight days after, respectively.
  
  Drivers may be on duty for up to 14 hours following 10 hours off duty, but they are limited to 11 hours of driving time.
  
  Drivers must take a mandatory 30-minute break by their eighth hour of coming on duty.
  
  The 14-hour duty period may not be extended with off-duty time for breaks, meals, fuel stops, etc.

I would say the only issue is on your required break time, you sit around doing nothing and not get paid for it. If you are at home that is fine, if you are a long haul trucker, you're stuck at a truck stop waiting for time to complete.

As a side note, as others have mentioned, truck drivers have been getting paid less and less over the years, and that's not accounting for inflation; plus it's rough on relationships, so it's no wonder there is a shortage.

The safety issues the parent posts were talking about are greatly increased when these rules are circumvented in order to drive a bunch more hours than that.

They're generally not circumvented to "drive a bunch more hours". That's a fools game. You need to take breaks eventually. Cramming more hours into the work week doesn't actually help you in the long term because the human body can't sustainably run on unsafe amounts of sleep. The books get cooked to avoid wasting valuable on-duty hours while sitting around waiting to be loaded/unloaded.

They generally are circumvented to make it to the receiver or next shipper within a given "shift". So instead of stopping 1hr from the receiver you might cook the books, get there, go off duty, sleep, etc. They unload at their convenience before you clock back in and then you cook the books again making it look like you're still off duty when driving an hour to your next load where you repeat the same 2-6hr loading delay shitshow. Then you cook the books a third time running 30min across town to somewhere you can get prepared food and park, hit up the massage parlor, etc, whatever it is you do to burn half a day off duty.

So instead of burning a work day doing busy work and sitting in your truck watching movies on an ipad you've accomplished a 34hr reset in that time and most of those 34ish hours were in fact spent off duty.

> Cramming more hours into the work week doesn't actually help you in the long term because the human body can't sustainably run on unsafe amounts of sleep.

The body can run on unsafe amounts of sleep for a long time. It is unhealthy, it is unsafe and leads to mistakes and crashes, but people in fact regularly attempt that. Many many people in fact think they are being hardworking and strong for doing that.

The pressure to drive unsafely is very real on professional drivers. The drivers (not trucks) I knew were telling me exact same story. Regularly driving a lot and without good sleep. Pressure to drive more and faster.

Also, this is how the debate started:

> I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem.

While I think 48 hours drive was exaggeration or drivers brag, it was meant to express "a lot of driving way more then is reasonable".

The big issue truckers have is that typical loading/unloading delays tend to result in large stretches of what is effectively off duty time punctuated by moving the truck a few hundred yards that they don't get credit for.

And you assume it wrong, having a car is a luxury in my native country and I was only able to afford one after I got into a comfortable 9-19 work schedule.

Don't assume that everyone is American or that American culture for commuting is widespread across the globe.

Good public transportation is a luxury in the majority of the US. Most jobs in most places require a vehicle + license + insurance + maintenance. In my city, we have a bus service but it can be 2 hours late on a consistent basis. Sometimes they don't even show up and you have to wait for the next pass and hope it shows up. Sometimes the driver is sick and there is no replacement, so no bus. Also, many places will fire you if you are late, so you need to be at the stop 2 hours before it shows up just to be safe, and you might not even be safe if the driver is sick. This is a medium sized city.

So in many places, your options would be sleep at work, or drive home tired.

Yeah, I will let you know I'm originally from Brazil, now a Swedish citizen. So any problem you've encountered in the USA I've probably seen worse.

A bus from my hometown to the office, a trip of about 25 km, took me 3 hours somedays, usually would be between 1h30m-1h45m. One way.

> So in many places, your options would be sleep at work, or drive home tired.

Please, there are other options, they are just more inconvenient than what you are used to accept living on.

I've slept in offices' cafeteria room because I had no public transportation back home more times than I could count on all my fingers and toes...

"There are other options than sleeping at work. You could sleep at work."

I too have slept in a break room. I've also slept under a desk in an office (spending 8+ hours outside until everyone went home). And I'm in the US.

The grass is not always greener on the other side, my friend.

The danger from a 2,000 pound car is not comparable to the danger from a truck that weighs up to 80,000 pounds (or FORTY TIMES as much). And that's not even considering overweight loads.

I mean both will significantly kill people in an accident.

"Eleven percent of all motor vehicle crash deaths in 2019 occurred in large truck crashes."

"Twelve percent of all passenger vehicle occupant deaths and 22 percent of passenger vehicle occupant deaths in multiple-vehicle crashes in 2019 occurred in crashes with large trucks."

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/large...

"Large trucks accounted for: 10% of all vehicles involved in fatal crashes; 4% of all registered vehicles; 7% of total vehicle miles traveled"

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/large-t...

One is SIGNIFICANTLY (twice!) more likely to kill people in an accident. To say otherwise is just a lie.

>One is SIGNIFICANTLY (twice!) more likely to kill people in an accident. To say otherwise is just a lie.

Show me where I said that. You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car but not a truck because you're only half as likely to kill someone than a large truck. To say otherwise is just a lie! See I can put words in your mouth and use it as a red herring too.

The correct answer is it's not ok to drive home exhausted regardless of the vehicle you are in.

> I mean both will significantly kill people in an accident.

Or, you know, when you literally said that it's no different:

> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?

> You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car

Show me where I said that.

YOU are the one who claimed that driving exhausted in a truck is no different from driving exhausted in a car. They are EXTREMELY different. One is SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to end in a death, which is why that one has significantly more regulation, even though driving recklessly is illegal in any case.

>Or, you know, when you literally said that it's no different:

Ok so you are just arguing because you want to be right. I asked what's different. Do you not understand the difference between a statement or a question?

You quoted me as saying I literally said driving tired in a car or truck is no different:

>> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?

That's obviously a question. It starts with "what" and ends with a question mark. It can't "literally" be a statement.

>Show me where I said that.

Sorry you completely missed the point I was making. You are using red herrings and I called you out on it by using a red herring.

I'm gonna be done here, you aren't arguing in good faith, so it's a waste of both our time. I know you are going to reply because you just have to have the last word, so be my guest.

Most of them didn't really have an opportunity for a life so you can't blame them. What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time? Legally you can only stop at a truck stop. If you wake up at 6:30, spend an hour on breakfast, then drive for 4 hours, with a 10 minute break every hour (30 minutes) , then stop for an hour for lunch (at 11:30), then drive for another 4 hours with half hour brakes before an hour for supper (now 6:00), then two more hours, it is 9:00. For a normal 8 hour sleep night you now have an 1.5 hours to kill in a middle of nowhere area with nothing to do. Most people don't need that much time for breaks. You can easily see how someone would want to cheat for more pay - there isn't much else to do.

Now for health our hypothetical trucker above should get out and move, but face it, most people aren't getting their exercise.

Perhaps dystopian to say, but this sounds like a perfect use-case for 5G-streamed VR MMO games. Have an hour to kill in the middle of nowhere? Jack in!

Or read a book. Watch a movie. Write a book. There are many things to do.

Also on the mandated Sunday stop I see many drivers maintain their trucks and cabs. Life doesn’t have to be boring.

> What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time?

Railroads have had to deal with that since the Hours of Service Act in 1907. After 12 hours, train crews and dispatchers are "dead on the law", and have to stop the train. The railroad tries hard to prevent that. They don't schedule people for the full 12 hours. There are crew change points. Railroads put train crews up in motels. Ferry crews around in crew vans. Once in a while a train does end up stopped for that reason, usually because some other problem tied up traffic.

Interestingly, while there's theoretical work on the Truck Driver Scheduling Problem [1], there doesn't seem to be someone offering this as a service. That might be a startup opportunity for someone.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589631...

Some railways are using "Driver Status Monitoring", which uses things like eye tracking to check the driver is alert.

Even with the best shift scheduling software, it's difficult to handle cases outside the railway company's control -- like the driver being tired because they were kept awake by external noise, stress etc when they were trying to sleep.

> What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time?

Uhh... keep driving home because HOS regulations don't apply when you're off duty? https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/personal...

"The following are examples of appropriate uses of a CMV while off-duty for personal conveyance ... Commuting between the driver’s terminal and his or her residence ... Authorized use of a CMV to travel home after working at an offsite location"

Although frankly the answer is "stop somewhere and sleep because your trip is too long to do in a single day" and I'm not sure why you think that somehow that's too much of an inconvenience for them.

> These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing.

Hi, IT guy here. When I'm sleep-deprived, there is absolutely 0 chance of it causing some family to die. It's very different.

"We can't stop $badThing because they might do $evenWorseThing !!"

No thanks on that analysis, maybe trucking companies should stop unsafe driving practices and stop exploiting their workers.

> These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing

The difference is that IT guy won't crash truck into another car when overworked. Truckers did.

And it was not because they were idiots. It was, because humans are affected by tiredness. And it did not happened because of some larger goal, but because it is cheaper to pressure trucker to drive too much.

Christ, lay off the damn moral superiority complex.

Electronic log books are not "a lot more difficult." Google "truck electronic log cheat"

In some cases it's just pulling a fuse or the right connector.

In other systems you can literally tell the e-logger that you're doing a kind of driving that 'doesn't count' and the system goes "oh okay" and that's that.

Reportedly a lot of state police commercial vehicle cops don't bother to check e-loggers because they're lazy and it's not as easy as flipping open a paper book.

Actually remember a presentation from one of the logbook startups from a few years ago. The key feature that skyrocketted adoption was the ability to fudge (...er, "correct") the logbook manually. When it was automated, they had issues because it would basically lock them down to the rules.

>These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings.

From a macroeconomic perspective these guys are heroes.

Depending on how the driver is contracted 100k is not a big deal. Because the take home is not even close to that. For instance take off the fuel costs off that 100k just for starters

Isn't the key to drive as a team?

I actually talked to a guy that drove as a "team" but really just solo. He was proud he drove 48 hours non-stop and made more money.

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