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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Don't assume that everyone is American or that American culture for commuting is widespread across the globe.
So in many places, your options would be sleep at work, or drive home tired.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Now for health our hypothetical trucker above should get out and move, but face it, most people aren't getting their exercise.
Also on the mandated Sunday stop I see many drivers maintain their trucks and cabs. Life doesn’t have to be boring.
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...
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.
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.
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.
No thanks on that analysis, maybe trucking companies should stop unsafe driving practices and stop exploiting their workers.
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.