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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

I think the truckers often want to drive longer than they’re legally allowed.

Yep. Every time a truck is parked, that trucker is away from home and also not making money. They almost universally hate the limits. Of course it's also in the collective best interest to not have massive trucks with tens of thousands of lbs of cargo driven by exhausted drivers.

Yeah, the restrictions make sense for society but the truckers (annd trucking companies) aren’t the ones that want them.

I agree there have to be restrictions, the idea of speed popping truckers driving for days without sleep is not good for anyone. My guess though, call me cynical, is that bigger companies pushed for these rules. They help push our smaller players who are more burdened by paperwork and compliance. The source of most industry regulation like this is a desired barrier to entry.

Aren’t truckers often paid by the mile and not the hour, incentivizing minimal rest?

Exactly, saying truckers often want to drive longer than they’re legally allowed is technically correct but not the whole truth. Interestingly the trucker situation seems to exist quite universally.

They aren't paid when waiting for loads though, and that eats into hours. So you can be stuck at a terminal burning drive hours while technically not driving.

And it drives them up the wall that they can't get to the shipper/receiver, clock out and then load/unload, drive 10-30min to where they can park and then turn the truck off for the night.

Meanwhile some CDL bus driver or day cab driver clocks out at the end of his shift, commutes an hour home, has dinner, gets woken up for 10min at 3am by his infant and then clocks back into work at 4am and the government is fine with it.

Same number of waking hours. Same number of driving hours. But the white collar bureaucrats give the latter a pass.

Back in the day they just cooked the books but now with ELD they can't anymore.

It seems to me the dynamics of the failures are different - cab drivers drive smaller vehicles at slower speeds in more engaging traffic. When a semi truck crashes it makes a highly visible spectacle, and if there are other people involved, with fatalities. If a cab driver takes a micronap in rush hour traffic they bounce off someone's bumper.

Note parent also mentioned bus driver. 20 tonnes does not merely "bounce off someone's bumper"; 20 tonnes plus 70 passengers even less so, and all that's assuming it's only a 40-foot bus. Articulated buses are 60' here, with some articulated trolley-buses having such outrageous torque they had to be de-tuned to avoid destroying themselves.

A zero-to-sixty (kilometer) on par with a Miata, no loudly revving diesel engine or exhaust, and approximately 40 tonnes between coach and passenger weight should not be so quickly dismissed.

That does change the math, but again, the buses aren't usually going that fast (I'm sure their average speed is far closer to zero than to 60), and like I said, they are much more engaged, constantly stopping or changing lanes. There's much less chance of the bus driver nodding off on a quiet stretch of highway.

It does seem like a small but noticeable improvement would be made if shipping/receiving locations were incentivized to allow trucks to park there overnight. Walmart was an example that stuck out to me - it's a decision by each store as to whether trucks can stay in the parking lot overnight. I can't see why anyone benefits from allowing a Walmart to say truck drivers can't stay in their massive parking lot before the planned 5am delivery.

You mean the buses where you don't have to wear a seatbelt or even have a seat?

Safety is pretty damn low on bus priorities. Even with our damn children, school buses are often driven by underpaid, overworked, inexperienced people, and the kids have nothing to protect them in an accident. City buses don't have belts or safety either, but at least they are usually in very low speed collisions.

We had to implement an annoying rule about stopping before train tracks so they'd stop trying to cross in front of trains!

We ignore it because fixing it would cost tax dollars

They're not burning drive hours, they're burning on-duty hours which are also limited. You are limited to 14 hours of on-duty time. You are also limited to 11 hours of actual driving time out of those 14 hours. So, I guess if you are delayed more than 3 hours (minus breaks) you are kinda eating into drive hours because of the on-duty limit of 14.

Sounds like as well as mandating limited on-duty time government needs to mandate pay for waiting time is same as pay for driving. This would reduce the incentive for drivers to drive more hours.

This is not so straightforward when drivers are paid by the kilometer. In such cases government could mandate minimum waiting pay rate is average equivalent hourly pay rate of driving hours from same shift, or such like.

I was just reading Arriving Today[0] which mentioned that people have studied pay-per-mile for US truckers and come up with pretty clear payment rates that are needed to support safe driving behaviors. I think it was about 60c/mile was majority safe speed and length of drive, but the average is 30c/mile and for individual truckers contracting out, it pushes down towards about 20c/mile.

[0]https://www.harpercollins.com/products/arriving-today-christ...

Depends but in general yes. I have a relative who owns his own truck and finds his own loads. He gets paid when he delivers his load, so he's still incentivesed to go as fast as possible. Thankfully he's not as tech savvy to cheat the ELD

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