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Comment by bitshiftfaced | Hacker News Reader

I see 18 wheelers do illegal maneuvers all the time, but as a society we understand that they have no better option most of the time. If I had to encode things like "park in a busy street" and "pull out into the road even though cars are still coming," and document that as company policy/codebase, I think I might get a bit nervous.

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I question the premise that 18 wheelers should be allowed operate in urban centers at all, let alone be tacitly allowed to resort to illegal maneuvers. It's a convenience and cost-savings for businesses that are able to have a semi truck drive direct to their door, but it creates serious negative externalities for everyone else. The vast majority of cargo headed into the city should be shifted into vans or small trucks that are intended to drive on city streets.

That sounds super expensive and a logistical nightmare. Imagine a pallet that has 1500 products on it, now those are reboxed, take more space, use more fuel because there will be more trips for each shipment. You also are now tracking probably a dozen boxes instead of a single pallet. There are a dozen boxes to open and inspect before accepting the delivery. You will still have the trucks in the streets too because it cant be easily eliminated if you want to keep auto shops or any light industry where the item exceeds the weight two humans can safely carry.

It would make more sense to me to legislate new commercial buildings must include a loading dock. Require developers to make the commercial buildings have shared loading dock so several small bodegas and stores can all share a dock on their building. This would reduce the amount of the trucks parking in the street with a liftgate or forklift to lower the pallets.

You don't need a huge truck to move pallets. A standard Sprinter van can carry three or four and you can get specialized vans that carry six.

There's also a huge space between 18 wheels and Sprinter. Fun fact: There's even cargo bikes that can carry up to 3 euro pallets (though that's clearly stretching the definition of "bike" to the breaking point) https://pulse.dbschenker.com/de/xxl-lastenfahrrad-europalett...

Then just do it.

The reality is that 18 wheeler s are there for a reason, and probably you should know it before think urban center only needs small trucks.

This is why you have a human driver do the “busy local street” part and then have the truck drive itself for the “follow the speed limit on an almost-featureless highway for 16 hours” part.

We do this for aircraft current state. The pilot manages the autopilot and exception handling. It's sort of silly we don't throw automatic emergency braking and lane keeping in trucks and call it a day.

Self driving companies want to sell us that we don't need a human operator at all. That's what the companies with large fleets of vehicles want so they the expenses of paying humans. Adding an "autopilot" to a truck while still having a human driver in the truck is not saving the company any money. Requiring a human also means that a truck cannot drive 24/7 like if it was 100% computer operated. Airlines deal with this as well by having maximum operating hours just like truck drivers.

So, unless it's 100% computer controlled, there's really not much point in it from the fleet owner's perspective

I've always thought that the fastest to achieve scenario would be: human driver drives truck to the first rest area on the highway, gets out and lets the autopilot do the rest. Vice versa when exiting the highway. You'll need some logistics planning to get the drivers to and from the right places, but that's not so hard; lots of rest areas are connected to the other side of the road (at least in Europe). Is no one working on that?

> Self driving companies want to rent us

FTFY

They have to sell the concept for us to want to rent the tech is more the sentiment I was after but completed with your sentiment

the thing about airplanes, is that although they are going fast, the margins for exceptions can be a lot wider. In a truck on a highway the margin of error is only feet. I don't know that a driver can really react meaningfully fast, especially if they are zoning out or idle. And, if they're not zoning out but instead paying close attention, what has been gained?

Agree on lane keeping, but my experience with emergency braking has been less than stellar. it seems to mostly react accidentally and occasionally not do what it is supposed to.

The robotaxis struggle with dropoffs and pickups for this reason I think.

In a dense city, there’s often nowhere you can legally stop. Real taxi drivers will often just stop in the middle of the street, or double park temporarily.

Walking home the other day, i saw a taxi which had stopped to pick up on the northeast corner of a crossroads. The passengers were taking their time. A southbound bus was trying to turn off that corner, but couldn't, because of the taxi, so it pulled out into the street and waited. Then the lights changed, and traffic started coming from the east and west; the traffic from the west piled up behind the stopped bus, and a vehicle in the traffic from the east wanted to turn north, and got stopped by the stopped traffic.

The entire junction was filled with immobile vehicles because one taxi had stopped.

In the UK, this is legal. Black cabs can stop wherever they like to pick up and set down. It's an extraordinary privilege.

You know what you don’t see doing illegal maneuvers all the time? Trains.

You know else I don't see? Railroad tracks going through the entirety of a city, and trains delivering cargo to local stores and other businesses directly.

Have you heard of Europe?

Can’t wait for you to no true Scotsman me after I tell you I’ve never seen what you describe in my 30 years living in Europe.

https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/swiss-operators-optimis...

I don’t know if anyone is arguing for completely eliminating trucks from the supply chain, but there are definitely counterexamples to the idea freight trains cannot penetrate cities at all. I believe there are even some specialized small trains which can deliver goods directly to loading bays of large stores, but I can’t find an example right now.

At some point, we will need to define which of the illegal maneuvers are expected vs which ones are unexpected.

In the mean time, I expect a lot of lawsuits and weird insurance decisions.

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