For consumer deliveries at least. However, (I suspect) much of the trucker industry goes to businesses, which would be much more willing to have an employee unload the truck when it arrives.
That isn't to glamorize nor humanize the profession...merely to show the obstacles that truck drivers deal with that are still too fringe to be modeled correctly or trusted in a non-supervised environment. There may be a not-so-distant future where driverless trucks take over long haul drives, with actual drivers handling the last mile. But don't expect the trucker to die quite so quickly.
How far is the line of sight for google self-driving cars?
I wonder if the reason we use large trucks is so that we can have only one driver and not pay for more. I wonder if having multiple vans instead of a single truck uses a similar amount of fuel (per pound of cargo).
1) The space needed to drive safely behind the car/truck in front of you would be wasted. Cargo, in a container (semi-van, etc.) does not need to travel a safe distance behind the cargo in-front of it; it is tightly packed, and there is a lot of 'cargo'. If all cargo was transported via. cargo vans, the wasted space in-between vehicles (distance for the same volume of cargo traveling with a semi-truck) traveling down the highway would add up to a HUGE distance. Btw. Lets see it in practice:
- The average distance a Truck Load semi-truck travels down the highway is ~856-miles
- DOT Guidelines suggest a three-second rule for driving behind a vehicle. So... at an average speed of 55 m.p.h. A car is traveling at 81ft/second. At three seconds this is 243 ft behind the car in front of you.
- A normal truck container is 48' (we'll go with 48' but there are 53'), and holds 24 pallets. 12 and 12 (side-by side), from front to back.
- I am not sure how many pallets a cargo van could take, but let's go with 2 (it is probably less than this).
At 2 pallets for each cargo van, we would need 12 cargo vans for the equivalent of shipping 1 semi-truck.
At an average of 55 m.p.h. on the highway, 12 cargo vans would total 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between. That's more than a 1/2 mile
* we, keychainlogistics.com have over 40,000 shipments on our system, right now, that would go on a single semi-truck. Most for today. In calculating needing cargo vans for these loads (sure they very in size, but lets go with a total size of 24 pallets per shipment) it would equal 12 * 40,000 = 480,000 vehicles.
With an average of 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between each truckload worth of shipment (calculation referenced above), we are talking a total of 40,000 (combined 12 cargo vans here) * 2,916 ft = 116,640,000 ft of wasted space which = 22,090.91 miles wasted
1.b) Think about the congestion on highways!
2) Large items needing to be shipped: Equipment, Logs, containers, etc.
3) Freight containers from ports. They are a standard size, and the maritime shipping industry, until 1950's or so did not use containers. The book - The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - gives an amazing/detailed understanding to the efficiency of containers. Which ultimately you need a semi-truck to transport a container.
4) The time to load palletized goods (something that would likely not fit in a cargo van) is much shorter than loading individual boxes