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Trucks Are Killing Us

nytimes.com

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Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#91

Post by sokoloff »

futhey wrote: post #56
rcarrigan87 wrote: post #48

I'm all for the safety arguments being made by the author but he does paint the trucking industry as this huge money making business when that really isn't the case. Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs. It's an industry where innovation is very hard because you really need to justify every dollar spent on R&D. Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there…

As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depressed over the last three decades and have seen a drop in real wages in many segments of the trucking industry. I saw many drivers keeping multiple log books, skipping or cutting-short rest breaks. Professional drivers can and do operate safely. But with some car…

Who would drive a truck for $11/hr max? You could make more driving Uber or bartending/waiting tables...

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#92

Post by jbeales »

hyperpape wrote: post #85
jbeales wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the kind of data I was looking for too! I'm also on the software fringes of trucking, and that was my reaction to the 2009-2013 statistic. Pretty much anything driven by economic activity is up over that period, we should be looking at accidents per kiloton or something like that.

Yeah, that would be more informative. But we still need to know about the baseline rates. Trucks are very big, so dangerous to other drivers, and there's a lot of miles driven. On the other hand, there's industry capital to potentially finance safety upgrades, and they're driven by professionals. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of what the acceptable risk is, given all those factors.

I'd like to see a comparison of accidents, (or better, deaths), per million miles of personal vehicles vs. trucks. I'm pretty sure trucks will come out as causing fewer accidents/deaths.

I actually did the math for the 2009 - 2013 thing, and truck tonnage increased by 21.75%, so a 17% increase in accidents means that trucks got safer over that time.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#93

Post by roflchoppa »

sokoloff wrote: post #91
futhey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depressed over the last three decades and have seen a drop in real wages in many segments of the trucking industry. I saw many drivers keeping multiple log books, skipping or cutting-short rest breaks. Professional drivers can and do operate safely. But with some car…

Who would drive a truck for $11/hr max? You could make more driving Uber or bartending/waiting tables...

Migrant workers from asia / south america. whom might not speak enough english to do other work. I say this by hanging around my fathers freight forwarding company for the past 15 years.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#94

Post by rwallace »

closetnerd wrote: post #7
yoo1I wrote: post #4

> Howard Abramson is a freelance writer who was an executive at American Trucking Associations from 1998 to 2014. So the same guy who wrote the piece has for 16 years been directly responsible for the lobbying he is decrying. Anyone know what's going on there?

Maybe he's realized the inevitability of the situation and decided to jump ship. Can't completely blame him, but makes it difficult to take his opinions seriously.

Be very careful with that line of thinking. It amounts to 'he's a bad person, so we should punish him by assigning him low status, and part of that is to refuse to take his opinion seriously.' It's instinctively appealing, but it's also an area where human instinct is terribly wrong.

A better way to react would be 'it looks like he's done bad things, so when he talks about those bad things, he knows what he's talking about and we should take his opinion very seriously. Whether he should be punished is a separate question, but if so, that punishment should take a form that doesn't cripple our ability to stop the other people who are continuing to do those bad things.'

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#95

Post by Silhouette »

Aloha wrote: post #55
macNchz wrote: post #3

Self-driving trucks seem to have such great promise to improve the safety and efficiency of the trucking industry and our highways in general. Even if they're only self-driving during the long haul sections and human drivers take over for local deliveries it would make a huge difference. Hopefully the various interested lobbies don't try to put too many artificial barriers in the way of self driving trucks becoming a…

I'm a former over the road truck driver who hauled truckload freight. I disagree profoundly that self driving trucks are the future, the future is multimodal transport, even now a significant proportion of long haul (greater than 3-600 miles) is already on the rail, either in the form of a container or piggyback. The issue that keeps the remaining long haul (greater than 600 miles) on the road (vs rail) is timing, wh…

The issue that keeps the remaining long haul (greater than 600 miles) on the road (vs rail) is timing, when you put something on the rail, you loose a day or so at one end in loading/classifying and another in classifying/unloading.

That's an interesting comment. Modern container ships and the infrastructure that supports them are surely one of the most effective logistical developments in human history, transferring huge volumes of cargo between the ships and road/rail at either end with impressive efficiency. It seems like you're suggesting that road/rail links bring in more of an overhead, despite the lower volumes on a train vs. a ship. Is that a fair conclusion from what you're saying?

If that's reasonably accurate, what do you think causes those extra overheads? Is it the wider variety of loads instead of everything being in standard shipping containers, the need for power to support some of them that you mentioned, or maybe just the need for better loading/unloading systems at road/rail transfers?

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#96

Post by selectodude »

spqr0a1 wrote: post #70
joesmo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of running rail to supply all the routes currently served by truck now (and generally in the last 50-60 years) is so high that it's infeasible. The less populated and poor the destination, the higher the costs (and most remote areas are both sparsely populated and poor). I think you're seriously underestimating the vastness of the US and the remoteness of the majority of it. Sure, given enough investment and…

Ah, but road transport isn't really shared between commercial and personal transportation. Road maintenance is in large part funded by fuel tax. Fuel use is roughly proportional to vehicle weight at low speed, or frontal area at high speed. While wear to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. So trucking is heavily subsidised by smaller cars. If the costs created by trucking were internalize…

Which would be an issue as most major US rail corridors are already running at peak capacity.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#97

Post by nitrogen »

lutorm wrote: post #32
donatj wrote: post #13

> About a mile before the crash, the driver ignored work-zone warning signs on the New Jersey Turnpike of likely delays What was expected here, honestly? Should he have made a note in his notebook? > About a half-mile later, the posted speed limit dropped to 45 m.p.h. from the usual 65, which the driver also ignored. Truly more often than not the people who do slow down are in the vast minority and arguably the bigge…

Highway construction crews must love people like you.

I'm sure it depends on local driving culture and varies from place to place, but there are many stretches of road where local drivers completely ignore posted construction speeds, except for a small percentage who cause dangerous backups and lane changes. Since worker safety is paramount, the best approach is using concrete barriers instead of orange barrels in these high speed zones, not just ignoring the majority of drivers.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#98

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

BurningFrog wrote: post #78
rcthompson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)

Sounds like a sensible rule that is impossible to enforce.

In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#99

Post by ivanca »

BurningFrog wrote: post #78
rcthompson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)

Sounds like a sensible rule that is impossible to enforce.

Easy enough, with the help of a GPS you can check that the driver can't be on the move for more than 16 hours straigh without an 8-hours reccess. If he wants to do something else instead of sleep that's his problem.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#100

Post by ZoeZoeBee »

sokoloff wrote: post #91
futhey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depressed over the last three decades and have seen a drop in real wages in many segments of the trucking industry. I saw many drivers keeping multiple log books, skipping or cutting-short rest breaks. Professional drivers can and do operate safely. But with some car…

Who would drive a truck for $11/hr max? You could make more driving Uber or bartending/waiting tables...

Driving for Uber won't be an option too long either, why do you think they've hired over a dozen robotic engineers from Carnegie Mellon?
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