Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trucks Are Killing Us

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 248 posts

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#101

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Couldn't there be an intermediate step with speed limiter sensors. When in crowded places or approaching slow objects too fast, reduce speed to say 20mph.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#102

Post by Silhouette »

Aloha wrote: post #60
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…

The article bothered me because of the presumption that the author made about hours of service, and as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule - so while you can be compl…

as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers

I don't doubt you about the dispatch issues. The article itself mentioned that the driver of the truck that caused a fatal accident had spent 12 hours driving from his home to pick up the truck before then spending 13.5 of the permitted 14 hours driving the truck at the time of the accident, and had been awake for 28 hours straight.

But isn't the idea that anyone can safely handle that kind of vehicle for 82 hours per week also a bit crazy? That's roughly working 14 hours/day for 6 days/week. That's almost double what we'd allow here in the UK, for example.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#103

Post by MiguelVieira »

The author makes several good points, but never mentions fault. From a 1998 study on car-truck collisions:

> the car driver's behavior was more than three times as likely to contribute to the fatal crash than was the truck driver's behavior. In addition, the car driver was solely responsible for 70 percent of the fatal crashes, compared to 16 percent for the truck driver.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#104

Post by wpietri »

roflchoppa wrote: post #93
sokoloff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you can answer a question I've been wondering about: what valuable things do truck drivers do besides driving trucks?

There's a lot of hype around self-driving trucks these days. But there's this common tendency to assume that if you can replace the visible part of a job with technology, then those jobs are doomed. The classic example for me is a restaurant replacing waitstaff with computers screens so that people order without talking to a human. But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around.

So what else is in the job description of a trucker that's valuable?

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#105

Post by alecdbrooks »

jbeales wrote: post #92
hyperpape wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the tables of fatalities per 100 million miles that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration compiles [0], the accident rate for trucks went up from 1.03 to 1.29. Passenger vehicle crashes are actually lower, going from 1.03 to 1. These are still on the low end historically: both rates were around 1.36 15 years ago.

[0] http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-tr.... I'm using tables 4 and 5.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#106

Post by wpietri »

Alex3917 wrote: post #27
ajmurmann wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm carefully optimistic since this would be in there interest of the trucking industry and they already seem to be succeeding at pushing laws through that are bad for the drivers. I would love a system where the trucks get driven to a lot outside of the city where they get set on a automatic course to the equivalent lot at the destination. During transit no person is onboard at all. At the destination lot a human en…

> I'm carefully optimistic since this would be in there interest of the trucking industry How would self-driving trucks help the trucking industry? It seems like driverless technology will only make the business even more commoditized than it already is, and the only ones that make any money will be the one or two companies with the iPhone apps where you push the button to get your truck.

> How would self-driving trucks help the trucking industry?

The people running the companies will be looking at labor as a major expense and human employees as a high source of variability and day-to-day complication. Trading labor cost (typically seen as an expense) for fixed asset costs (typically seen as investment) is hugely appealing to a lot of executives.

> It seems like driverless technology will only make the business even more commoditized than it already is [...]

Sure, and buying a $1 lottery ticket is financially equivalent to asking the store clerk to change $1 and then throwing $0.40 into the nearest sewer grate. But everybody buying a lottery ticket thinks they'll one of the few winners. Executives are generally like that too. But worse, because they get to gamble with other people's money and then take a slice of any winnings.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#107

Post by wpietri »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
nulagrithom wrote: post #38

> It has pushed to allow truck drivers to work 82 hours a week, up from the current 70 hours over eight days, by eliminating the requirement that drivers take a two-day rest break each week; There was a different problem with the two-day rest break: > Must include two periods from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. home terminal time. Because obviously the trucking industry shouldn't be working graveyard. That's the part that was susp…

Shouldn't the trucking industry be working mostly graveyard? I mean, what's the better time for trucks to drive fast and safe if not night, when everyone else is not on the road?

The best time for trucks is at night, but trucks don't drive. Humans drive trucks, and humans are diurnal animals.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#108

Post by ssalazar »

bro-stick wrote: post #52
Alex3917 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm carefully optimistic since this would be in there interest of the trucking industry How would self-driving trucks help the trucking industry? It seems like driverless technology will only make the business even more commoditized than it already is, and the only ones that make any money will be the one or two companies with the iPhone apps where you push the button to get your truck.

"Industry" is both ambiguous and nebulous. It would seem to help the stakeholders whom depend on trucking, perhaps the fleets of trucks and most definitely not the drivers. There are far too many truckers' jobs at risk to retrain and place in nonexistent "freeing" jobs that just don't exist. Loads of unemployed people with no job prospects to feed their families would be an idiotic situation rife with discontent bord…

> There are far too many [...] jobs at risk to retrain and place in nonexistent "freeing" jobs that just don't exist. Loads of unemployed people with no job prospects to feed their families would be an idiotic situation rife with discontent bordering on insurrection.

This is an argument against nearly every technological development ever.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#109

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

rcthompson wrote: post #75
Aloha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article bothered me because of the presumption that the author made about hours of service, and as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule - so while you can be compl…

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.)

even if you enforce that it's still not gonna help with the fact that as much as people would like it circadian rhythms don't adjust instantly. Ever changing shifts are the bane of a good existence, working nights all the time is fine, working nights a week every 2-3 or worse, 2-3 days a week, is going to cause a lot of problems for everybody.

From my perspective I would totally gamify cars/trucks for everybody, every time you want to go somewhere you get your reflexes tested, if your reaction time is higher than a certain amount the car won't start. This will catch anybody who is too tired just as well as anybody who has been drinking I would think, which in the end works about the same when it comes to road safety.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#110

Post by Zigurd »

notNow wrote: post #35
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 think that the trucking industry is one of the biggest employers in the US. Are you OK with devastating these people's lives for extra efficiency promised safety? Before we push for more automation and job losses, we need to revamp the whole political/economic/social system to ensure a more egalitarian income distribution since the vast majority of the Earth's population are proletariat who exchange their labor in…

If it comes to that, yes.

A top surgeon in Boston was recently crushed under a semi in city traffic. The truck should have had sensors that prevent "right hooking" a cyclist, and the driver should be monitored for standards of sleep and on-duty time, and for alertness behind the wheel.

But really, what most people are calling for here would improve truckers' working conditions.

Post reply on HN