Trucks Are Killing Us • Hacker News Board

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#111

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:34 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

Possibly true but irrelevant. You could go a trillion miles per fatality, but only the total fatalities matter, perhaps as a percentage of all road fatalities.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#112

Post by nickff » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:37 PM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #98

BurningFrog wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#113

Post by Retra » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

apendleton wrote: post #88

thedogeye wrote: post #25

It's rather disingenuous to compare truck crash fatalities to plane crash fatalities. Almost everything kills people more often than plane crashes.

Yes, so why is air travel so much more heavily regulated for safety than all the other things? The perception is skewed, and people just don't think about motor vehicle collisions as being a big problem, even though they kill tons of people every year (more than firearm homicides, too, for what it's worth). Pointing that out is reasonable.

It's because those people die all at once in a way they can't control or escape. With car accidents, people are perfectly content to believe they are skilled enough drivers to be able to avoid death.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#114

Post by hmottestad » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:45 PM UTC

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 $700B may be a bit stupid from the article authors.

However. A point to bring across is that if the government mandates something to add a bit of safety that isn't ridiculous then shipping costs just simply go up across the board.

As long as everyone has to abide by the new laws, no one will have a competitive advantage.

It's like abolishing slavery. Sure, the slavers will say they can't compete anymore because they have to pay for labour, but after a few years everyone has to pay for labour and the market equalises.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#115

Post by douche » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:46 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #104

roflchoppa wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

> But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around.

Yeah, they do it poorly and inaccurately, with lots of latency between requests.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#116

Post by joveian » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

joesmo wrote: post #34

machbio wrote: post #20

The Solution is the Train - that I don't understand why has not dominated in US, though it being a big industry in earlier part of the 20th Century

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…

The worst part is that it did exist and was removed. A lot of folks don't realize just how extensive the rail network was.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#117

Post by eridius » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:49 PM UTC

Egregore wrote: post #62

jerrac wrote: post #39

Driving while tired can be as dangerous as driving drunk. The occasional 14hr drive isn't horrible, but if you do that several days in a row, you're going to be really tired. So limiting the hours per day a truck driver drives seems like a good idea. As does "shift" driving. Collision avoidance tech also seems like a good idea. That said, I don't think we need the government to do anything. Drivers can unionize and d…

Have you actually talked with any truck drivers? Are you sure they want it? Most deaths are not truck drivers, but drivers of cars who enter in collisions with trucks. And truck drivers would like to make more money in shorter periods of time and not spend this time resting someplace away from home. I hope autopilots will replace truck drivers soon.

I would assume truck drivers don't want to kill people. No matter how it's done, one person accidentally killing another person tends to fuck up that first person pretty well.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#118

Post by Retra » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:50 PM UTC

notNow wrote: post #71

robbrown451 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything was going to be automated all at once, this "devastation" might be the case. But it won't happen all at once, it happens over the course of a decade or two. In almost every case in history, automation has increased jobs and increased the quality of life. Your post reminds me of this story: "Prof. Friedman visited China in the early 1960s and was taken by a government official to see a public works proje…

Since you quoted that super villain Friedman, it's a futile exercise to discuss this issue with you but touching on the silly analogy cited by Dr. Evil: Abandoning spoons to shovels ==> 1000X efficiency gain and net positive mass-scale job opportunities Abandoning shovels to heavy equipment ===> 100X efficiency gain and net positive of mass-scale specialized job opportunities. Abandoning manual trucks to fully auto =…

They can band together and start their own transportation companies. It will be significantly cheaper, now that the trucks don't require wages and health coverage.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#119

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

Driving on I5 from Seattle to Portland is now a long line of semis, one after the other. Trucks, even loaded to the legal limit, cause 9,000 times as much fatigue damage to the road as a car (fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the weight).

It's inefficient and environmentally absurd to use trucks that way. Railroad tracks parallel I5. The solution is to pick the container off the semi, put it on a railcar, do the intercity haul on the rails (which are made for heavy loads) with minimal fuel and manpower costs, pick it up and put it on a truck to do the last mile in the destination city.

So why isn't this done now? Highways are subsidized by cars (fuel taxes), and railroads are taxed. The incentives are backwards.

What I'd do is significantly raise the weight taxes on trucks on the interstates, and use that money to subsidize the rail right-of-way.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#120

Post by douche » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #110

notNow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cyclists and tractor-trailer trucks really shouldn't be sharing the same roads. But then again, that's Boston, a hellacious death-trap of a city to drive in.