In the last cross-country trip I took, the interstates were bumpy and the country roads were smooth, no doubt in part due to semi traffic.
Trucks Are Killing Us
121–130 of 248 posts
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#122But no one wants to give up Amazon Prime & other forms of free or discounted shipping.
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#123>More people will be killed in traffic accidents involving large trucks this year than have died in all of the domestic commercial airline crashes over the past 45 years
This is such a slimy apples to oranges comparison. Clearly commercial airfare is far safer than ANY road ground transit.
After this comparison, I don't feel like reading the rest of the article.
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#125Driving 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…
Tiny nit, but from Wikipedia and [0], road damage goes up closer to the fourth power of axle weight. Just further support of your point: rail is absolutely the way to go, especially as it's all in place already.
[0] - http://www.pavementinteractive.org/article/equivalent-single...
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#126Earlier 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.)
It would be resoundingly ignored, and its utterly unenforceable. Right now, if you're a driver and you decline a load, it may be days to get another one at times, especially if you're stuck in a city with a ton of inbound freight, but not too much outbound freight - so you take what you can, push your endurance, and hope you can get far enough out of town that they wont try to swap it on you.
... So obviously the solution is to keep killing motorists so you can get a paycheck. Gotcha.
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#127I'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…
you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule
The same thing happened to me when I was working the Halibut opener in Alaska. Switching to a midnight to noon shift can wreak havoc with your sleep cycle, and it is very hard to avoid falling asleep while driving. Happened to me.
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#128Earlier 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.
At least some of that risk needs to be realized by the other drivers on the road. I don't know how many times I've seen a little shit-box commuter car zip into the safe following distance that a heavily-laden truck is maintaining, then stomp on the brakes, forcing the truck driver to burn their brakes and down-shift abruptly to avoid going right over the top of them. You don't stop 100,000 pounds in the same distance you can stop 2000.
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#129I have to drive an interstate on my daily commute. I always wonder why the state troopers, almost without fail, have a semi pulled over on the way in.
Also, I have noticed that truck drivers seem to be as dumb/bad as the average driver, and there is no particular need to single them out. People in general are fucking stupid behind the wheel.
Re: Trucks Are Killing Us
#130>More people will be killed in traffic accidents involving large trucks this year than have died in all of the domestic commercial airline crashes over the past 45 years This is such a slimy apples to oranges comparison. Clearly commercial airfare is far safer than ANY road ground transit. After this comparison, I don't feel like reading the rest of the article.
Yeah, I agree.
Maybe the author should have added the percentage of these truck accidents compared to all road accidents.