Trucks Are Killing Us

Post by rhizome » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 9:05 PM UTC

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…

Post by hyperpape » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 9:08 PM UTC

alecdbrooks wrote: post #105

jbeales wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Post by spdionis » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 9:09 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #115

wpietri wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by jonknee » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

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…

Post by jonknee » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

copsarebastards wrote: post #74

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…

> Hopefully the various interested lobbies don't try to put too many artificial barriers in the way of self driving trucks becoming a reality. I just don't see this happening. A qualified truck driver costs a trucking company upwards of $30K/year in salary alone. The cost of running a truck capable of driving itself even partially is obviously going to be higher, but at $30K/year + other human-related expenses, it wi…