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Trucks Are Killing Us

nytimes.com

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Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#151

Post by teyc »

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…

Changing the rules and making it apply uniformly if nothing else, should increase the cost for the consumer.

Given the low margins, the beneficiary is not the trucking company, but the consumer, who then makes small savings in the price of goods but incurs a disproportionate cost in trucking accidents.

Case in point of a driver who has not slept for 28hours - it is a matter of public hazard to allow someone in that condition to operate a heavy vehicle.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#152

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #119

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…

The constant repaving of freeways is due to the damage caused by heavy trucks. Taxpayers pay a fortune to subsidize truck traffic.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#153

Post by cb18 »

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…

Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs.

Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there's room to spend on safety is meaningless... Would love to see a more in depth analysis on the issue from a financial perspective.

And fta:

The industry also bases its opposition to safety-rule changes on money, saying that increasing costs will hurt profits

Excuse my bluntness, but this is a terrible argument.

Saying that safety measures are too costly is ridiculous, because what is happening is that all the other road users are bearing the cost in death and dismemberment when the trucking companies should be bearing the cost in dollars spent on the available safety measures.

Trucking companies absolutely should not be seeking out slightly higher profits on the back of death and destruction. It's a net negative for the entirety of society. You have the truck companies sucking out this little bit of extra profit through their regulatory capture at a much greater cost to the rest of society.

Think about the slight difference improved safety measures would make to the bottom lines of these companies. Then think about all the years of life they are destroying through negligent safety measures, and think about all the things those years of life could have contributed to the world.

The more I type this out the more I realize how absolutely indefensible this argument is, "Yeah, we'll just carry on killing people, because preventing it would cost us a little bit of money..." That is just stomach churning in its crass indecency.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#154

Post by Aloha »

op00to wrote: post #126
Aloha wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article is weasel worded, frankly.

In 2013 there were 32,719 vehicle related deaths in the US, 3,964 of them involved a 'large truck' in other words about 12.5% of total deaths.

According to the IIHS - the number of fatalities per 100 million miles traveled is significantly lower (.88 for passenger vehicles in a large truck involved crash and .21 for occupants of large trucks) than the average for all vehicle (1.10) - and in just 15 (1998) years the numbers have declined significantly (from 1.67 and .37, and 1.8 respectively).

I'd be happy to hear what your solution to the problem is, I realize any death at all is a shame, but nothing can be made 100% safe - statistically, you're at a greater risk of dying of stomach cancer, suicide or malaria - than you are to die in a vehicle accident of any kind (11.6 deaths per 100,000 in the US), or for that matter you're more likely to die of Melanoma, Hepatitis B or an Upper Respiratory Infection then you are to die in an accident with a large truck (.9 deaths per 100,000 in the US are involving a large truck).

The solutions are neither clear, nor easy, but if you have one, I'd be open to ideas.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#155

Post by closetnerd »

rwallace wrote: post #94
closetnerd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair enough. Though again, I do sincerely sympathize with him. If my assumption is true, he did what he did for survival of a form. Fine in my book.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#156

Post by mcguire »

zdean wrote: post #47
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…

Truck driving is a devastating profession. My dad drove trucks for the better part of 2 decades. It hurt his physical health (immobility for hours on end punctuated by the occasional food/rest break)and did ridiculous damage to his psychological and emotional health. In the end, if you account for the number of hours he had to drive to rack up those mile-dollars, he probably made just north of minimum wage. There are…

"It hurt his physical health (immobility for hours on end punctuated by the occasional food/rest break)and did ridiculous damage to his psychological and emotional health."

You realize you're posting this on a site largely dedicated to computer programmers.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#157

Post by mcguire »

hyperpape wrote: post #26

I'm not able to comment on all parts of the article, but one thing stuck out at me: deaths were up from 2009-2013, but so was the volume of freight being shipped: http://www.transtats.bts.gov/osea/seasonaladjustment/?PageVa... . That makes that particular statistic quite dubious. Disclosure: I work for a SAAS company serving the logistics industry, which is why I knew that. I don't really have an opinion about how re…

While we're talking dubious statistics,

"While heavy trucks accounted for less than 10 percent of total miles traveled in the United States during 2013, according to federal data, the N.T.S.B. recently reported that they were involved in one in eight of all fatal accidents..."

I would like to point out that "one in eight" is 12.5%.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#158

Post by jessaustin »

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…

...high up-front cost and low long-term cost: the ideal conditions for...

...financing? An industry as well-understood and predictable as trucking will not want for lenders.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#159

Post by Aloha »

Silhouette wrote: post #102
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…

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 tr…

The rules are 11/14/70.

11 Hours driving maximum per day, 14 hours on duty maximum per day, and 70 hours maximum per rolling 8 day period (or 60 hours per rolling 7 day period).

Between driving periods, you must take 8 hours + 2 hours (most drivers just do a 10 hour rest period) in the sleeper berth. If you take 34 hours (knows as a reset) off duty, your rolling HOS clock resets to 0 and you can drive a full 70 again.

Being awake for me, and functional for 14-18 hours continuous is never a problem for me, but when I drove I avoided being in a urban area when I was that tired - I'd stop short, sleep outside of town, and head in in the morning to drop the load at the receiver usually.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#160

Post by [deleted] »

Silhouette wrote: post #102
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…

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 tr…

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