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Trucks Are Killing Us

nytimes.com

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Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#171

Post by jerrac »

patrickyeon wrote: post #65
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…

They are trying self-regulation, right now, and the article is arguing that it's not working well enough. They've been self-regulating as long as we've had trucks.

No. The article said nothing about private efforts. It was advocating government regulation.

By self-regulation, I mean something like a set of guidelines multiple trucking companies voluntarily sign on to. Or employment contracts.

Not just unwritten "goodwill", which is what your comment seems to be equating to "self-regulating". Apologies if I'm wrong about that.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#172

Post by kw71 »

Aloha wrote: post #86
rcthompson wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

I think it's unenforceable with the current infrastructure.

In Europe, trucks are required to have chart recorders called tachographs. You put one chart in the machine per day and that's your log. I think this makes it a lot more difficult to keep two logs, and now there are computerized tachograph recorders which should be even more resistant to tampering (ie. they can get the current date and time from a trusted source such as mobile network, tv broadcast, or GPS.)

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#173

Post by kw71 »

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?

Nope, logs are all manual entries on sheets of paper.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#174

Post by douche »

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…

You could also build the roads properly to withstand truck traffic. The Canadians do a much better job at this than the U.S. does, from what I have seen. In Quebec, they've been rebuilding sections of the road north-east along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and extending down towards the Maine border from Quebec City. They go in and build the road bed up from ledge, blasting out sections to create more gentle grades. When they fix a section of road, it stays fixed, whereas all too often, we just go in and resurface the top layer every four or five years.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#175

Post by rodgerd »

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.

So... without subsidies (in the form of tolerating fatalies as well as monetary burdens imposed on the rest of the citizenry) it wouldn't be a viable industry?

Sounds like there's a simple solution to the problem.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#176

Post by jerrac »

copsarebastards wrote: post #58
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…

> That said, I don't think we need the government to do anything. I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion looking at this data. > Drivers can unionize and demand better hours. Insurance companies can require collision avoidance tech be installed. Etc. Many things can happen, but they aren't happening, so...

> I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion looking at this data.

What data? The article is an opinion piece, not a data analysis.

> Many things can happen, but they aren't happening, so...

Aren't they? The opinion doesn't say anything about private efforts to fix things. It focuses on government regulations. It doesn't indicate if truckers have made efforts to get better hours, or companies efforts to make things safer while staying on budget, or insurance companies studying if lower hours/better tech would help or not.

Now, if that stuff has been tried, and failed, then what have states done? Why do we have to go directly to Federal level?

Ultimately, we should never give more power to one group unless it really is the only way to do what is needed. No matter how much we trust that group. Thus, whenever someone suggests new regulations, I always question if they are really needed. Especially when we're talking about the USA Federal Government.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#177

Post by Retric »

cb18 wrote: post #153
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 bluntn…

In an Efficent market it's to buyers not the industry that pays for regulation. The only way raising rates hurts an industry is when it reduces demand.

Full disclosure I have relatives that own and operate a fairly large shipping company they really don't care about industry wide effects like fuel costs. Thinks like software integration with their customers are compeditive advantages, regulation just gets passed along. Though, the overall economy is also important as people don't avoid shipping a PC because transportation is adding an extra 1/20th of a percent to the cost, but of nobody is buying then there is no need to ship.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#178

Post by moogly »

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.

Over the years, I've actually come to think those kind of statistics are kind of irrelevant. It comes off as rationalisation in the end. As soon as you start inputting people's lives in a cost/benefit analysis, I get really sad.

What changed my mind? The effectiveness of Sweden's Vision Zero project: http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/en/Concept/Does-the-visi... http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/11/the-swedish-approach-...

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#179

Post by jerrac »

mcguire wrote: post #164
copsarebastards wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, I don't think we need the government to do anything. I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion looking at this data. > Drivers can unionize and demand better hours. Insurance companies can require collision avoidance tech be installed. Etc. Many things can happen, but they aren't happening, so...

Drivers are frequently the ones complaining about the hours-of-service regulations. They get paid by the mile but many of their working hours are non-driving, so more hours on the road is more money. Drivers unionizing (That would be the Teamsters, right?) to demand fewer hours seems roughly as likely as programmers unionizing to demand something better than their 80-hour weeks.

Would an awareness campaign about the dangers of drowsy driving help?

As for unionizing, why mention Teamsters? Just have each companies employees get together and negotiate with management. (Yes, I'm being purposefully naive. Even if this really won't work, it should still be tried first.)

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#180

Post by ericd »

ajmurmann wrote: post #8
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 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…

Lots of decisions at the government level require putting a value on human lives. It's a feature, not a bug, that congressmen aren't usually held accountable for indirect death like this.
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