181–190 of 248 posts
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Why wouldn't something like this be needed in ten years?
Theoretically, self-driving machines will be traversing highways fairly accurately in ten years.
(Thanks for letting me use one of my favorite quotes!)
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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.
I only know about this 'cause I know some of their sysadmins. but there's a whole industry of automated truck-tracking and truck-activity logging out there.
Most of it, I think, is focused on reducing liability/reducing insurance costs, I think; I don't think most of it is legally mandated.
Note, I've also heard from other people who's pagers go off when certain devices can't resolve GPS signals that a common cause of their pager going off is a trucker driving by with a GPS jammer that was being used to defeat one of these automatic truck logging deals.
So... yeah, it's not legally mandated or anything, but automatic logging of truck activity and speed is pretty common.
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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…
I'm also curious what truck drivers' value is besides the driving. The main thing I see is doubling as role of security guard -- a minor deterrent to anyone wanting to rob the contents of the truck. So there may be some value for them as ride-along security once automated driving is here, but perhaps only if the problem of people blocking the road to trigger the truck's automated driver to stop and be robbed is serious enough or happens roughly equally along all routes at all times (unlikely).
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…
How much longer does it take to load/unload a freight train versus a truck? How much slower is the train and how longer does it take to ship? (and how does that affect cost or product quality when shipping items that must be refrigerated in transit?) Is it a realistic option for same-day or overnight shipping required for services like Amazon Prime in the volume that is currently being carried by trucks?
For items where delivery is not urgent, I'm all for using rail, but with expectations from consumers for quick delivery, its hard to see how they will be able to compete on the current system for rail-based freight.
An alternative (at least in the short-term), might be to create truck-only traffic lanes or highways with tolls and fewer exits. (and other lanes or highways just for cars) The lanes could be built to withstand the additional weight from the trucks, and non-truck traffic would run more efficiently and safely.
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
(Didn't downvote.) There is rarely, if ever, a singular "the solution" to an issue. Trains, boats, planes, trucks, couriers, etc. serve semi-overlapping needs. Trains did dominate the U.S. before the auto industry convinced people cars and highways were "better," and local commuter trains were scrapped over large parts of America. Yes, Europe has loads of them and you can't book an actual train ticket from Paris to A…
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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 so…
If monday tuesday and wednesday you drove through the day, and then friday evening they tell you to take a night course, then the tahoraph will say thay you had enough rest, while you will still get sleepy in the middle of night.
In other words - tachograph will tell you whether the driver had a break, not whether he slept properly during that break.
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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 alon…
Regulatory capture and efficient markets can't coexist. (My impression of regulatory capture on this matter comes from the OP, it's the first I've really heard of this safety issue.)
I already explained in my above post that it is society at large that is currently paying for this with death and destruction on the highways.
And that's why this is such a barbaric position.
Say that the needed measures are put in place and this problem is alleviated. And during the implementation of the needed measures, costs get passed along the line and a few extra cents are tacked on to consumer products.
Well, significantly reduced highway deaths and people paying a little extra for whatever is obviously the preferred situation.
But then what will likely happen is that somewhere in the cost chain someone will improve/innovate something that lowers the cost of some particular element in the cost chain, then what the market will bear will adjust and we'll be back to the same or lower consumer product prices plus reduced highway deaths. What's blocking this process from happening is, according to this article, the short-term thinking and profits over lives stance of the trucking companies.
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%.
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…
I agree that rail seems ideal and much more economical and environmentally friendly, but is the system designed to handle consumer shipping with its demands for quick delivery with tight deadlines? (Which I'd argue constitutes a large portion of truck-based freight) How much longer does it take to load/unload a freight train versus a truck? How much slower is the train and how longer does it take to ship? (and how do…
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 g…