Trucks Are Killing Us • Hacker News Board

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#201

Post by BufordTJustice » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 12:42 AM UTC

BufordTJustice wrote: post #51

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…

I second this. The working hours and toll sitting in a tractor like that all day are bad, but if you do things like cut hours for drivers, especially the drivers that aren't owner-operators, and continue them at the same pay, you unfortunately will push a huge contingent of people further out into the margins. I am all for increased safety, and very much think the drivers are on the road way too much, but I fear addi…

I guess I'd like to understand why people don't agree. Just to be clear, it's really important that we shore up tractor trailer safety (I've been hit by a class 8 rig twice now, once where the driver was asleep at wheel), but the cost of this really needs to be borne by the companies and not the drivers; as a consequence, you know, in order to get more safety on the road, product prices may go up. I am OK with this though.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#202

Post by stevewepay » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 12:50 AM UTC

hammock wrote: post #198

stevewepay wrote: post #191

This is why drone technology is very interesting to me. If you have drones flying around that deliver things directly from docks to warehouses, or warehouse to warehouse, not only would it be faster, but potentially safer too (the drone could take paths that have no or minimal human population). There's probably a bunch of ways to regulate this as well, such that in the case of disaster, the cost of human life is ext…

>the drone could take paths that have no or minimal human population You mean like railways?

Drones have the capability of delivering directly to the final destination, unlike railways.

In fact,Amazon could redistribute their inventory between warehouses overnight depending on predicted popularity of various items. Or it allows them to have a gigantic single warehouse with every single item in it, and just worry about distribution centers as opposed to warehouses that hold inventory. Then every hour they could send the packages via drones from their central warehouse to distribution centers where they are immediately put on trucks and sent out.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#203

Post by jfhubbard » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 12:58 AM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #194

jfhubbard wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a strong supporter of intermodal; trucks & trains have got to work together. I think that trains are part of the solution to truck driver shortage plus they have lots of other benefits (environmental etc..). I think that there is a great opportunity to make intermodal more efficient and to create more truck/train interface points and to make them more efficient. A lot of work to do. Opportunity for big applicati…

I'm a former OTR driver now working in telecom and as a sysadmin (still with active CDL however). How do you propose to solve the delay issues at each end of the rail journey, do you think shippers can be made to accept longer transit times? I'd love to see the median length for a TL trip come down to like 150 miles.

How do I propose to solve the delay issue? I don't have a solution but I think that there is a lot of value in finding one!

I guess that that is part of what I was hinting at when I said that the solution needed a lot of capital investment and software. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of investment to be made.

I wish that some of the effort that was going into self driving vehicles would go into making intermodal operations smoother. I think there would be a huge payoff.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#204

Post by Vendan » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 1:20 AM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #156

zdean wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My father-in-law has had his health ruined to the point of having is commercial license revoked, from a multitude of largely immobility caused health issues(including a blood clot that ran literally his entire lower leg). As a programmer/computer person, I do sit a lot, but not in conditions anywhere approaching his. I can stand up and stretch every 45 minutes, I have a standing desk, I can move around in my chair. Not to mention my chair is ridiculously comfortable compared to just about any car/truck seat I've sat in, including his work truck.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#205

Post by vvanders » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 1:35 AM UTC

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…

That's because they closed the shipping terminal down in Portland so they have to ship it all via semi. From what I understand train has much higher latency(and its being taken up by coal/oil cars).

Over the last 6 months its really driven ip traffic on I-5.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#206

Post by L_Rahman » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

lsc wrote: post #182

kw71 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://www.speedgauge.net/ 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 s…

It is legally mandated now, and the fleets have till 2018 to implement automated truck-tracking. I work at an enterprise hardware company and we get lots of inbound customer inquiries from logistics companies in the trucking space.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#207

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 1:52 AM UTC

stevewepay wrote: post #197

maxerickson wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect ground vehicles win on energy even if you roll in the roads.

I don't think energy is the driving factor. There are a lot more technical challenges associated with self-driving cars than self-driving drones. Self-driving cars aren't even fully solved at this point. However, even very cheap hobby drones can accurately fly to specific GPS coordinates. Even most plane flights are auto-piloted and even auto-land, so I believe that drones are a lot closer in terms of implementation…

[deleted]

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#208

Post by maxerickson » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 2:01 AM UTC

stevewepay wrote: post #197

maxerickson wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect ground vehicles win on energy even if you roll in the roads.

I don't think energy is the driving factor. There are a lot more technical challenges associated with self-driving cars than self-driving drones. Self-driving cars aren't even fully solved at this point. However, even very cheap hobby drones can accurately fly to specific GPS coordinates. Even most plane flights are auto-piloted and even auto-land, so I believe that drones are a lot closer in terms of implementation…

I would expect trucks with drivers to continue to beat drones on cost for a long time, a single trailer load is at least hundreds of drone trips, maybe thousands.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#209

Post by zdean » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 2:05 AM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #156

zdean wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Yes I do. And for any programmer (or any other person) who thinks there's even a remote similarity of experience, I invite you to find the most comfortable chair you can and then sit in it 15 hours a day uninterrupted (minus time to run to your local truck stop for a tasty meal) for a month straight watching you tube videos of a highway. And then rest for 1-2 days and repeat. That will give you a not-so-close approximation of the trucker's experience.

Having said all of this, there's an immense challenge/opportunity here for smart hackers to improve the experience of these truckers...they're not going to get replaced by robots anytime soon.

Re: Trucks Are Killing Us

#210

Post by jdc » Sun, Aug 23, 2015, 2:14 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #189

netfire wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If people are willing to pay weight fees that reflect the true cost of fixing the road damage, they can continue to use the trucks. But why should taxpayers pay for 2 day delivery instead of 3 day by rail?

I'd guess job creation, possibly with a side of union influence.