81–90 of 192 posts
Depends, do truckers have a strong political lobby? If no, they'll be in trouble. If yes, then they'll be guaranteed to exist for as long as they are funding lobbyists and politicians.
I haven't thought of this until now, but it's going to be interesting to see the impact of self driving trucks on human migration. Today many people feel trapped where they live because it's prohibitively expensive to move. Once self-driving trucks are common, the cost of moving across the country should plummet. Imagine being able to move everything in your apartment or home across the country for a few hundred doll…
Depends, do truckers have a strong political lobby? If no, they'll be in trouble. If yes, then they'll be guaranteed to exist for as long as they are funding lobbyists and politicians.
Truckers are mainly small businesses so they probably have no lobby. The bigger trucking companies that employ these self-employed truckers will happily switch to automatic trucks. They also have the political clout. Same for farmers. The real small family farmers have no political power. It's the big farms that get laws made for them.
But, as a small farmer, I already see how unaffordable automation is. Tractors that are basically self-driving have been commercially available for decades, but it is difficult to pencil out unless you have a lot of acres to spread the costs across. I feel that the same will be true for self-driving trucks. The huge fleets will adopt it immediately, but small guys like me who only have to haul grain a few weeks of the year, it seems more cost effective to just spend some time in the seat.
Time will tell, but history tends to be a good indicator. I don't see truckers going away any time soon.
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Maybe. Depends on tax law at the time. Going to need social safety net money, we might as well tax automation.
Our tax code needs reform, but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive.
Not at all. The end goal should not be productivity onto itself. If those gains are being scooped up by a sliver of the population, we change the rules to benefit all. One person, one vote.
As automation automates away more jobs, the cohort of people without jobs grows, forcing regulations (through democracy) to change to move towards a citizen's dividend funded by a tax on automation. The system will reach equilibrium, or there will be a revolution.
If you don't want your automation lifting the tide of all boats, someone else will come along and build it.
The most likely thing (imo) that will happen will be highway trains...there will be a real human driver in the front of the caravan, maybe just in a van or car, and then 1-10 self driving heavy duty trucks behind them. They'll draft off of each other and do 99% of the long haul route in an automated way. Once each truck is near it's destination, it will peel off of the pack and park itself near the highway, at which…
Too bad that all the "speculative VC dollars" seem to be in trying to jump directly to full-automation of multiple small passenger vehicles. Now, I've never heard any public figure say this out loud -- so maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree -- but I think the bandwagon is being pulled by a very particular idea about a market they can try to corner. Specifically, they're thinking of a future demographic bump in p…
I'm not saying this is the driving force behind focus of companies, but it's an important consideration for many individuals in this space.
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> this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases The problem is that local drivers average about half the pay ($30-40k) vs long-haul drivers ($70-80k). Even if there is more demand for local drivers it likely won't offset the wages lost.
There are a lot of unknowns here. The factors putting downward pressure on trucker salaries are: - Remote operation of trucks is an easier lifestyle, so more people would be willing to take the job, driving down salaries - Fewer human truckers are needed per truck on the road, so for a given level of trucking activity, fewer jobs exist Some potential countervailing factors: - Price of trucking plummets, potentially j…
Tangential to this point: If this mode of truck operation becomes prevalent, I could potentially see a path where warehouses/loading docks get employees certified (a la forklift truck certifications) to operate the truck on premises to handle the "last mile" (i.e. on-site) operations. Now you've completely decimated the number of trucker jobs.
"Then what you have is a truckers’ lounge with 20 or 30 guys standing around getting paid." THAT's the error: those guys aren't getting paid anything to stand there. They get paid by the mile. Making them wait is benefiting the warehouse, and costing THEM.
Yeah. My wife has a friend who's a long-haul trucker. He gets profoundly disrespected by the current system, including showing up at 8AM to an appointment and being made wait all day, and sometimes into the next day, for his truck to be unloaded/loaded and ready for him to take. And he's paid nothing for that. There's no penalty at all for wasting the trucker's time. I cite this as evidence that the truckers have no…
It looks like your wife's friend needs a better broker because all the companies we deal with charge us.
Our shipper won't schedule a truck unless we know that the load is ready due to how steep the fees can be.
When we shipped some equipment to a major trade show, they try to schedule it so that the truckers have a minimum wait but the show will also pay the detention fees back if they were the source of the delay.
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The rails are already there. When I drive down I5, you can see them. The reason this sorry state of affairs exists is because truck traffic is heavily subsidized (highways paid for with taxes) whereas rail traffic is heavily taxed (and the rail companies have to pay for the tracks). It could be improved by increasing weight taxes on trucks, and using the proceeds to subsidize intercity tracks.
Yeah the impact on roads increases with the fourth power of vehicle weight. Why doesn't the tax?