The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
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Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#2Maybe transport & trucking needs to be automated. If there's a lack of labourers, why not fill in the gaps with self-driving semis?
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#3Maybe transport & trucking needs to be automated. If there's a lack of labourers, why not fill in the gaps with self-driving semis?
Long-distance trucking seems like a huge and obvious market for autonomous vehicles. Trucks mostly travel along Interstate highways and drivers have mandatory rest periods. Usually that means the truck sits somewhere, sometimes with the engine on.
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#4Maybe transport & trucking needs to be automated. If there's a lack of labourers, why not fill in the gaps with self-driving semis?
Long-distance trucking seems like a huge and obvious market for autonomous vehicles. Trucks mostly travel along Interstate highways and drivers have mandatory rest periods. Usually that means the truck sits somewhere, sometimes with the engine on.
As far as I understand, many places use trains for these purposes. It means that less drivers are needed and the cargo spends more time in transit.
Alas, the united states has a fairly poor cargo rail system, which in fairness is due to its spread out geography in many places.
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#5> But corporate America has become so parsimonious about paying workers outside the executive suite that meaningful wage increases may seem an unacceptable affront. In this environment, it may be easier to say “There is a shortage of skilled workers” than “We aren’t paying our workers enough,” even if, in economic terms, those come down to the same thing.
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#6Maybe transport & trucking needs to be automated. If there's a lack of labourers, why not fill in the gaps with self-driving semis?
Not surprisingly this is the first step in that process. Automating the driving of trucks is expensive, there was at one time an ample supply of truck drivers keeping wages low, so no automation. As the cost of human drivers goes up, it changes the math with respect to automation, once it hits the tipping point the change over is inevitable.
We saw an exact corollary of this with automation in Chinese factories. As long as the cost of labor was lower than the cost of automation factories remained manual only shops, but the cost of labor has gone up, and with it have come robots. What I find particularly fascinating is that in the labor case the manufacturing went off shore first (it was cheaper to hire Chinese workers) and now it is being automated, in China. Since you cannot easily off shore truck driving that option doesn't exist.
I do however keep my eye out for 'teleoperated' trucks. Something which is a mix of robotic driving with supervision and command and control with a human. This is also possible today and would allow a trucking company to operate more trucks with fewer drivers, but it also requires some automation on refueling. The system has resisted this form for a while.
So what I took away from the NYT article was that the economics of trucking are entering the point where the system can support more dramatic changes than it has in the past. That means there are opportunities there.
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#7> But corporate America has become so parsimonious about paying workers outside the executive suite that meaningful wage increases may seem an unacceptable affront. In this environment, it may be easier to say “There is a shortage of skilled workers” than “We aren’t paying our workers enough,” even if, in economic terms, those come down to the same thing.
The "worker shortage" concept is seriously one of the dumbest memes of corporate America. There's a ton of people out of work, and it doesn't take much in the way of skill to be a truck driver. Companies simply aren't paying enough for what can be a very demanding job.
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long-distance trucking seems like a huge and obvious market for autonomous vehicles. Trucks mostly travel along Interstate highways and drivers have mandatory rest periods. Usually that means the truck sits somewhere, sometimes with the engine on.
As far as I understand, many places use trains for these purposes. It means that less drivers are needed and the cargo spends more time in transit. Alas, the united states has a fairly poor cargo rail system, which in fairness is due to its spread out geography in many places.
I don't know that much about the railroads but that doesn't sound right:
"America's freight railways are one of the unsung transport successes of the past 30 years. They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world."
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#9Maybe transport & trucking needs to be automated. If there's a lack of labourers, why not fill in the gaps with self-driving semis?
Theoretically seems easy but I think practically it's incredibly difficult due to the unpredictable nature of Over the road trucking.
There's no automated cross country trains and those move on a predictable path.
Although I would love to see it happen because of how incredibly efficient it would make the transportation industry.
Re: The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
#10> But corporate America has become so parsimonious about paying workers outside the executive suite that meaningful wage increases may seem an unacceptable affront. In this environment, it may be easier to say “There is a shortage of skilled workers” than “We aren’t paying our workers enough,” even if, in economic terms, those come down to the same thing.
As far as I know, that equivalence betwixt "shortage of workers" and "not paying workers enough" holds for economists as far apart as Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. That makes management's policy especially inexcusable.