I've got some visibility to the logistics industry. My experience doesn't quite fit some of the posts in here / that story.
Drivers have been making LESS over the years for a few decades now.
Nobody wants to hire 18 year olds generally, insurance wouldn't allow it any way...
Logistics companies who hire drivers have been complaining about driver shortages but not increasing wages for years as well... and they actually seem to meet demand just fine. Issues at choke points like ports don't seem to be a pure driver supply issue from what I've seen.
The logistics industry is super price sensitive, people will complain... but they'll also wait to ship a thing to save a couple bucks (I'm not kidding when I say a couple bucks) all while complaining.
The drivers you hear who make a good living have specialized skills / work for specialized companies and do not reflect the industry as a whole.
I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem.
This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.
Edit: Just want to add some additional information. Trucking companies at least were my friends worked, were extremely toxic. They made close to $100k. However, their personal life suffered greatly.
Dispatchers would call them non-stop, even when they had doctor visits/family gatherings scheduled. The dispatchers would give them loads, that were basically humanely impossible to be delivered on-time by the book. Some of them would be awake all day, and leave in the evening then drive 24 hours+. Dispatchers would often scream at them, when they would call because they were falling asleep and were not going to make the delivery on-time because they needed a nap.
Some of them actually crashed, because they saw a "deer" lol.....they fell asleep.
These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings. This put them in an awful position in which they had to keep driving no matter how toxic the environment was. Unfortunately, I don't really know how they are doing today, as we grew apart.
> This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.
I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the next 50 years. We have a lot of laws and standards that, in effect, allowed people to cheat a little but not too much (or break a few traffic laws but not too many, etc). All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.
We are going to need to do a lot of work to find new equilibrium points where the various parties can cheat less. It will be made especially difficult because technology penetrates industries more quickly these days so it would be best if everything changed at once, but that also makes it more difficult.
I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules. I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.
I hope we never reach a state where technology actively defeats us.
The only time that I think it’s responsible to have total enforcement is when the rules perfectly capture reality and every facet of it …which to say is never.
Gray areas are also where all manner of corruption is born. Officials soliciting bribes, nepotism, exploitative labor practices, these things love gray areas.
They also keep bad rules around and encourage selective enforcement to target the disadvantaged. Lincoln said it best: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."
Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.
For example, I encounter far less discrimination and less racism living in where I do now than in other places, and yet the laws are practically the same here as in anywhere else. The reason I experience less discrimination here is due to the encompassing framework that everyone here is subjected to as part of their experience growing up. The strictness of the laws is irrelevant to that issue.
If you want to change how people act, you need to change the entire framework that people are growing within.
I may be missing something, but increased enforcement sounds like a great way to solve the corruption problem?
Eg. Public servants make ends meet by fudging timesheets => Enforcement clamps down on practice => Employees bargain for higher pay to make up for difference => Public gets a more transparent accounting of their labor costs
There's no set of laws that can efficiently govern dishonest people. Or in "low trust" environments, if you prefer think of it amorally.
Enforcement just moves around where the corruption is incentivized to happen. Is it at the bottom -- workers stealing extra pay or higher up where the enforcement happens?
Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.
That's sometimes true but I'd just note this has nothing to do with the original argument made praising gray areas.
The drug war is a place where there's an escalating war between dealing and enforcement, yes. But most dealers aren't having a lot of fun in this gray area.
I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules. I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.
Hmm, this sounds so appealing, yet I think it's terribly confused. I think you're confusing the "gray area" between what people and rules say and what people do, with "areas of slack". Slack areas are where people can take initiative to do what they want (following the rules or not). Gray areas can be that sometimes, were more like that in the past, but today, gray areas are often areas of over-determination - the rules are contradictory, you could be punished or suffer for violating any of them and you have to carefully calculate which violation will let you survive. There's no joy in that kind of shit. And, as mentioned by other posters, breaking some rules can kill people.
The reason we now have electronic tracking of freight truckers is because they used to be notorious for taking uppers and driving as long as possible, causing all sorts of nasty accidents. That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.
Exactly. I want absolutely zero gray areas when I'm on a highway in the middle of Indiana at night and cross paths with at least a few hundred semi trucks. The less gray the better.
To your point, a few winters ago I was driving up the NY Northway (north of Albany) in January, in a heavy snow storm, and cargo trucks were consistently passing me at 70+ mph.
One deer or one owl into traffic...it would have been a complete charlie foxtrot.
I agree in general but there are some places where gray areas benefit the employer more than the employee and I think this is one of them. If everyone is forced to cheat the regulations to get their jobs done then it's no longer just a gray area and the regulations are pointless.
At least in this case, breaking the rules kills a lot of people - IIRC out of all the truck-caused fatalities, more than 1000 deaths/year in USA can be directly attributed to drowsy driving.
Sleep-deprived truckers should not be a thing, it has pretty much the same effects as driving drunk, but much more common so causes more crashes and more deaths. Breaching the rules for that should have as much tolerance as those intentionally driving drunk and endangering others that way.
I have mixed feelings on this. I actually think this is a reasonable response to overly rigid systems but also creates fertile ground for unethical behavior. Ideally, I think we need systems with rigid guardrails, but that the distance between them is proportional to the amount of risk incurred by what you call the practice of "art".
Bending the rules is great in some areas, but I don't think it should apply across the board. Ignoring rules is fine in low-risk scenarios (particularly when the risk is not borne by someone else) but I don't want, for example, my commercial airline pilot to get too artsy when it comes to his approach for landing, or the programmer writing critical code for the autonomous vehicle to unilaterally decide they know better, or the electrician I hire to flagrantly disregard consensus standards.
From previous work in safety critical code, I regularly confronted situations where rule-breaking was done as a means to an end, while not being cognizant confronting the risks that incurred because of cognitive biases. People also loved gray areas in this role because it limits accountability. I'm sure there were people who at Enron thought they were playing the gray areas as an artistic endeavor to maximize profit, but I don't think incentivizing that behavior is the best for society.
That’s great until we’re talking about safety. I’m not willing to have my family run over by a semi truck with a drowsy and over worked driver for the sake of protecting these grey areas.
A good regulatory scheme will give people flexibility in how they comply with the rules so that productivity and innovation aren't (overly) constrained. If you find that you constantly need to break rules to be productive then it means you need regulatory reform, not less oversight or enforcement within the current regulatory context.
> I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.
A longish life has confirmed this to me, over and over.
> I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules.
I think we agree actually. I didn't say it was good that rule breaking is getting harder, just that it's a fact.
We have a lot of enculturation around a certain level of surveillance and visibility. Things are quickly becoming more visible and we will need to adjust. Preserving grey area can be part of that, but only if we decide to preserve it.
The breaking of the rules here is not for the driver's benefit, though. Its the owners greed pushing serious costs on their employees. Disruptive innovation doesn't always make things better.
All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.
- I think stability depends on what time frame you look at. Pushing how much time you spend driving, how little you sleep and so-forth may be stable for some period (weeks, months, a few years..) but it's not stable for a person longish term. Letting wages drift downward, so you wind-up hiring people with more problems (say, amphetamine addiction) may also be short-term stable but not long term stable.
The actually instability of the situation I think is illustrated by "chameleon carrier". Companies that shutdown and restart when they accumulate too safety violations.[1]
The thing about the situation is when things are being continually jury rigged to keep people working in the most profitable conditions for the carriers and the worst conditions for them, it's the opposite of stable, it's extremely fragile.
Saying the system as a whole is stable does not mean there are no unstable parts. Goods get delivered at an acceptable cost with an acceptable loss rate - even with chameleon carriers and any other bad actors that exist. Suddenly changing how easy it is to break the rules, without changing anything else, could destabilize that equilibrium.
> I think stability depends on what time frame you look at.
What is the timeframe that you are thinking of where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?
-- When we're talking of a system, "stability" is roughly the property that a small perturbation in the system causes it to return to the position that it was previously in. The pandemic was significant shock but the notable thing we see is that the system.
...where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?
The individual rule-breaking (working more hours than a person could stand) still allowed day functioning of the system but it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them. Hence, the system was fragile to shock.
> it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them
That situation seems pretty exceptional to me. I think it's fair to call an equilibrium that requires a covid pandemic to disrupt "stable." I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.
If you just mean that capitalism is inherently unstable, then yes of course, but that doesn't seem closely related to the space for rule breaking as the space varies from place to place and industry to industry.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.
I never said trucking was unusually fragile for the America today. Many other industries follow the paradigm of barely paying enough and relying on a trickle of people willing to put with their framework and all of them are whining but not actually changing [2]. The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1] is also a description of how a lot of industries operates. It's fragile, ugly and profitable.
> The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1]
Look, are you talking about trucking or are you talking about capitalism writ large? The larger capitalistic structure is both unjust and deeply unstable - but that topic is outside of the specific conditions of trucking and the accuracy of monitoring systems. The limits of the accuracy of surveillance systems are relevant, as far as I know, to all economic systems.
Or, to put it another way, I will ask again: what period do you see this system being unstable over? If it's just the covid pandemic then I see the disruption, but I disagree that the system was not 'stable' before. It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.
> It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.
It really wasn't, though; IIRC, the current reading of the evidence is that the mass extinction started about 10 million years before the impact delivered the coup de grace.
But I think you were assuming the somewhat popular fiction where things were stable, but then the meteorite wiped them out.
Maybe the state will have to outsource enforcement of these issues so that it doesn't have to admit to allowing some rule breaking. Anyone want to co-found Selective-Enforcement-as-a-Service?
I think we will see "micro fines" and electronic car systems in the next 10 years.
Go over the speed limit for a certain period of time (eg, 10 mins)? Microfine. $5.
Park in a no parking area for too long? Microfine.
Don't signal your turn? Microfine, $0.50.
The thing that would hold that back is the huge stock of existing analogue/gas vehicles. For all the talk of going electric, no one is going to buy everyone a new electric car and no one is going to just prevent the gas cars from driving since the economy needs people to work. Not that I'm in favor of the CO2 pollution this implies - though I'm not in favor of your Orwellian scenario either, which would be plausible otherwise.
Nah, you don't need a fancy car for the nightmare. Insurance companies are already letting you put in a device that measures your driving. It connects to the OBD-II port - standard on all vehicles since 1996.
This is a terrible idea. It fixes the cost for speeding or not signaling to something that a well off person can easily afford. Even I would consider just paying a $5 fine in order to speed to get to an important meeting, etc. A $500 fine for 10 minutes of speeding would make me think twice
I think that actually illustrates the above commenter's point about gray areas? the highway does not devolve into lethal chaos when people exceed the limit by 10 mph. even 20 mph over is not so bad when the relative speed among vehicles is low. or on the other hand, a few outliers are not a huge problem when proper lane discipline is maintained (ie, don't pass on the right, keep right except to pass). it's not a big deal if most people occasionally speed to get to an important appointment. it's also not catastrophic if a few people who can afford it take the hit and speed everywhere. mostly, it just offends our sense of fairness.
But, if this were to come to pass, rich people would just speed and pay the fines as the cost of running the business. It's why fines to pick up late from the daycare backfired badly.
The anecdotes I hear about "cheating the system" before electronic logs are mostly along the lines of: stuck in stand-still traffic for 30 minutes, I'll log it as a break. Whereas according to the electronic log you're still driving.
Say you have a truck governed at 68mph which means you can log an average of 65mph without raising any eyebrows. So what we would do is log the miles you drove/65 and not the actual time you drove.
Or, how I used to run, keep your logbook behind so you can backfill the driving hours and breaks so you can eventually be legal again — usually at a shipper or receiver you could catch up as they commonly would keep you there for 6-8 hours. What’s the buzzword, eventually consistency?
Not even mentioning “loose leaf” logbooks where one could rewrite whole days to gain hours.
Would you support speed limit enforcement by checking license plates at the beginning of a stretch of highway and at the end and auto-ticketing anyone who averaged over the speed limit?
Yes, can confirm, such cameras exist in Serbia and generate electronic tickets available to the vehicle owner on a government website if the calculated average speed is above allowed.
To what, 55 mph? It's the most fuel-efficient speed for the majority of vehicles, and is far less likely to kill people in an accident, than a collision at 70*1.15 = 80mph.
why stop there? pretty much any form of transportation is more dangerous and/or generates more emissions that humans on their own two legs. collectively, we have decided to trade some of that away to actually get places in a reasonable amount of time. but if you don't feel comfortable driving in 65+ mph traffic, there are plenty of surface roads that run parallel to interstates.
Next 50 yrs? This will be lucky to still be an issue in 5 to 10 yrs. Soon enough, the long haul routes will be autonomous. Humans will handle the short haul from some rural / suburban hub to the suburban / urban final destination. Autonomous might not be able to do "the last mile" but that's not what cause ppl to not want to be drivers.
I'm personally skeptical about the immediate practicality of autonomous driving, but either way, I was not just speaking about driving. I was talking about nearly every area of rule around 'public order.'
Long haul is practical and doable. Full door to door autonomous is unnecessary in the short term. Simply cracking the long haul nut is going to be significant.
That's really interesting. I've a similar anecdote from a different industry: pizza delivery.
I'm old enough that my first job was right at the cusp of computerized order entry (as opposed to handwritten tickets) at the small pizza shop I worked at in high school.
Prior to the computer order entry system drivers would routinely "lose" one or two tickets a shift and just pocket the cash for the order. One of them told me that the computerized ticketing basically halved their actual take home pay.
I worked at a pizza shop with paper tickets. Every single one was accounted for at the end of the day. If any tickets were missing, that was out of the manager's pocket, so he made sure he had them all.
Except if everyone does it and nobody really gets busted for it, then it is. You just don't like business being run that way.
The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can.
Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.
I understand that the dictionary follows usage, and i get that you have a rhetorical goal, but with that logic Enron was simply overpaying its employees.
I think there's an aspect of whether it's expected or not here.
If the culture of the delivery drivers was that this was a perk of the job that everyone sort of knew about, then I think it's reasonable to call it a type of compensation.
Sort of like how unreported cash tips are a type of perkany rely on, even though no contract could ever stipulate that.
The question, to me, is whether the people with "lost" orders actually got a pizza in the end. If they didn't, then it is theft—if not by the individual, then by the company whose structure incentivizes the individual's behavior. (Similar to how Wall-street investment-auditing firms were ultimately responsible for incentivizing their auditors to mischaracterize the risk of certain asset classes in 2008.)
I thought it was obvious that the delivery person takes the cash at the door in exchange for the pizza and pockets it. If the pizza isn't delivered, there's no cash to pocket.
Oh and I'm not arguing it isn't theft. I'm arguing that the system we've built basically demands that people steal from their employers in order to survive.
If you don't like our sort of downwards spiral into a trustless third-world society where everyone is trying to scam everyone else then you might want to look at what policies you support that crush wages for people who aren't at least software devs.
In the EU it got harder and harder to cheat the digital tachographs. The latest generation of smart tachographs record GPS coordinates of start/stop points so one can no longer cheat with a magnet on the wheel's Hall sensor. Everything is signed cryptograpghcally, even the wheel sensors have a crypto seal, the only way to cheat is to use tampered firmware, which carries huge penalties. I'm surprised at how deregulated the US transportation market is by comparison.
EU and US is just fundamentally different. It is hard to overstate that. But it comes with trade-offs. Workers in EU, in general, have better standards at work than in US. It helps that in EU, healthcare is not directly part of employer cost ( everyone pays into it ). EU tends ( I do mean tends, because it seems to vary greatly ) toward unions, whereas US truckers seeem un-unionized by and large.
> ICC is a checking on down the line
> Well I'm a little overweight and my logbook's way behind
- Dave Dudley, "Six Days on the Road" 1963
The give-and-take between making a living and obeying the law in truck driving is well established in our culture.
Anyone who's interested I'd encourage to check out Dave Dudley's music. It's all there: racing time, avoiding the law, fatigue, loneliness, bodily harm, drug abuse, etc.
The electronic logs are probably the reason these rules have been relaxed recently. When you could cheat, everyone just cheated because you needed to in order to make a living. Now you can't cheat and the industry is speaking up about it.
Yup, there was a big hit to guys driving extra hours when it became easier to spot them.
It was easy to make extra money, but it was at the cost of all of their time. It kinda inflated how good a living you could make...at least looking at the end results. But it also wasn't very realistic.
>Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into.
Do you really think a middle aged truck driver is (was) holding the steering wheel for 16hr straight as a matter of routine business? Of course not.
Tropes like that make for easy online virtue points but that wasn't the reality for the overwhelming majority of people who were cooking the books.
These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order.
And occasionally someone would go overboard, drive 36hr straight and cause a crash. And because that's an easy thing for people who have zero knowledge of industry incentives and feedback loops to get their panties in a knot over they made it "extra illegal" because you can't make being an idiot illegal.
And so now the industry cuts far less tasteful corners and pays everyone crap and you have drivers who have barely memorized the pre-trip, have barely and hours behind the wheel, can't read english, and who choose a different career in short order and are likewise treated as disposable.
So the net effect is more or less a wash but a handful of people get to get big raises and some politicians can pat themselves on the back for "solving" logbook fraud.
> These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order.
And how does this justify as something safe? When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. Safely behind a computer. If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives.
I worked 12 hour shifts as a 911 dispatcher and was mentally exhausted after those shifts. I had an hour drive home each of those shifts. There were definitely many shifts I wasn't driving home safe. Luckily my hour drive was like that because I was "temporarily relocated". The employer gave us the option to go book a hotel stay so I had some days where I was too tired to drive home safely and would stay in the hotel 5 minutes away.
And that's just me in a small little sedan, not an overloaded 18 wheeler. For context, I also do have a commercial drivers license. Driving for 60-80 hours in a week is just not safe. There is no way to try and justify that it is.
The only people doing that many hours of driving a week "safely" were probably high on cocaine. Cocaine usage was quite prevalent in the trucking industry because of this huge push to have drivers fudging logs and overdriving.
There are tons of studies out there that prove that driving while tired can be just as bad as driving drunk, if not worse depending on how deprived of sleep you are and how long you've been going.
For example, drivers who transport property in the same state are subject to state regulations but not federal regulations. Whereas drivers who deliver materials from state to state must comply with federal regulations. Among the regulations:
A reset occurs when a driver has had marked 34 consecutive hours off duty. The workweek starts after the last legal reset. For example, if you begin at 1 a.m. on Monday, then the workweek continues until 1 a.m. the following Monday.
Each duty period must begin with at least 10 hours off-duty.
Drivers may work no more than 60 hours on-duty over seven consecutive days or 70 hours over eight days. And they need to maintain a driver's log for seven days and eight days after, respectively.
Drivers may be on duty for up to 14 hours following 10 hours off duty, but they are limited to 11 hours of driving time.
Drivers must take a mandatory 30-minute break by their eighth hour of coming on duty.
The 14-hour duty period may not be extended with off-duty time for breaks, meals, fuel stops, etc.
I would say the only issue is on your required break time, you sit around doing nothing and not get paid for it. If you are at home that is fine, if you are a long haul trucker, you're stuck at a truck stop waiting for time to complete.
As a side note, as others have mentioned, truck drivers have been getting paid less and less over the years, and that's not accounting for inflation; plus it's rough on relationships, so it's no wonder there is a shortage.
The safety issues the parent posts were talking about are greatly increased when these rules are circumvented in order to drive a bunch more hours than that.
They're generally not circumvented to "drive a bunch more hours". That's a fools game. You need to take breaks eventually. Cramming more hours into the work week doesn't actually help you in the long term because the human body can't sustainably run on unsafe amounts of sleep. The books get cooked to avoid wasting valuable on-duty hours while sitting around waiting to be loaded/unloaded.
They generally are circumvented to make it to the receiver or next shipper within a given "shift". So instead of stopping 1hr from the receiver you might cook the books, get there, go off duty, sleep, etc. They unload at their convenience before you clock back in and then you cook the books again making it look like you're still off duty when driving an hour to your next load where you repeat the same 2-6hr loading delay shitshow. Then you cook the books a third time running 30min across town to somewhere you can get prepared food and park, hit up the massage parlor, etc, whatever it is you do to burn half a day off duty.
So instead of burning a work day doing busy work and sitting in your truck watching movies on an ipad you've accomplished a 34hr reset in that time and most of those 34ish hours were in fact spent off duty.
> Cramming more hours into the work week doesn't actually help you in the long term because the human body can't sustainably run on unsafe amounts of sleep.
The body can run on unsafe amounts of sleep for a long time. It is unhealthy, it is unsafe and leads to mistakes and crashes, but people in fact regularly attempt that. Many many people in fact think they are being hardworking and strong for doing that.
The pressure to drive unsafely is very real on professional drivers. The drivers (not trucks) I knew were telling me exact same story. Regularly driving a lot and without good sleep. Pressure to drive more and faster.
Also, this is how the debate started:
> I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem.
While I think 48 hours drive was exaggeration or drivers brag, it was meant to express "a lot of driving way more then is reasonable".
The big issue truckers have is that typical loading/unloading delays tend to result in large stretches of what is effectively off duty time punctuated by moving the truck a few hundred yards that they don't get credit for.
And you assume it wrong, having a car is a luxury in my native country and I was only able to afford one after I got into a comfortable 9-19 work schedule.
Don't assume that everyone is American or that American culture for commuting is widespread across the globe.
Good public transportation is a luxury in the majority of the US. Most jobs in most places require a vehicle + license + insurance + maintenance. In my city, we have a bus service but it can be 2 hours late on a consistent basis. Sometimes they don't even show up and you have to wait for the next pass and hope it shows up. Sometimes the driver is sick and there is no replacement, so no bus. Also, many places will fire you if you are late, so you need to be at the stop 2 hours before it shows up just to be safe, and you might not even be safe if the driver is sick. This is a medium sized city.
So in many places, your options would be sleep at work, or drive home tired.
The danger from a 2,000 pound car is not comparable to the danger from a truck that weighs up to 80,000 pounds (or FORTY TIMES as much). And that's not even considering overweight loads.
"Eleven percent of all motor vehicle crash deaths in 2019 occurred in large truck crashes."
"Twelve percent of all passenger vehicle occupant deaths and 22 percent of passenger vehicle occupant deaths in multiple-vehicle crashes in 2019 occurred in crashes with large trucks."
>One is SIGNIFICANTLY (twice!) more likely to kill people in an accident. To say otherwise is just a lie.
Show me where I said that. You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car but not a truck because you're only half as likely to kill someone than a large truck. To say otherwise is just a lie! See I can put words in your mouth and use it as a red herring too.
The correct answer is it's not ok to drive home exhausted regardless of the vehicle you are in.
> I mean both will significantly kill people in an accident.
Or, you know, when you literally said that it's no different:
> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
--
> You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car
Show me where I said that.
YOU are the one who claimed that driving exhausted in a truck is no different from driving exhausted in a car. They are EXTREMELY different. One is SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to end in a death, which is why that one has significantly more regulation, even though driving recklessly is illegal in any case.
>Or, you know, when you literally said that it's no different:
Ok so you are just arguing because you want to be right. I asked what's different. Do you not understand the difference between a statement or a question?
You quoted me as saying I literally said driving tired in a car or truck is no different:
>> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
That's obviously a question. It starts with "what" and ends with a question mark. It can't "literally" be a statement.
>Show me where I said that.
Sorry you completely missed the point I was making. You are using red herrings and I called you out on it by using a red herring.
I'm gonna be done here, you aren't arguing in good faith, so it's a waste of both our time. I know you are going to reply because you just have to have the last word, so be my guest.
Why would you assume that they drive home? Regardless, there would hypothetically be massive differences such as distance and size of vehicle. Both are bad.
Most of them didn't really have an opportunity for a life so you can't blame them. What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time? Legally you can only stop at a truck stop. If you wake up at 6:30, spend an hour on breakfast, then drive for 4 hours, with a 10 minute break every hour (30 minutes) , then stop for an hour for lunch (at 11:30), then drive for another 4 hours with half hour brakes before an hour for supper (now 6:00), then two more hours, it is 9:00. For a normal 8 hour sleep night you now have an 1.5 hours to kill in a middle of nowhere area with nothing to do. Most people don't need that much time for breaks. You can easily see how someone would want to cheat for more pay - there isn't much else to do.
Now for health our hypothetical trucker above should get out and move, but face it, most people aren't getting their exercise.
> What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time?
Railroads have had to deal with that since the Hours of Service Act in 1907. After 12 hours, train crews and dispatchers are "dead on the law", and have to stop the train. The railroad tries hard to prevent that. They don't schedule people for the full 12 hours. There are crew change points. Railroads put train crews up in motels. Ferry crews around in crew vans. Once in a while a train does end up stopped for that reason, usually because some other problem tied up traffic.
Interestingly, while there's theoretical work on the Truck Driver Scheduling Problem [1], there doesn't seem to be someone offering this as a service. That might be a startup opportunity for someone.
Some railways are using "Driver Status Monitoring", which uses things like eye tracking to check the driver is alert.
Even with the best shift scheduling software, it's difficult to handle cases outside the railway company's control -- like the driver being tired because they were kept awake by external noise, stress etc when they were trying to sleep.
"The following are examples of appropriate uses of a CMV while off-duty for personal conveyance ... Commuting between the driver’s terminal and his or her residence ... Authorized use of a CMV to travel home after working at an offsite location"
Although frankly the answer is "stop somewhere and sleep because your trip is too long to do in a single day" and I'm not sure why you think that somehow that's too much of an inconvenience for them.
Perhaps dystopian to say, but this sounds like a perfect use-case for 5G-streamed VR MMO games. Have an hour to kill in the middle of nowhere? Jack in!
> These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing
The difference is that IT guy won't crash truck into another car when overworked. Truckers did.
And it was not because they were idiots. It was, because humans are affected by tiredness. And it did not happened because of some larger goal, but because it is cheaper to pressure trucker to drive too much.
Electronic log books are not "a lot more difficult." Google "truck electronic log cheat"
In some cases it's just pulling a fuse or the right connector.
In other systems you can literally tell the e-logger that you're doing a kind of driving that 'doesn't count' and the system goes "oh okay" and that's that.
Reportedly a lot of state police commercial vehicle cops don't bother to check e-loggers because they're lazy and it's not as easy as flipping open a paper book.
Actually remember a presentation from one of the logbook startups from a few years ago. The key feature that skyrocketted adoption was the ability to fudge (...er, "correct") the logbook manually. When it was automated, they had issues because it would basically lock them down to the rules.
Depending on how the driver is contracted 100k is not a big deal. Because the take home is not even close to that. For instance take off the fuel costs off that 100k just for starters
I watched a grown man, a skilled and conscientious man, learn to drive an 18-wheeler in California and try to make a living.
It is dangerous, it will test the nerves of the driver. You will be bullied, it is the culture. The price pressure on wages, for a fully qualified and competent driver, were relentlessly downward in the USA.
The ports here are full of refugees sleeping in the cabs of their leased trucks. The callousness and stupid-on-stupid business practices are a cacophony. Civilized people need not apply to either end of it.
>Civilized people need not apply to either end of it.
That's a big part of the problem. We are gradually transforming our economy so that bigger and bigger chunks of it are run by people living in miserable conditions, driven there out of desperation. The media cheers it as giving another chance to disadvantaged, and goes out of their way to redirect the average person's ambitions away from accumulating wealth. And if you oppose it, they will just claim that you hate all those poor people, rather than disagreeing with the lowering of the average living standard. The end game is slums for everyone (except the ruling class of course).
You are onto something here, I think. And it certainly does not help that driving was one of those few remaining jobs that did not require a lot of education. To me personally it seems like recipe for a disaster to basically prime a chunk of your population for an anger for being left behind by 'the rich', who set the system up to skim few more bucks from labor savings and "the poor", who are desperate enough to take their spots in those jobs.
>To me personally it seems like recipe for a disaster to basically prime a chunk of your population for an anger for being left behind by 'the rich'...
What are they going to do about it? It's no coincidence robot dogs are now being outfitted with guns.
The entire USA logistics industry is filled with toxic, below average IQ, bro-to-the-max managers. It's like Wall Street, but dumber and no math requirements. See my other comment in this thread for details on that.
Nope, not really. Economy is sort of a closed loop. There is that much basic resources and this much people, and it's all about how it gets distributed between them. "Sort of", because it creates incentives for people to do some things, and if these incentives are right, the economy creates new value.
In an anarchy it boils down to who's got a bigger gun. Under feudalism, it's about what class you were born to. For a brief moment in human history in a bunch of Western countries it was about who managed to create something of value and sell it to others. But that would also mean bankrupting inefficient behemoths to make room for the next generation, but we stopped doing that in 2008.
So now, if you have bought a couple of Walmart shares back in 1970s, you're good. If you have purchased a house prior to 2010s, you are great. But if you are younger, you're screwed. The media tells you that living in a box and having no family is OK, and if you are ambitious - go play a victim and get forced non-monetary recognition from others. The incentive to create things is gone, so the society is inevitably converging to some weird corporate feudalism, and that only means further degradation for those except the hereditary elites.
Maybe you're being ironic, but it sounds like you're whining... there are "other" Walmart shares, nowdays it's easier and cheaper to buy them...there are houses which'll appreciate in value (most? do) but wealth does have that bad habit of holding you still, those shares need researching, the house repairing... and anyway I'm sure you prefer to travel...
I never did understand why people keep up with their 9/5 5 days a week (and in Europe a month holiday ) when they could save more, spend less (on heating) by heading south in the winter... in a way the most important thing people from the west have is their passport which (unfairly) allows them pretty much freedom to travel anywhere...and a basic salary which would cover a years expenses for a couple months of work...
A sense of place and belonging is critical to life satisfaction. If we can't settle down and build a life in a community, then that is not a slight obstacle to happiness, its a major detriment to the health of the population.
I'm of the opinion that we are more animal than we remember, and the human animal thrives in a participatory community. I reject that casualness of your point.
You're right except stocks don't matter at all. It's the land that matters if you want to reinstate feudalism. USA was the land of the free because nobody "owned" it. 300 years later it is running into the same problems that drove people out of Europe to North America.
Yeah I think it’s ridiculous that people forget that we only got to this point because previous generations built a framework which we currently live in and where many of us can prosper.
If we want to abandon that and go back to the centuries of fiefdom where we barely made progress, by all means do it somewhere else.
You forgot the part where people under 21 years of age aren't allowed to drive big rigs across state lines.
Electronic logbooks are the main reason drivers lost wages recently. Turns out that the market had adjusted to an equilibrium that expected drivers to fudge their log books, and once the ability to fudge was removed, the absolute morons who fill the ranks of logistics companies wouldn't up their rates and the market equilibrium was broken. This caused drivers to leave the business.
It can't be overstated how absolutely dumb the average desk jockey in the logistics space truly is. Having had to deal with a few different companies over the years (Hapag Lloyd, various CPG companies, Marten), there was no contest in offices with just straight up low-IQ but cocky jocks filling the desks. A brother-in-law is in the transportation industry, and he routinely uses fancy words he doesn't understand on calls (I hear them when I'm visiting) and nobody on the call is capable of calling him out. A recent example was when he was saying that "we need to work on improving the linear regressions on our deliveries"........ I tried to explain to him that the term wasn't what he thought it was, and he literally couldn't absorb what I said. He is in charge of hundreds of millions of throughput for a massive food corporation whose products are in every household in the country. Near as I can tell, the entire industry is a bunch of mediocrities with spreadsheets spending most of their days in meetings comparing their numbers and getting yelled at when they don't line up correctly.
Basically, this guy says take it on the chin for a year or two and keep a clean record. Then you can easily change companies and earn a solid middle class salary. Do you believe it or think his wages are bit "bubbly"? Honestly, I'm not involved in the logistic industry, but his video looks "no-BS" and straight forward. If was looking for solid working class / middle class job, I would be watching this video for tips!
The downsides caught up to him after ~3 years. He also worked his salary out to roughly $8/hr (see video for details) considering time spent "on the job".
So, perhaps this isn't the solid advertisement for the industry you were thinking it is.
Wow, thank you so much to share this follow-up video. I watched it today. My heart goes out to him. He is trying to be emotionally naked in front of an Internet audience about serious quality of life issues for OTR truckers.
He mentioned the intensity was simply too high. It's an "all or nothing" job. Honestly, when I first posted, I wasn't aware how griding the job is. I'm glad I watched this follow-up video.
What if trucking companies offered to allow two truckers to split the schedule? Then, it is up the pair to work it out. I feel the same about people who quit their office careers early for emotional labour -- family care. Many of them could easy return to their old role in 50% capacity, and split with another person. I know it could be done, but management has no interest.
It's not impossible that anyone could drive well for a while and land in a good place, but that's not the industry I see. I don't see people suddenly getting paid well after 30 months.
I don't have first hand experience with the Walmart example, but I've heard from others they get their pick of the most experienced drivers / don't pay poorly, but they're not the industry and the idea of just meeting their minimum to be considered and magically getting a job sounds a bit silly.
To me that's a YouTube video that implies a lot, isn't impossible, but doesn't say much about the odds of any of it being true for a given person either ...
The industry I know has demand for drivers, but the outcome of that isn't what you might think. There's "demand" where they demand folks who aren't paid well, and then there's real demand.
> complaining about driver shortages but not increasing wages
This is the core truth in virtually every "<worker> shortage" story. It's true for every profession, every occupation, every market. Pay a market wage and the problem goes away.
What the headlines really should be is "Rapid change in wages causes headaches for employers".
I mean, it's true that short term shocks to wage levels (and covid has been one hell of a shock) cause disruption to markets. That's worth covering. But the root cause is not and never has been a "lack of people", it's that the population of people willing to work at the now-sub-market wage is smaller than employers want.
> What the headlines really should be is "Rapid change in wages causes headaches for employers".
It's more like employers are feigning a labor shortage because they want access to the cheap and abusable visa labor they exploited before the pandemic.
It's an extremely difficult and dangerous job. The drivers deserve to be paid more than the current wages. Driving ruined my dad's health permanently - the long term costs aren't even factored in usually.
From acquaintances I know, the combination of long periods of sitting, stimulant abuse, lack of healthy food options, inconsistent sleep, air quality from being around other trucks, stress from the job, and mental isolation from being away from friends and family all are really hard, even for a year. Now imagine a 30+ Year career.
Sitting for 8-12 hours a day in a cramped position is bad for your back, neck, shoulders, hips. Name a joint and it's gonna get messed up eventually. There's also a risk of blood clots and generally anything that can be caused by poor circulation, especially in your legs. Add to that poor sleep from sleeping in your cab or possibly a crappy motel if you're lucky, not getting enough sleep, rarely being able to exercise or eat well, and obesity and muscle degeneration start to become pretty serious risks, too.
You can compensate for all those things, and some drivers do. Taking walks on their breaks, doing calesthenics, bringing good food from home, etc. Many of them don't, just as many other people don't take care of themselves and are fat and sedentary.
The amount of sitting a software dev does is comparable if not more to most truck drivers, I'd guess.
I can get out of my office chair, stretch, and then return back to my seat in a minute as much as I'd like. An 18 wheeler has to exit the highway, find a place to park that accommodates large trucks, put on the brakes, Climb out, walk around, and then go back to the highway. All while not being paid a salary but being paid by the mile.
This picture sprang to my mind when thinking of the consequences of trucking. Essentially, the sunlight from his driver side mirror aged the right side of his face. This is why I wear sunscreen almost constantly when going outside and to keep exposure to a minimum.
Something not mentioned in the article, and I'm sad to see NPR ignore is that the trucking industry turned predatory in the past few years (mainly because I'm sure they reported on it in the past).
Certain logistics companies have been pushing drivers into "owner-operator" scenarios, where they are responsible for gas, insurance, maintenance, and lease payments, while not being given the flexibility to drive for other companies. Leaving some drivers with negative paychecks (basically, their pay didn't cover expenses).
I'm betting they are going after 18 years olds specifically because they are kind of primed to into debt for a career because the college admissions process kind of primes them to think this is normal.
Since listening to that, a lot of the recent news I've been seeing, including this article, haven't been a surprise to me.
I remember they talked specifically about how predatory the trucking industry is. They interviewed both the truckers and some of the representative from companies exploiting them. (Business model didn't sound all that different from Uber. Drivers pay for their own trucks, work as independent contractors, while large operating under control of companies.)
I can't actually locate it on this site so it may have been reported in some follow-up stories. Or perhaps in details of actual story audio.
Yep the whole "owner operator" thing is just another scam. It seems like I'm seeing fewer of those on the road lately but that may just be that I'm seeing fewer of them not that there actually are fewer.
> Certain logistics companies have been pushing drivers into "owner-operator" scenarios, where they are responsible for gas, insurance, maintenance, and lease payments, while not being given the flexibility to drive for other companies. Leaving some drivers with negative paychecks (basically, their pay didn't cover expenses).
So basically the trucking industry looked at Uber and Lyft and said "Oh, hey. Neat."
No, from what I remember 10yrs ago when Uber was still starting it was already quite popular to push people into 'fake B2B' arrangement.
I remember truck drivers, paramedics and others pushed into 'fake B2B' for years and there is quite a lot of regulation in EU that if you have a single customer as a single proprietor you might be checked if it is 'fake B2B'.
As far as I recall, the roach coach that stopped at the place I worked at in 1980, twice a day, was 'staffed' by such an independent contractor.
We call them food trucks now and some of them really are independent I think, like the ones that cluster in Portland. But what I refer to served food that was not nearly as good.
> while not being given the flexibility to drive for other companies. Leaving some drivers with negative paychecks (basically, their pay didn't cover expenses).
This seems to me that the drivers should just file a self-written W-2 as a statutory employee and let the IRS figure it out. Not allowing an 'owner-operator' to work for other companies pretty clearly puts the 'owners' into the category of statutory employee.
That’s easy to say if you can trivially find another job. If they’re concerned about that and don’t want to be in a tax case (which seems extra unappealing for someone who spends most of the day driving) they probably won’t - and that’s what those companies are banking on.
California regulatory requirements basically shut down drivers owning their own trucks: the cheap old diesel trucks aren't in compliance anymore. So there's a lot of scummy leasing arrangements for the newer more expensive trucks.
That’s what the situation in this thread sounded like: those companies must have some kind of lever to force exclusivity and I’d assume it’s something like a loan.
The question is whether they are confident enough that this will be true, not lead to retaliation, and some consequences will happen. If not, a lot of people might feel they’re trapped.
I dunno.. maybe the government should start an advertising campaign, but that would imply that they would be able to put individual interests above those of their corporate overlords.
For anyone thinking or saying - "isn't this something someone could do as an extra job at weekends" - from my personal experience driving some medium-size trucks in the UK while I was at university (helping a friend who had a delivery company), driving anything that's larger than a van is a totally different experience than driving any sort of car, and is both much harder work and a magnitude more stressful. Not to mention how f**ing difficult it is to reverse.
And I wasn't driving anything near the size of the rigs being talked about here.
I 2nd this. I've driven a truck with a long horse trailer just pushing the edge of the requirement of a Class A license since I was 16 and I can say it is HARD. That's without having to worry about a tractor gear box and clutch brakes on an 18 wheeler. Everything you do has to be planned well in advance.
You need to constantly look out for human squirrels driving econoboxes and trying to pass you on the right while you make a wide turn. Crowded gas stations truly suck. Bollards hide and try to eat your trailer. If you get into a corner and can't turn sharp enough you can get trapped by your trailer.
Then there are the additional laws, weight limits, fines and fees, logging requirements, hour limits, hazmat, double trailers and a hundred other things that a trucker needs to know.
I spent 4 years driving a 35ft RV with our family. The trips were fun, the driving is scary.
Wind affects you so much. You can feel big vehicles passing you. Every slight angle on a road makes you feel like you’re going to tip over. You need special navigation systems that know your vehicle size so you don’t get routed down a road where you can’t turn around or a bridge can’t support you.
Definitely learned to appreciate truck stops and rest areas though. Parking overnight fills up so many times you’ll end up in a Walmart parking lot because of all the cameras.
It’s an adventure. It could be fun and a lot of people love it. Some people especially get into long distance trucking.
But IMO it’s definitely a full time job with a lot of responsibilities. I’m shocked there aren’t more accidents which is really a credit to all of these drivers and their training.
I have spent a little over a year traveling every few days/weeks with a 35ft fifth wheel RV.
I hope to high heavens that you didn't have a normal bumper pull with a length of 35 ft. That would be utterly crazy!
It is completely uneventful if you have a proper truck and hitch, even with a 30 mph crosswind, though I have never gone over 75 mph with this setup. If you EVER feel like you are not in control or the vehicle is unstable, your setup is fatally flawed, and you need to reconsider your hitch and truck setup.
Open source OSMAND has truck navigation with weight, width, and height restriction considerations.
Truck stops and rest areas should be your last resort. You need to make phone calls and strike deals with potential places to stay at discounted rates. Being nice over the phone goes a long way.
My brother is a Romanian truck driver (he’s on his way to France right now, if I’m not mistaken). He got into this career at 32 years of age because he couldn’t make it anymore running a small cow farm, his farm couldn’t compete against the subsidized milk coming from the likes of France or Poland (a temporary, politically-induced ban on selling beef to Russia also didn’t help, his cows’ value was halved over-night). What I’m saying is that every action has a reaction, those Romanians and Bulgarians are not into it to steal someone else’s job, most of them were forced to do it because of economical and political decisions taken over their heads.
Well, one of the differences between the US and UK is the US is much larger, and the long-haul 18-wheeler routes are going to take longer than a weekend to drive and back. Going between, say, Chicago and NYC takes ~12 hours... not counting stops. And that's one way!
It only takes one choke point or low bridge or prohibited route to ruin your whole trip. While 99% of US roads may be bigger and wider, 1% of a 400 mile daily trip can cause major problems.
Aren’t American trucks bigger though? Seems like the economics would encourage companies to make the biggest truck that can physically fit on the roads, to maximize cargo per driver hour.
Slightly bigger, because in the US the regulation is on trailer length, whereas European regs are on total length. So Euro trucks are all cab-over designs, while American trucks are generally engine-in-front (easier to access for maintenance). But unless you're talking about a double trailer, not much difference.
The problem is a lot of American roads have poor clearance. You can find a lot of images online of trucks that have been opened like a sardine can along the top due to hitting a low bridge. You can't make the truck too long either or else it will be unable to turn on right angle intersections. When they deliver big things like wind turbines on American roads, its can be an extremely slow process with engineers spotting each and every single turn along the route.
That's an interesting point. It would seem that the idea truck would have the highest possible cargo to truck weight ratio for profitability purposes. The square cube law would seem to indicate that larger trucks are heavier, but add much more cargo space to compensate.
However, larger engines could be less efficient per pound than their smaller counterparts. My intuition is that the opposite is true, but I could definitely be wrong on that.
true, but then in the UK you're working with roads that aren't even really designed to host trucks in the first place. American roads are pretty grid-ish, British roads are all over the shop and much more organic in structure.
In fairness, UK streets are often tiny compared to those in the US (at least in my experience motoring around southern England for a week). I suspect that plays a nontrivial role.
No doubt, but in my short experience in southern England, if you're not on a major highway, you're often on a lane just big enough for one compact car and sidewalks are used in case of oncoming traffic. Chicago alleys are positively spacious by comparison. I imagine truck drivers just learn routes with wider roads.
Just this past weekend I drove a 25ft truck for a 400 mile move. It was the first time I've driven something bigger than a car and I gained a lot of respect for truck drivers. Surprisingly difficult to do basic things like lane centering.
I think it depends. I've driven stuff like larger box trucks or pulling a larger trailer (even a tiny house!) without any issue. I wouldn't want to drive them in a city though. That would be stressful.
Just don't get in a hurry. That way you can look far enough ahead to predict any issues before they become pressing. When you're starting out, this also gives you time to remember how the transmission works (although all new rigs are automatics now, which might explain the high schoolers). All the idiots on the street with you can either pass or wait behind.
I agree with this, but it doesn't solve all the issues of driving in the cities (maybe you're area is different). I would be concerned with the narrow streets with people not parked well, double parked, etc. Philly seems to be terrible to drive in compared to many other cities. If you do get into an accident, the police won't even come to make a report. The roads are generally in terrible condition too.
Never drive them into a city. That's one of my rules for operating a larger vehicle; if I can avoid urban/city zones I will. Sometimes you can't avoid them, but the rest of the time I plan to go around. Especially if I'm hauling something heavy.
There was one experience where the local Uhaul gave me a 20' truck instead of the 10' van I requested. It was the most stressful, surreal experience I ever had trying to maneuver that big dumb truck around city streets. And this was just to move a broke college graduate's stuff; basically a cheap futon, book case, and desk. Nothing in the truck was worth the damage of hitting or scraping a car.
Here's the problem with driving on the weekends. Unless you get hooked up with a company and they're ok with paying your insurance the answer is no. The TLDR here is that if you're and employee or contractor for a trucking company, you'll be paying insurance rates based on driving the legal DOT(in the states) limit.
If you want to see what this looks like, google around for "hot shot trucking". It doesn't require a CDL under, I believe, 24k lbs. BUT it does require a special insurance since you're no longer a person, but a company.
Each individual state may have more stringent CDL licensing requirements. However, every state must follow federal requirements as a baseline. One element in federal CDL operator requirements is a vehicle’s GVWR. The federal requirement specifies that, when a vehicle has a GVWR of 26,000 pounds or less, the operator does not need a CDL. However, this does not mean the truck GVW can be loaded above the GVWR of 26,000 pounds and operated by a non-CDL driver. Federal requirements state the GVW must, in addition, be 26,000 pounds or less. CDL requirements become more confusing when the vehicle is towing a trailer.
The truck driver shortage reminds me on the fossil fuel situation.
Generally, we hear that truck drivers won't be needed in the future: Trucks will drive themselves. But now we have less truck drivers than we need, and the future with self driving trucks hasn't quite arrived yet
Similarly, we hear that fossil fuels should be out phased. And now we have an energy crisis with not enough oil and gas. The future of renewable energy isn't quite there yet.
There are 3.6M truck drivers in the US, and this number has only been increasing. The shortage has nothing to do with self-driving trucks. The problem is it’s a dangerous, high-stress, and comparatively, low pay job. It has only gotten worse with all of the additional regulations in the past 5-10 years. Not saying I disagree with all the regulations, but the implementation needs work. Truckers are constantly on edge nowadays.
Anyways, if they wanna solve the shortage, pay them more. Simple as that.
One group I worked with they were yelling they did not have enough drivers. But we sent someone over and watched how they ran their op for a few weeks. The real issue was they had one guy who would only come in at 6:30AM sharp. The entire org had somehow worked itself around that one hard requirement. He was also the guy who signed off on shipments. So lines of trucks would sit waiting empty because no one could leave until it was signed off. They thought they needed more drivers because shipments were low. Just to keep up and more loaders to load the items. Drivers would show at 9 and would not even roll out until 1. When the real solution was to hire 2 more people to sign off on orders and put them on different shifts. Throwing more money at the problem would never fix it. They just did not have enough space for that many drivers to show up at the same time.
They had designed their whole shipping system around max capacity at a particular time. They started adding more shipping capacity to cover it. When they really needed to shift when the work was happening. Once they fixed that they actually found they had overstaffed on drivers. They quickly found those guys more work as they were putting off orders because of capacity.
very much so. A lot of LTL and shipping companies should re-evaluate how and when they load things. The rules changed fairly recently and those will create all sorts of spots like that. So the old routes and loadtimes probably no longer make sense. Where 1 guy coming in at a particular time was fine but now with the way shifts are going to be you may need 2 and shift the pickup time out by x hours. That sort of thing. The rule changes also constrained the actual number of hours drivers can do (so there is an increased demand for drive time). When I started with this stuff 20+ years ago it was 5x5 shifts were common and legal. But now you will have to make sure you give people their weekends and core sleep times and about a dozen countdown clocks per driver. Getting that scheduling right will be quite the linear algebra optimization problem.
It’s not the regulations causing problems - it’s the price pressure seeking lower and lower standards. The rest of the drivers on the road don’t want to share it with a truck driver on two hours of sleep, steering 15 tons of truck and cargo.
Nor do they want to be around vehicles that have skipped their brake maintenance because they pushing operational hours to the edge.
Agreed 100%. The problem is the regulations have increased the difficulty and stress of the job while the pay has steadily decreased. That’s why my solution is to pay more, not remove the regulations.
Though there is plenty of room for improvement in the regulations. They need to provide some leeway for drivers that have been stuck in traffic for hours and can’t complete a load that’s just a couple miles away.
Also, you have no idea how many truckers work around these regulations and go through insane hoops just so they can fudge the numbers. When you see that happening en masse, your regulations probably need some tuning.
I agree the solution is to pay more - that would also reduce the level effort being expended to bypass regulations by independent drivers. The problem is the independent drivers are squeezed between the logistics companies and the regulations. They need to form a union to get both better pay and better implemented regulations - but that’s difficult the way the market for their services has been evolved to break them down into individual contractors.
In the EU the transport regulations are doubled by workplace security, capped maximum work hours and minimum wage regulations. So far socialism has somehow worked fine in this sector. Still, 70% of the trucking market is served by East Europeans and Westen companies have registered fleets in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria and are using staff from these markets specifically. It's not only because of staffing pressure, but also heavy regulation in the West.
If there wasn't a shortage then sure they might lose money by paying drivers more, but the supposed shortage of labor hurts more (it leads to business that they don't do at all)
Some customers won’t buy but the driver’s pay is only one part of the total cost and most businesses aren’t running on margins that tight for very long. If shipping prices drift up, they’ll adjust their usage or raise their own prices rather than voluntarily go out of business.
True, but isn't that the while point of the supply-demand curve? Not enough drivers to cover the work means that prices should go up, and some marginal customers will go away, until the whole thing balances.
It's odd the way people understand that increased prices will lower demand, but not see that demand will also drive prices.
> At some point, companies will simply not purchase the goods if they can't truck it economically or will look for alternatives.
I don't know why you were downvoted. Maybe people assumed a political position, but AFAICT you're just stating facts.
If trucking in its current form becomes unsustainable then it'll evolve into leaner alternatives, or we'll simply pay more / consume less. Nothing wrong with that.
I think it’s more the “assume a perfect spherical cow” style of argument. It’s true that people will stop buying if the shipping price hits some incredibly high level but it’s a complex system where driver pay is just a small part. The most likely outcomes are things like raising their own prices, becoming more economical in their use or packaging, shifting the delivery times & intervals, etc. — things which happen all of the time without reaching such dramatic levels. The data I’ve seen has the cost of fuel being right behind compensation in cost and that fluctuates all the time without people halting purchases.
Too bad the rail industry doesn't care to compete in general. Trucks run when you want them to. Rail means you need to rearrange your shipping to fit them.
There are exceptions, but when it doesn't take much digging to discover rail doesn't care to get more of this business even though they could with a bit of customer service.
You still have to provide last mile delivery, loading and unloading operations thus it takes more time. Plus adjust the logistics chain. If you have big warehouses built for trucked goods, tough luck.
Maybe comparing the bill from a trucking company against the bill from the rail; How much does it cost to get that freight from the train station to my delivery location, though?
Truck transportation is a bidding market. I think this is exactly what's going on, up to the point customers have private fleets that are losing people.
Re: pay, here's a comment of mine from another thread on this topic. You need to take into consideration that there are two sides to this market -- the supply side and demand side:
There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.
> There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.
Why should truck drivers subsidize these companies, then?
A company should not be in business if it isn't sustainable without screwing the workers.
Why this is so poorly understood by people is beyond.
Small businesses always complain about how they can’t afford to pay more. But if you need to pay less than a minimum wage to make your business viable then… it’s not viable.
Well..if there were laws to enforce a higher minimum wage, all of your competitors would have to do it too and the price of products across your industry would rise.
The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.
Over the years we’re in the same boat and the cycle begins again with a new minimum wage - that’s ok.
> The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.
that is a myth. Only people on the bottom can afford to spend more. For the rest of us we don't get a raise.
With higher wages prices need to go up for the same profit. Supply and demand may or may not allow prices to go up. Some marginal products go off the market. Some prices go up. People adjust to buying less things because they can't afford them. Slowly inflation catches up and wages are back to "too low" - this is a bad thing.
You're basically saying that both demand is exceeding supply (=shortage) and that demand is weak enough that supply increases aren't worth it. That's not a shortage. That's just a price equilibrium i.e. business as usual.
It’s very essential, but it is independently transactional - I.e. very not sticky.
It’s the same reason that buying a drink is independently transactional and competitive vs buying health insurance is very non competitive and very sticky.
I’ve had friends in the truck driving business and the hardest part is finding people who can stay clean with the drug testing. The Venn diagram of people wanting to drive truck and who recreationally use drugs seem to overlap a touch.
Say you're a trucker working 60 hours a week that's $22.55/hour.
Here's the day of a truck driver...
Most truck drivers are paid by the mile. If you're a long-haul truck driver you live in your truck. Driving all day, then sitting at a warehouse for 3 hours while you get unloaded. You're not getting paid while sitting there but you also can't leave. You have to stay with the truck at all times. Then it's 11pm when you're finally unloaded and you have to find a truck stop to park and sleep at. The closest truck stop is 10 miles away but it's 11pm, it might be full. You only have 20 minutes of legal driving time left on your log book. Do you risk going to the truck stop even though it might be full and you run out of driving hours or do you try to find a street to park on? Most cities don't allow trucks to park on the street so that's a gamble too.
If you run out of hours looking for a spot to park you risk getting a fine if you are inspected. State troopers and police can pull truck drivers over at any time for an inspection. If you are fined it's out of your own pocket, not the company.
So even if you were doing your job perfectly legally, you ran out of time because the warehouse took too long to unload. Now you might get fined and completely wipe out any income you made today. It also goes on your driving record and future companies won't hire you if you have too many incidents.
Now it's 6am and you're not feeling well and need to use the bathroom. The truck stop bathroom has a 15 minute wait but your next pickup is in 30 minutes and it's a 20 minute drive way.
Also your kids birthday is tomorrow but you might not make it back in time.
Now do this every day for less than $25/hour. All while every car on the road rages at you because your truck is limited to 65mph.
They said underpaid, not low paid. It's not just a job, it's a way of living that completely dominates your life and taxes your body with the lifestyle associated with it.
Clearly not enough people are willing to make that tradeoff for the salary.
It is still low paid. Money per hour, volatility of income, and quality of life at work including morbidity and mortality risk are just as relevant as money per year.
BLS does not incorporate these metrics, but there is an easy way to see if a job is low paid relative to quality of life at work (and outside of work). And that is to see people advise their kids to aspire to be. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, but not truck driver.
I dont know how reliable these indeed salaries are, I also know many many many drivers that are making less than 50K a year putting in 50-60 hours a week (or more) and are away from their familes for 5-7 days at a time
Automated electric long-haul trucking looks good but there's an issue that requires an on-board human: self-driving at present only makes sense for long steady stretches of freeway, say I80 through Nevada and so on. Even though that's the majority of the travel time, human drivers will be needed for:
(1) 'the last few miles' i.e dealing with local complexity at delivery points, and
(2) unexpected emergencies (flat tires, etc.) and general maintenance.
Something like a remote drone operator probably wouldn't work(for changing tires etc.) or be completely reliable (disconnecting in a snowstorm etc.).
However, this could be an attractive work situation for many people. If you have an 8-hour straight automated run with a truck cabin, the operator can sleep, study, write code... hopefully something more productive than online games, anyway. Supplemental earnings could be possible.
This also benefits the trucking companies as they can plausibly run trucks on much longer 20+ driving / day schedules, since operators can sleep on the automated streches of the freeways.
You can also run convoys with one team per 5 trucks. They will want to maintain a person in the loop if only for protecting from highway robbers. What happens if two cars ride side by side in two lanes, force the truck to stop and steal the load?
I have been following oil news closely for a better part of a decade now, the oil industry did not reduce capacity due to renewables. They respond to price, especially higher cost productions like fracking and oil sand. Consistently low oil prices since 2014 crash has scared many investors away, and it'll take some time of consistently high oil price before investor confidence return.
Current high prices is a combination of inflation (primarily caused by money printing), OPEC+ not going full speed, and other high cost producers not ramping up due to lack of confidence.
It's not about the cost, it's about the availability.
Go look at the percent generated by source and you'll see how far off we are from phasing out fossil fuels. Couple this with the projected usage of electricity in the coming years and the outlook is that much bleaker.
There's plenty of oil and gas. It's just the still available sources are difficult and expensive to extract from, requiring high prices to be worth it, but plentiful supply inherently drives the prices down, so it either needs to be kept artificially low via cartels or subsidized, which voters are understandably not big fans of given the history of fossil fuel subsidies.
I think “quite” is doing a lot of work here. I agree with this characterization of the mechanics of what’s happening, but more broadly I’d say western culture has been suffering a growing disconnect between dream and reality for some time now. What is seen as “futuristic tech”, driven by endless hype machines, perpetually seems to be just a few years away, regardless of things like: physics, funding, business models, government aptitude and will, human behavior, public opinion, and frankly human ingenuity/adaptability. As a consequence, instead of planning based on the world we live in today and the most likely near term projections, we try to plan for entirely unrealistic futures. It’s a mixture of being sold a future as being closer than it is or entirely different than it will be, and trying to will into existence a future we want (or want to avoid). Nobody wants to stay tethered to reality anymore, for various and varied reasons, so they try to act like it doesn’t exist.
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Drivers have been making LESS over the years for a few decades now.
Nobody wants to hire 18 year olds generally, insurance wouldn't allow it any way...
Logistics companies who hire drivers have been complaining about driver shortages but not increasing wages for years as well... and they actually seem to meet demand just fine. Issues at choke points like ports don't seem to be a pure driver supply issue from what I've seen.
The logistics industry is super price sensitive, people will complain... but they'll also wait to ship a thing to save a couple bucks (I'm not kidding when I say a couple bucks) all while complaining.
The drivers you hear who make a good living have specialized skills / work for specialized companies and do not reflect the industry as a whole.