Back in 1987, at my first job at Hewlett-Packard, they had a little robot that would deliver mail. This was their plant in Loveland, CO, I believe it was the first non-California site HP opened.
Along the main hallways there was some sort of retroreflective tape laid down, and the robot, which looked like and equipment cart, would follow that tape. At every stop it would sound a chime and the secretary for that section would come out and retrieve a bundle of mail and distribute it to their people.
Super simple implementation, but it worked quite well for what it did.
Your comment brought back a memory: My wife was interning at Eli Lilly in their HQ in Indy in the summer of 1999 and they had an office mail robot that fits the exact description you gave.
I think it followed markings on the floor. Zero computer vision, when it came your way you'd better watch out, it nearly squished me against a wall while I was watching it.
They’re more or less mobile ATMs rolling through a hospital. Also, the security is in large part from reducing the overall number of people with any access.
>TuSimple and the USPS declined to disclose the cost of the program, but Frum said no tax dollars were used and the agency relies on revenue from sales of postage and other products.
Really? This is exactly the kind of thing we should be spending tax dollars on. I have no idea why people think the USPS is this giant wasteful pit of money in the federal budget but they provide a lot of valuable services in addition to steady employment for a lot of Americans.
>I have no idea why people think the USPS is this giant wasteful pit of money in the federal budget
A concentrated disinformation campaign funded by people who stand to benefit from privatizing mail delivery. It started with the mandate to pre-fund pension and healthcare benefits for the next 75 years, funding pensions for retired employees who aren't even born yet. That means by federal mandate, the USPS is sitting on $400 billion that they can't touch [1]. That's not all bad in and of itself, but they're also limited by law on what they can charge for stamps, and the federal review board doesn't always let them increase prices to keep up with costs [2].
The same group of people who forced the USPS into an precedented fiscal nightmare are the same people going on TV and telling you that the USPS is fiscally irresponsible and a waste of money and should be privatized. Not a big surprise that Rep Tom Davis III was the author of the bill passed in 2006 but in 2004 FedEx was one of his biggest campaign contributors.
This is happening everywhere with all kinds of government services. "Slash budgets" and by firing full time employees and cutting investment, piecemeal it out to the lowest-bid contractor, the quality of service deteriorates, not much money is actually saved, but someone gets rich(er)!
And when the service fails, you can point to it as the reason government solutions don't work and how regulation is bad, which provides convenient reasoning to strip more regulations and privatize more government services.
Noble? Maybe... I'd say it's dishonest at best. If the USPS failed on its own, there might be a point to the argument that the government is inefficient. But when lawmakers destroy something and then claim that it destroyed itself and therefore we must destroy everything else, it doesn't quite seem right.
It's like smashing a window with a baseball bat to prove glass is easily breakable. Yes the glass broke, that's why you don't hit it with a baseball bat. Rather than replacing the windows with brick, how about just not hitting it with a baseball bat? If you want to prove how easily breakable the glass is, let is break (or not) on its own.
You're responding on a completely different level than what I actually said.
> If the USPS failed on its own, there might be a point to the argument that the government is inefficient. But when lawmakers destroy something and then claim that it destroyed itself and therefore we must destroy everything else, it doesn't quite seem right.
To be clear, I agree with this. I like the USPS, and think they do a great job.
The point is that grassroots support for "starve the beast" didn't start out focused on the USPS. The USPS was just one of the more vulnerable targets, plus some business stood to gain, so politicians directed the ire there. It's similar dynamic to how in these "government shutdowns", national parks close but the TSA keeps right on going. Or locally, how trying to keep real estate taxes down ends putting the screws on teachers and firefighters, rather than shrinking the town bureaucracy.
The larger point is to avoid simplistically ascribing the worst intent to the "other team". It's an easy answer, but prevents understanding that they actually have legitimate points. And it drives adherence to the agenda of your familiar team, which is also busy manufacturing consent for corporate agendas in a similar manner.
>It started with the mandate to pre-fund pension and healthcare benefits for the next 75 years, funding pensions for retired employees who aren't even born yet.
This is wholly inaccurate. All that the USPS is being required to do is set aside money to pay for pension liabilities that they have incurred. Nothing close to funding pensions for employees that have yet to be born.
Besides, this is all hypothetical as the USPS has not actually made the payments they were supposed to.
>the USPS has not actually made the payments they were supposed to
That's so 100% disprovable, so easily disprovable, disproven by the first link in the comment you directly replied to, that I'm have a hard time assuming good faith in your argument as the HN guidelines tell me to do.
He’s correct. If they had made the payments they were suppose to, the health benefits account would have been fully funded by 2017. Because they didn’t, it is only half funded and is running deficits.
I'm reading the first link and I see language like "83 percent," "50 percent funded," and "unfunded by $86.6 billion." Are you interpreting treis' comment as "hasn't made any of the payments?" Because I read it as, "hasn't made all of the payments," which seems accurate.
The USPS has missed most of they payments, not making a full one since 2010. The health benefits fund (the 50% one) was the only one that needed to be funded and much of that funding came from transfers from the other, overfunded, pension accounts.
Anyway, the point is moot, since the prefunding period is over and the payments are now on the permanent schedule. Because the Post Office couldn’t fully find the account, the fund is now running deficits and will be depleted in a decade.
"Hasn't made any of the payments" is the only way to read it when they're saying "it's hypothetical". Once the first payment is made, it's not hypothetical any more. It's real money. The USPS only stopped paying because they were more than $8b in debt and could no longer afford the $5.7b per year they needed to pay. Which goes to prove the point that Congress is intentionally taxing them out of business.
If I owe you money and I stop paying and my argument for stopping paying you is that I don't have any money left, do you claim that my money problems are hypothetical because I haven't paid it all? No. They're very real, highlighted by the fact that I can't pay the rest.
>I'm have a hard time assuming good faith in your argument as the HN guidelines tell me to do.
Seriously? You should Google before becoming quite so self righteous:
>It is not the first time the Postal Service has missed its required payments to prefund retirees’ health benefits. From 2012 through 2016, the agency failed to deliver nearly $34 billion toward its pool for retirees’ health care.
Please explain your use of the word "hypothetical". That might be where I am getting confused. Because the only way I'm interpreting that statement is "the USPS can't blame this law for their money problems because they haven't even made any payments"
At best, I might be able to twist the words to say "the USPS's money problems aren't real because they can't afford to pay their debt", which makes no sense.
The reality of the situation is the $5.7b they're required to pay every year is more than they can afford to pay, so they paid it until they reached $8b in debt and then stopped paying. None of that is hypothetical in any way.
I don't know where you got your numbers but they certainly don't reflect reality. As my cite says, they missed ~34 billion worth of payments. As your cite says they're missing 86 billion dollars that they need to pay their pension obligations.
>Please explain your use of the word "hypothetical".
Hypothetical as in they are not actual real outflows of cash from the USPS. They can't be blamed for the USPS' financial woes since they haven't made a payment in 7 years now.
Yes, set aside liabilities for 75 years in the future. They effectively have to fund people before they're born, unless you think they've got a lot of workers who'll be there over 75 years old.
So, yes, they have to fund. And they're struggling because they're being subject to deliberate and malicious political attack on public services.
>Yes, set aside liabilities for 75 years in the future. They effectively have to fund people before they're born, unless you think they've got a lot of workers who'll be there over 75 years old.
They have to set aside money to pay pension obligations that they have incurred to their current employees. No money is being set aside to pay pensions for workers who have yet to be born. A tiny fraction of the money set aside may be paid out in 75 years, but it won't be to a worker that has yet to be born. It would be paid to a current USPS employee that is still living 75 years from now.
>So, yes, they have to fund. And they're struggling because they're being subject to deliberate and malicious political attack on public services.
For other reasons, perhaps, but not for the pre-funding requirement.
Is a pay-as-you-go pension really a smart option if your #1 product/mandate (first class mail) is at total risk of becoming irrelevant in the near-term?
Those aren't the only options. It's hard to argue that the goal isn't the complete destruction of the USPS when you mandate they pre-pay pensions 75 years in advance and then forbid them from raising prices to fulfill that mandate.
If the USPS is going to become irrelevant in the near-term, does stockpiling 75 years worth of pensions really make sense?
We agree that the pension obligations are the reason why the USPS (once one of the most innovative logistics organizations in the world) has degraded so throughly. But pointing to shadowy private interests is backfilling personal politics into the narrative. The obvious culprit of USPS' debilitating pension obligations the pensioners themselves.
Its a common misconception, and it is driven by political interests that want to dismantle public services and replace them with more expensive services that have a profit margin for themselves attached.
For me it's not a misconception. 99.99% of things delivered by USPS are spam at my house. I don't even get paper statements for any of my bills. 100% of things delivered by UPS/FedEx/etc are useful things I want to get. Every time I go to the mailbox is an encouragement to get rid of the USPS. My life would literally be better if USPS didn't exist.
I'm required to facilitate the USPS's delivery of this spam by maintaining a box in my yard if I want to ever get anything from them at all. If UPS/FedEx start leaving garbage in my yard I can sue them for littering on my private property.
Hundreds of millions of people are forced to rely on it. I can't be the only person who sees the primary role of the USPS is to deliver garbage to my front yard.
The benefit of UPS/FedEx is if they start leaving garbage in my front yard, I can sue them for littering.
If the USPS goes away there will be a very short adjustment period when private organizations and official government changes its mailing practices, but it will all be fine. I'm willing to make a compromise where the federal government can require that regular (weekly?) mail delivery be available everywhere in the country, and if it's not available from private sources the government can create one. So if you're in the boonies of the northern most territory of Alaska, you'll get weekly mail or something delivered by government subsidized mail service.
USPS delivers packages too. You're either not looking closely enough at the shipping labels or you don't order from a variety of merchants. In general, USPS seems to make sense for smaller businesses that ship small packages. There is also MailInnovations/SmartPost where UPS/Fedex dumps packages at the local "inefficient" post office for last mile delivery.
Raising the lowest price for sending junk mail to the prices of UPSFedex would certainly reduce spam, but this has nothing to do with how the services are governed.
You advocate for regulating the USPS to reduce the delivery of SPAM if you want. I'm happy to just see them disappear. Why should I care to have government regulate a service provider into providing a better service when a better service already exists?
In practical terms I cannot stop having a mailbox, because a few times a year a check or something comes in the mail. That means I would have to go get my mail from the post office every so often and go through it all. So all that's accomplished is I have to drive a few miles down the road to pick up my USPS garbage instead of having the garbage delivered into my front yard. If the USPS didn't exist at all, everyone (businesses, official government notifications, etc) would switch to the better service providers like UPS/FedEx.
What is this better service that delivers letters for around the current clearing price (< $1) and prevents/polices spam? AFAIK Fedex is around $30, which is the overwhelming reason spammers don't use them.
Of course, that comes with a guaranteed delivery date, insurance, tracking, etc. I'm sure the private carriers would charge more than the USPS if they were servicing the lowest end mail, but currently the USPS is monopolizing that.
Also important to note that the USPS is subsidized by the spam they deliver which primarily winds up in the landfill. If the USPS wasn't filling everyone's garbage bin with bulk rubbish every day, their clearing price would be closer to private shippers. To put a scale on that, I have one trash can in my house that is at my desk and only winds up getting garbage mail tossed in it. Every two weeks I have a 13 gallon garbage bag full of mail garbage. What is the time-cost of every household in my city dealing with that much extra junk? What is the environmental cost?
A valuable service which they charge money for, and should generate revenue to cover their costs.
Pension funding politics aside, I want to pay USPS postage fees which cover the cost of the service they provide. There’s no reason to be paying below cost postage to USPS. I find that their rates are extremely competitive, particularly priority mail flat rate compared to UPS or FedEx.
I think the post office could be doing a lot more digital services in 2020 and I’d love to see a lot less junk mail, it would be nice if they could centralize the opt-outs.
You can't put aside the pension funding politics but still want to pay the USPS more, since the price of postage fees is set by federal law and must be approved by Congress. The reason you pay below cost to the USPS is because Congress demands it.
> It should be noted, however, that the 2006 postal law sought to provide the Postal Service with increased pricing flexibility and to promote simpler, quicker and more efficient process for changing postage prices. [1]
I think by and large current rates cover the costs. There is a weird international looohole which they are closing. We should not be subsidizing free shipping from China.
My point is mainly I don’t want to see taxpayer subsidies in excess of postage. I believe without the pension funding weirdness the USPS would be about break even, but there’s lots of conflicting information.
The other part about increasing postage is that people are asked to pay more, but they don't necessarily see an improvement in the service that comes with the postage. I think about this a lot with public transit too, what a lot of people pay at the farebox doesn't necessarily cover the cost of the ride.
Fairbox recovery rates [1] in the US tend to be around 15-20%. The rest is made up from public subsidies. In the most heavily utilized subway systems, the ratio can increase to around 50% (NYC). [1]
It depends how you count the revenue, but by some accounts public transit is more heavily subsidized by State and Federal government than driving. This is especially true on a per-passenger-mile basis.
> I have no idea why people think the USPS is this giant wasteful pit of money in the federal budget
Because republicans have spent decades trying to kill it. Before the post office was forced to pay pensions fund up front by republicans [1] it was self sustainable.
> Because republicans have spent decades trying to kill it. Before the post office was forced to pay pensions fund up front by republicans [1] it was self sustainable.
The pre-funding period ended in 2017 -- Current retirees are paid from this fund. Since the USPS missed the majority of its payments to the PRHB, the fund is currently running deficits and will be depleted by 2030.
source: https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694188.pdf
That means that even if it was "Pay As You Go", it would not be self sustainable.
The first source has a history section that details the Senate and House votes. There is no record of the votes because it was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate and without challenge in the House.
> Thanks to NALC and a coalition of other unions (the Rural Letter Carriers and the Mail Handlers), management associations, vendors and mailers, Congress rejected almost all the negative recommendations of President Bush’s blue-ribbon Commission on the Postal Service. Instead it crafted a balanced compromise that emphasized pragmatism over ideology.
> Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) were instrumental in negotiating the final details with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the bill’s chief sponsor in the Senate. In an e-Activist message sent on December 9, NALC President Bill Young thanked Waxman and Carper for advocating NALC’s interests in the legislation. He also thanked Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI), and Reps. Tom Davis (R-VA), Danny Davis (D-IL) and John McHugh (R-NY) for their roles over the years.
I didn't even know until about a month ago that the USPS is one of the only constitutionally-mandated federal institutions (in school, we focused a lot on the Bill of Rights, not so much on the articles themselves).
I don't think this is quite right. The Postal Clause give congress the power to establish the USPS. It doesn't mandate that they do so. If Congress decided the USPS was no longer necessary (not a position I advocate), they would be well within their rights to pass a law abolishing it.
Reminds me of when I attended an event in Paris, France and they had a robot bartender. I was there during the day when they were setting up and it took a team of 3 engineers ~8 hours to set up vs just paying a bartender for the 3 hours + an hour's setup time that the evening cocktail reception lasted.
I understand they organisers wanted something cool, but it was comical to observe nonetheless.
There's a chain of hotels (Yotel) that is known in part for its robot that will stow luggage the hotel is holding for you. In practice, the staff mostly stows your luggage like every place else because the robot doesn't have anything like the throughput you need at busy times.
The flipside to it is, during slow hours you still have the robot at the ready to help the odd guest. The robot just sitting there generates virtually no costs (bar the minuscule amount of electricity to maintain situational awareness), while at the same time freeing humans to do more important tasks. Which may very well be family and social life.
Maybe? There are always people on duty anyway and the robot contraption probably takes up way more expensive urban space than any cost savings it brings. I'd be pretty sure the robot is far more about having a hip urban vibe than any sort of ROI.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a hotel with lockers. Part of it is probably not wanting to become a public luggage storage facility. The other is probably that, while lockers work well for modest-sized carryons, once you get into bigger suitcases like a lot of people travel with, you can't really lift them up to a locker that's off the ground.
Lockers (or luggage storage generally outside of hotels) are, in general, pretty scarce in the US--and at least a lot of Europe in my experience. It's one of the things that makes a regular hotel pretty handy; I can drop off my luggage the day I arrive or leave and not have to restrict my activities until it's time to checkin or depart.
They're very common in hostels, particular backpacker hostels, but that fits with having limited luggage. I've seen them once or twice in the cheapest hotels.
The main railway station in a European town sometimes has luggage storage. In Germany that's usually lockers, in countries with more history of terrorism (like the UK) it's a room with a metal detector and an attendant.
The in-vehicle monitor will likely be a standard part of autonomous and semi-autonomous trucking for the foreseeable future.
A monitor can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work, and can respond to onsite issues more promptly and accurately than could a remote one.
> A monitor can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work
People working full time still need to live you know, even if it's "less work".
Last time I checked the "amount" of work doesn't really correlate with the pay too.
You can't tell a professional truck driver "Ok man, you'll be in the same seat, on the same road, for the same amount of time but you get $500 instead of $1500 because it's less work, oh and also if there is a crash and you weren't 100% focused you'll be liable for the damage"
What drivers are paid for a given load reflects market conditions like e.g., weather, truck availability, and load availability, more than anything else.
Automating large parts of the driving process would make the job easier and more desirable. More people would be willing to work as monitors, which would increase truck availability and lower rates.
There’s also the possibility that a monitor could do other work while the truck drove. Team drivers already do this; the passive driver occupies herself when not driving by reading or even dispatching other loads.
How can the monitor do other things if he is expected to have full situational awareness at a moment's notice in case something goes wrong, when you have no idea if or when that might happen?
All the studies say this is actually more dangerous, which is why Waymo abandoned L3 development years ago when they discovered their safety drivers were falling asleep at the wheel. And there's the infamous Uber death which is well documented and analyzed.
That's the difference. In an autonomous urban driving environment a monitor is expected to have full situational awareness at all times because driving in cities is a hugely complex process. A truck driving 1,100 miles on I-80 would not need to be monitored as closely, if at all, because that driving process is far simpler. This kind of highway driving accounts for the majority of over-the-road freight.
"Monitor" might be a misnomer, here, in that the monitor isn't expected to be actively watching what the truck is doing; rather the monitor would be expected to respond to infrequent issues and maybe handle off-highway driving to and from shipping and receiving facilities.
I understand the idea of having drivers take over in dense urban areas, and letting the truck drive itself along the highway between cities. But this assumes the truck is capable of safely navigating along the highway with zero human intervention. An inattentive driver/monitor is no better than no driver when something unexpected happens and requires a sub-second reaction. If they can do that then they're in business, but I am skeptical.
I don't think the quantity of work matters at all for salary.
A monitor probably needs more knowledge than a driver (need to know the specifics of the product, how to fix problems etc.), and has the same downsides (long hours, not especially exciting job, bad work hours, sitting all the time etc.). If anything I would think they would be paid more.
It would be wholly dependent on the load and the technical implementation.
In my view the monitor would be a driver with standard knowledge and experience who could drive if the autonomous system encountered an edge case or for last-mile, i.e., from the freeway to the shipping or receiving facility.
Under those circumstances a load traveling ten hours with six hours of loading and unloading time would require two hours of active work and fourteen hours of standby.
Any driver would accept a lower rate for this kind of arrangement.
It's not like the monitor will be sitting there playing Angry Birds all day - they will be required to be 100% focused on the road so they can intervene at a moment's notice. Personally I'd find that more stressful than just driving myself.
The arrangement I described above assumes no need for active monitoring for long-distance driving. It is the most monotonous and least technically-complex part of the process and the driver would be free to do other things during it.
It’s not the same process as the autonomous urban driving being attempted by Waymo et al. Driving from Phoenix to Dallas on the highway is far simpler than driving around Phoenix.
No one working on autonomous vehicles is trying to build something where, long term, you need a role like that. There's no benefit to that over just hiring a driver.
If it were as simple as pushing a button a monkey could fit the bill. Or maybe a pigeon. [0]
The monitor would be in place to manage the last-mile driving and any other technically-challenging aberrations on the route. Human skill and judgement would still be required, just for much shorter periods.
Salary in a free market is not determined by amount of work done, value produced, or credentials, but rather the supply of people who could fill that role.
Trains are super efficient. My uncle is a locomotive engineer. He has one or two conductors with a train that is a couple of miles long. They pay a premium to keep staffing at a minimum -- he can be called with 30 minutes notice to come in and drive a train for a 24 hour period.
You'd probably be able to run more smaller trains with automation, but competing with trucks is tough, because the efficiency gains associated with getting rid of people and adding automation are blown away by the need to cross-dock and do the last mile via local truck.
Yep! This is where the western / action movie trope of racing to cross the train tracks comes from. If you can get the train between yourself and your pursuer, it’s going to be a long time before they can do anything to catch up again. Often times in these movies, whoever is fleeing will take a few casual moments to look back at their blocked pursuer because there’s so much time to spare.
You need a lot more people to move the same amount of cargo in trucks, so there is a lot more money to be saved.
The consequences of individual crashes is also higher, which changes the perception and consequences of mistakes, even if the number of trucks means the actual scale of the problem might be similar.
The consequence of crashes is what led to the earliest implementations of automation on railways, starting in the 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_stop
Arguable a mechanical interlocking also counts, as it prevented unsafe routes being set for a train, and made it faster to set the intended route: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking
The quoted costs for positive train control just seem astronomical for what is actually being achieved;
> Under RSIA08, PTC is required on about 60,000 miles of railroad track. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimates full PTC implementation will cost approximately $14 billion. [1]
I understand that everything looks simple from the outside, and these have to be rugged, reliable, redundant, and failsafe, but that’s a lot of dollars per mile for sensors.
> PTC uses signals and sensors along the track to communicate train location, speed restrictions, and moving authority. If the locomotive is violating a speed restriction or moving authority, on- board equipment will automatically slow or stop the train. A more expansive version of PTC, called communications-based train control (CBTC), would bring additional safety benefits plus business benefits for railroad operators, such as increased capacity and reduced fuel consumption. However, CBTC is not currently being installed by any U.S. railroad, due to the additional cost and the challenge of meeting implementation deadlines.
So we’re talking about basically AEB (automatic emergency braking) for trains, and it costs $200k per mile to deploy? I don’t get it.
> Based on analysis of past PTC-preventable incidents, the FRA estimated in 2009 that $90 million in annual safety benefits will be realized after full implementation of PTC.
Oh good, breakeven without accounting for any time value of money in only 155 years. The only word that comes to mind is boondoggle.
Yeah, in a 2D problem space, with every vehicle already reporting position back to the network!
The two dimensions being track offset (distance from start of line), and time.
This isn’t even obstacle detection. This is a) obeying the speed limit, and b) not asking two known entities to occupy the same length of track at the same time.
It does not, for example, detect a car stuck on the tracks at the next railroad crossing.
I'm curious what the return looks like for self driving trains.
I'm going to bet for both safety and employment, trains and transport ships are orders of magnitude more efficient already. Trucks are a pretty big source of human inefficiency.
"possible solution to the driver shortage and regulatory constraints faced by freight haulers across the country"
- mmm, every industry is facing worker shortage huh -.-
The driver shortage is a legitimate crisis and was the cause of huge rate increases last year. Driving a truck is a difficult job and fewer people are choosing it as a career path. [0]
“Regulatory constraints” refers to FMCSA’s hours-of-service rules, the legal limit to how many hours a driver may operate a truck in a given day. [1]
Unemployment is very low right now. However, the most accurate statement is always, "shortage of people that have the qualifications we want that are willing to work for the payment we're offering."
Note: Unemployment is measured through participation in various workfinding government programs or receipt of unemployment benefits.
It doesn't really paint an accurate picture of how many are out of work, but getting by through alternative or illegal-quasi-legal means.
It also in no way measures the number of jobs a defined unit of work can supply, or whether the job itself creates enough of a return to be economically feasible to the doer.
It also in no way reflects that many jobs mow push for pre-acquired qualifications, which cost money, and lock out potential workforce.
No one wants to measure any of that. That leads to awkward questions.
It also ignores people that have not been working for more than a year, so basically if you're chronically unemployed (and are likely the type of person that need the most help) you're conveniently ignored for the sake of bureaucracy.
This is why it cracks me up when the tech industry (or any other) publicly whines about not being able to find good employees. Raise rates & publicize it, and you'll see them appear as if by magic!
Some drivers have to unload their trucks depending on the load and the receiver. For multiple LTL (less-than-truckload) loads the driver might stop at multiple facilities and unload a handful of pallets at each.
This would be more likely for smaller-format discount retail like, e.g., the Dollar Store or a restaurant supply chain.
I have family that works for a food distributor where their drivers get to restaurants, unload the truck, stock the items in the fridge/shelves, and take additional orders from the customer before they move on to the next delivery.
Assuming a 50 week year, that's $34k per year, or roughly $17 per hour. No wonder people don't want that job. You work completely alone driving all day for not much more than minimum wage.
That's because kingnothing assumed a 40-hour week, while bluedino said "he's home every 2 weeks"
If you assume he's driving the FMCSA limit of 60 hours in 7 consecutive days, the hourly wage is lower. And if you count all the time he's away from home, it's lower still. And he's paying for truck stop food and sleeping in his cab to boot.
And a far cry from the reports of $73,000 reported in some sources [1]
I think it might be better if the post office went totally to using robots. I've heard too many stories first hand about its toxic culture.
There was a woman who worked in Lansing, Michigan sorting mail. She worked in the back, never had an contact with customers. Every Halloween she'd wear a different costume to work. Three years straight she'd get disciplined for it.
Local TV asked if the employees she worked alongside had a problem with it but they didn't. Only management had a problem with her wearing a costume every Halloween. She said they are determined to stamp out all individuality in the employees. What a horrible place to work.
Trucks follow well-defined routes that are already well served by several truck stop operators. I would expect the first truly self-driving trucks to partner with Pilot or Loves to offer some kind of full service option where the truck pulls in and someone comes out to fill it up and scan a tag to charge the fuel to the right account.
I hope we see an article in two or three weeks about how this trial went. Started on Tuesday, which is kind of exciting, but I'm certain I've seen more articles about trials started than articles about how the trials went.
This is exactly the kind of job suited for automated driving. I wonder if there will be automatic-only highways soon spanning these stretches of the countryside, or whether such a thing would even help.
Mandatory computer-control will happen when a critical threshold of traffic is already operating that way, and risk/liability will make the restriction inevitable.
Inter-city mail should be by rail, which is far more environmental and much less costly. The only reason highways appear to be "cheaper" is the real costs are paid by other people (passenger cars).
Good grief, give them a break. It's a prototype. Surely we wouldn't want them to turn it loose on public roads without proper monitoring and a human ready to intervene if something goes wrong.
I agree. This is a big nothing-burger. I can create a self-driving car as long as there's a real driver behind the wheel when needed. It doesn't say anything about how much autonomy is actually expected.
Semi's can't react as quickly to changing conditions as a Tesla. Rolling carnage. This will never work.
>Semi's can't react as quickly to changing conditions as a Tesla.
That's true whether there's a human driving or a computer. The only relevant distinction for a semi or a Tesla is whether the computer can react faster and make better decisions than a human driver would.
Wrong. Driving a commercial vehicle requires a license that is more difficult to maintain, and for good reason: It's much harder to safely operate than a standard passenger vehicle.
Tesla and other 'Autonomous Driving solutions' are missing parity in the 'contextual awareness' space IMO. Safely operating a commercial vehicle is very much about 'contextual awareness'. Car cuts you off unexpectedly? Easy, slam the brakes in a Tesla. Truck? Crash and kill the people in front of you. You have to be able to absolutely anticipate crazy drivers and their terrible habits like jumping in front of you in heavy traffic and having to stop hard.
> Car cuts you off unexpectedly? Easy, slam the brakes in a Tesla. Truck? Crash and kill the people in front of you.
Again, how is this different between a computer and a human driver? As far as I can tell, the hardest part of self-driving is accurately seeing the world. Once you see a car, it's fairly easy to make the algorithm pessimistically assume that any car that can cut it off is likely to do so. If the car manages to cut you off anyway, you're going to "crash and kill people in front of you" either way, except that you're probably going to kill people over so slightly less often with a computer that makes the decision to brake 100ms earlier.
> Once you see a car, it's fairly easy to make the algorithm pessimistically assume that any car that can cut it off is likely to do so.
Well, this just doesn't match reality. Uber showed us that these algorithms are full of false positives and have to be disregarded to make the vehicle actually drive itself (Remember when they killed that pedestrian?).
What a computer would need is 'awareness,' and that awareness is even more critical in a larger body vehicle. There's always going to be 'emergency stop in case of unknown situation.' The difference is, the human is not in an unknown situation, they're able to anticipate and plan.
Given the current landscape, I'd say with enough data you could more or less brute-force an AI driven car and be somewhere on the spectrum of safer than the worst human drivers. I say it's practically impossible for a semi truck to brute-force with sensors and pessimistic algorithms alone.
Yes, I do remember when Uber killed a pedestrian. A pedestrian that the car didn't see. Yes the computer needs awareness, but it needs awareness no matter the kind of vehicle it is controlling. The hard part of awareness is the ability to see and correctly categorize potential hazards. That part is absolutely no different for any motor vehicle. The way the vehicle reacts to potential hazards is absolutely going to change depending on the vehicle's characteristics, but that's one of the least hard parts of the whole system.
>Given the current landscape, I'd say with enough data you could more or less brute-force an AI driven car and be somewhere on the spectrum of safer than the worst human drivers.
What's your definition of "enough data"? Tesla seems about as close are you could practically get, and they don't have a great safety history (although they don't have enough history period to really say whether they're safer than humans). The specific issues that Tesla and Uber have faced are issues with seeing and correctly interpreting the world around them. Those issues are largely the same in either case. If you assume you can see and follow lane markings and it turns out you don't do so well when the lane markings are damaged, you're going to have a bad time no matter what size vehicle you're in.
> Yes, I do remember when Uber killed a pedestrian. A pedestrian that the car didn't see.
The car did see the pedestrian. It was unable to correctly identify it as pedestrian initially. And instead of taking the pessimistic path of 'something unknown moving toward roadway, so I brake now' it had that portion disabled in favor of 'safety driver take over.' Reason being, as it came out, that these types of events are so common it would be wholly infeasible to attempt a 'driverless' solution without disabling the emergency braking routine.
> lane markings are damaged, you're going to have a bad time no matter what size vehicle you're in.
That's true. But it's not a problem humans have. In a Tesla (or whatever, not picking on them specifically), you can probably stop in a reasonable distance, and if you don't, you probably aren't going to kill scores of people. With a semi-truck, stopping distance is greatly increased. So, you need the ability to see farther up the road. If there's traffic in front of you, you obviously can't see lane markings 200 yards up the street. There's just so many variables. What if the road's wet and the lane markings end and the computer thinks it needs to slam on the brakes? I guess jack-knifing the trailer in the middle of busy highway is NBD, because that's what the computer was supposed to do.
I agree completely. I just wanted to point out that the higher momentum of a semi doesn't have any bearing on whether it's suitable in theory for automation.
Curious, are these pilot programs sending the trucks out completely driverless? Or are there going to be humans in the "cockpit" sort of managing things and taking occasional naps?
> San Diego-based startup TuSimple said its self-driving trucks will begin hauling mail between USPS facilities in Phoenix and Dallas to see how the nascent technology might improve delivery times and costs. A safety driver will sit behind the wheel to intervene if necessary and an engineer will ride in the passenger seat.
Along the main hallways there was some sort of retroreflective tape laid down, and the robot, which looked like and equipment cart, would follow that tape. At every stop it would sound a chime and the secretary for that section would come out and retrieve a bundle of mail and distribute it to their people.
Super simple implementation, but it worked quite well for what it did.