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I'm all for the safety arguments being made by the author but he does paint the trucking industry as this huge money making business when that really isn't the

I'm all for the safety arguments being made by the author but he does paint the trucking industry as this huge money making business when that really isn't the case. Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs. It's an industry where innovation is very hard because you really need to justify every dollar spent on R&D. Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there's room to spend on safety is meaningless... Would love to see a more in depth analysis on the issue from a financial perspective.

BufordTJustice 11y ago
I second this. The working hours and toll sitting in a tractor like that all day are bad, but if you do things like cut hours for drivers, especially the drivers that aren't owner-operators, and continue them at the same pay, you unfortunately will push a huge contingent of people further out into the margins. I am all for increased safety, and very much think the drivers are on the road way too much, but I fear additional safety or hours cuts will be disproportionately borne by the drivers, who really usually can't afford it anyways. Apparently truck driving is a very common job to work too[1]. [1] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
- BufordTJustice 11y ago
  I guess I'd like to understand why people don't agree. Just to be clear, it's really important that we shore up tractor trailer safety (I've been hit by a class 8 rig twice now, once where the driver was asleep at wheel), but the cost of this really needs to be borne by the companies and not the drivers; as a consequence, you know, in order to get more safety on the road, product prices may go up. I am OK with this though.
futhey 11y ago
As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depressed over the last three decades and have seen a drop in real wages in many segments of the trucking industry. I saw many drivers keeping multiple log books, skipping or cutting-short rest breaks. Professional drivers can and do operate safely. But with some carriers paying as little as 20 cents per mile, you can do the math and figure out what a typical work-week looks like if you want to eek out a very meager living as a trucker today.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  Who would drive a truck for $11/hr max? You could make more driving Uber or bartending/waiting tables...
  - roflchoppa 11y ago
    Migrant workers from asia / south america. whom might not speak enough english to do other work. I say this by hanging around my fathers freight forwarding company for the past 15 years.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      Maybe you can answer a question I've been wondering about: what valuable things do truck drivers do besides driving trucks? There's a lot of hype around self-driving trucks these days. But there's this common tendency to assume that if you can replace the visible part of a job with technology, then those jobs are doomed. The classic example for me is a restaurant replacing waitstaff with computers screens so that people order without talking to a human. But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around. So what else is in the job description of a trucker that's valuable?
      - douche 11y ago
        > But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around. Yeah, they do it poorly and inaccurately, with lots of latency between requests.
        spdionis 11y ago
        Depends a lot on the staff quality. The value of a qualified waiter is much more than simply taking your order.
        douche 11y ago
        Perhaps for high-end places where the human touch is important. But for your run of the mill, fast food and cheap chain restaurants, hiring staff is a liability, if you are forced to hire the kind of staff that is willing to work for $8/hour. I've never decided to frequent a particular establishment because their staff was better than average, but there are a lot I won't go back to because they had awful, incompetent staff. Average here means that they deliver something vaguely resembling what you asked for, within a reasonable timeframe, and they can total the order up on the cash register without over or undercharging by an order of magnitude, or crashing the entire POS system of the restaurant. That's rarer than you might imagine...
Aloha 11y ago
The article bothered me because of the presumption that the author made about hours of service, and as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule - so while you can be compliant with the HOS, you've still not slept any - because you just spent 4 days working days, and now you're expected to pick up a shipment at 11pm and run with it until out of hours for the day.. not practical or safe. The other thing that irritated me was the presumption that trucks have no safety hardware - I personally wouldn't want to drive a truck with collision avoidance stuff, not unless I had a ton of time to spend with it to understand what it does in an activated situation - that said, most trucks do have ABS, airbags are meaningless in a truck, you're so much larger than the other vehicles that a driver doesn't need airbags to stay safe, and airbags do nothing to enhance the other drivers safety, they just add cost for no real benefit.
- rcthompson 11y ago
  What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    Sounds like a sensible rule that is impossible to enforce.
    - Aloha 11y ago
      Agreed.
    - MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
      In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?
joe_the_user 11y ago
Uh, there is money to spend on safety. It is the money that the customers of the trucking companies pay. When every company's costs increase, they will all pass those costs on to their customers. Of course, the truck manufacturers would be the ones who would have to spend beforehand on research to satisfy the various requirement. Moreover, the article mentions that much of the technology already exists. Edit: As the other poster notes, reducing hours while maintain the same ultra-low-pay is a recipe for disaster too. It seems reason to demand that increased safety would involve more driver professionalization, which would require higher pay, which again would have to be pushed to the customers.
- rcarrigan87 11y ago
  There are pretty massive economic implications when you're talking about raising freight rates across the board. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it's a decision that isn't to be made lightly.
notatoad 11y ago
the idea that there is maybe not "room to spend" on safety seems absurd. Safety should something that only happens if you can afford it. If the cost of shipping needs to increase to accomodate the cost of safety, then let's do that, but trucking needs to be safe, both for the truckers and the other road users, no matter what the financial cost is. If paying for safety hurts the trucking industry by making rail or air freight more attractive, i don't see that as a bad thing. We should not all have to subsidize the trucking industry by compromising our own safety on the roads.
animefan 11y ago
I guess there are two possibilities. 1. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses compete with each other. In this case, increasing safety standards in a uniform way, will not change profits since the costs can be passed on to consumers. 2. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses are competing with other forms of transport. In that case, imposing more safety standards will result in less business being done by truck, and more by other means. As long as these don't have worse safety issues, this would be a good thing. You are right the revenue is a meaningless figure in both cases.
hmottestad 11y ago
The $700B may be a bit stupid from the article authors. However. A point to bring across is that if the government mandates something to add a bit of safety that isn't ridiculous then shipping costs just simply go up across the board. As long as everyone has to abide by the new laws, no one will have a competitive advantage. It's like abolishing slavery. Sure, the slavers will say they can't compete anymore because they have to pay for labour, but after a few years everyone has to pay for labour and the market equalises.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
teyc 11y ago
Changing the rules and making it apply uniformly if nothing else, should increase the cost for the consumer. Given the low margins, the beneficiary is not the trucking company, but the consumer, who then makes small savings in the price of goods but incurs a disproportionate cost in trucking accidents. Case in point of a driver who has not slept for 28hours - it is a matter of public hazard to allow someone in that condition to operate a heavy vehicle.
cb18 11y ago
Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs. Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there's room to spend on safety is meaningless... Would love to see a more in depth analysis on the issue from a financial perspective. And fta: The industry also bases its opposition to safety-rule changes on money, saying that increasing costs will hurt profits Excuse my bluntness, but this is a terrible argument. Saying that safety measures are too costly is ridiculous, because what is happening is that all the other road users are bearing the cost in death and dismemberment when the trucking companies should be bearing the cost in dollars spent on the available safety measures. Trucking companies absolutely should not be seeking out slightly higher profits on the back of death and destruction. It's a net negative for the entirety of society. You have the truck companies sucking out this little bit of extra profit through their regulatory capture at a much greater cost to the rest of society. Think about the slight difference improved safety measures would make to the bottom lines of these companies. Then think about all the years of life they are destroying through negligent safety measures, and think about all the things those years of life could have contributed to the world. The more I type this out the more I realize how absolutely indefensible this argument is, "Yeah, we'll just carry on killing people, because preventing it would cost us a little bit of money..." That is just stomach churning in its crass indecency.
- Retric 11y ago
  In an Efficent market it's to buyers not the industry that pays for regulation. The only way raising rates hurts an industry is when it reduces demand. Full disclosure I have relatives that own and operate a fairly large shipping company they really don't care about industry wide effects like fuel costs. Thinks like software integration with their customers are compeditive advantages, regulation just gets passed along. Though, the overall economy is also important as people don't avoid shipping a PC because transportation is adding an extra 1/20th of a percent to the cost, but of nobody is buying then there is no need to ship.
  - cb18 11y ago
    I'm not exactly sure what you're saying. Regulatory capture and efficient markets can't coexist. (My impression of regulatory capture on this matter comes from the OP, it's the first I've really heard of this safety issue.) I already explained in my above post that it is society at large that is currently paying for this with death and destruction on the highways. And that's why this is such a barbaric position. Say that the needed measures are put in place and this problem is alleviated. And during the implementation of the needed measures, costs get passed along the line and a few extra cents are tacked on to consumer products. Well, significantly reduced highway deaths and people paying a little extra for whatever is obviously the preferred situation. But then what will likely happen is that somewhere in the cost chain someone will improve/innovate something that lowers the cost of some particular element in the cost chain, then what the market will bear will adjust and we'll be back to the same or lower consumer product prices plus reduced highway deaths. What's blocking this process from happening is, according to this article, the short-term thinking and profits over lives stance of the trucking companies.
rodgerd 11y ago
> Trucking is a very low margin business. So... without subsidies (in the form of tolerating fatalies as well as monetary burdens imposed on the rest of the citizenry) it wouldn't be a viable industry? Sounds like there's a simple solution to the problem.

BufordTJustice 11y ago

I second this. The working hours and toll sitting in a tractor like that all day are bad, but if you do things like cut hours for drivers, especially the drivers that aren't owner-operators, and continue them at the same pay, you unfortunately will push a huge contingent of people further out into the margins. I am all for increased safety, and very much think the drivers are on the road way too much, but I fear additional safety or hours cuts will be disproportionately borne by the drivers, who really usually can't afford it anyways. Apparently truck driving is a very common job to work too[1]. [1] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

BufordTJustice 11y ago
I guess I'd like to understand why people don't agree. Just to be clear, it's really important that we shore up tractor trailer safety (I've been hit by a class 8 rig twice now, once where the driver was asleep at wheel), but the cost of this really needs to be borne by the companies and not the drivers; as a consequence, you know, in order to get more safety on the road, product prices may go up. I am OK with this though.

futhey 11y ago

As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depressed over the last three decades and have seen a drop in real wages in many segments of the trucking industry. I saw many drivers keeping multiple log books, skipping or cutting-short rest breaks. Professional drivers can and do operate safely. But with some carriers paying as little as 20 cents per mile, you can do the math and figure out what a typical work-week looks like if you want to eek out a very meager living as a trucker today.

sokoloff 11y ago
Who would drive a truck for $11/hr max? You could make more driving Uber or bartending/waiting tables...
- roflchoppa 11y ago
  Migrant workers from asia / south america. whom might not speak enough english to do other work. I say this by hanging around my fathers freight forwarding company for the past 15 years.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Maybe you can answer a question I've been wondering about: what valuable things do truck drivers do besides driving trucks? There's a lot of hype around self-driving trucks these days. But there's this common tendency to assume that if you can replace the visible part of a job with technology, then those jobs are doomed. The classic example for me is a restaurant replacing waitstaff with computers screens so that people order without talking to a human. But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around. So what else is in the job description of a trucker that's valuable?
    - douche 11y ago
      > But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around. Yeah, they do it poorly and inaccurately, with lots of latency between requests.
      - spdionis 11y ago
        Depends a lot on the staff quality. The value of a qualified waiter is much more than simply taking your order.
        douche 11y ago
        Perhaps for high-end places where the human touch is important. But for your run of the mill, fast food and cheap chain restaurants, hiring staff is a liability, if you are forced to hire the kind of staff that is willing to work for $8/hour. I've never decided to frequent a particular establishment because their staff was better than average, but there are a lot I won't go back to because they had awful, incompetent staff. Average here means that they deliver something vaguely resembling what you asked for, within a reasonable timeframe, and they can total the order up on the cash register without over or undercharging by an order of magnitude, or crashing the entire POS system of the restaurant. That's rarer than you might imagine...

Aloha 11y ago

The article bothered me because of the presumption that the author made about hours of service, and as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule - so while you can be compliant with the HOS, you've still not slept any - because you just spent 4 days working days, and now you're expected to pick up a shipment at 11pm and run with it until out of hours for the day.. not practical or safe. The other thing that irritated me was the presumption that trucks have no safety hardware - I personally wouldn't want to drive a truck with collision avoidance stuff, not unless I had a ton of time to spend with it to understand what it does in an activated situation - that said, most trucks do have ABS, airbags are meaningless in a truck, you're so much larger than the other vehicles that a driver doesn't need airbags to stay safe, and airbags do nothing to enhance the other drivers safety, they just add cost for no real benefit.

rcthompson 11y ago
What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  Sounds like a sensible rule that is impossible to enforce.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    Agreed.
  - MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
    In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?

joe_the_user 11y ago

Uh, there is money to spend on safety. It is the money that the customers of the trucking companies pay. When every company's costs increase, they will all pass those costs on to their customers. Of course, the truck manufacturers would be the ones who would have to spend beforehand on research to satisfy the various requirement. Moreover, the article mentions that much of the technology already exists. Edit: As the other poster notes, reducing hours while maintain the same ultra-low-pay is a recipe for disaster too. It seems reason to demand that increased safety would involve more driver professionalization, which would require higher pay, which again would have to be pushed to the customers.

rcarrigan87 11y ago
There are pretty massive economic implications when you're talking about raising freight rates across the board. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it's a decision that isn't to be made lightly.

notatoad 11y ago

the idea that there is maybe not "room to spend" on safety seems absurd. Safety should something that only happens if you can afford it. If the cost of shipping needs to increase to accomodate the cost of safety, then let's do that, but trucking needs to be safe, both for the truckers and the other road users, no matter what the financial cost is. If paying for safety hurts the trucking industry by making rail or air freight more attractive, i don't see that as a bad thing. We should not all have to subsidize the trucking industry by compromising our own safety on the roads.

animefan 11y ago

I guess there are two possibilities. 1. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses compete with each other. In this case, increasing safety standards in a uniform way, will not change profits since the costs can be passed on to consumers. 2. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses are competing with other forms of transport. In that case, imposing more safety standards will result in less business being done by truck, and more by other means. As long as these don't have worse safety issues, this would be a good thing. You are right the revenue is a meaningless figure in both cases.

hmottestad 11y ago

The $700B may be a bit stupid from the article authors. However. A point to bring across is that if the government mandates something to add a bit of safety that isn't ridiculous then shipping costs just simply go up across the board. As long as everyone has to abide by the new laws, no one will have a competitive advantage. It's like abolishing slavery. Sure, the slavers will say they can't compete anymore because they have to pay for labour, but after a few years everyone has to pay for labour and the market equalises.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

teyc 11y ago

Changing the rules and making it apply uniformly if nothing else, should increase the cost for the consumer. Given the low margins, the beneficiary is not the trucking company, but the consumer, who then makes small savings in the price of goods but incurs a disproportionate cost in trucking accidents. Case in point of a driver who has not slept for 28hours - it is a matter of public hazard to allow someone in that condition to operate a heavy vehicle.

cb18 11y ago

Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs. Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there's room to spend on safety is meaningless... Would love to see a more in depth analysis on the issue from a financial perspective. And fta: The industry also bases its opposition to safety-rule changes on money, saying that increasing costs will hurt profits Excuse my bluntness, but this is a terrible argument. Saying that safety measures are too costly is ridiculous, because what is happening is that all the other road users are bearing the cost in death and dismemberment when the trucking companies should be bearing the cost in dollars spent on the available safety measures. Trucking companies absolutely should not be seeking out slightly higher profits on the back of death and destruction. It's a net negative for the entirety of society. You have the truck companies sucking out this little bit of extra profit through their regulatory capture at a much greater cost to the rest of society. Think about the slight difference improved safety measures would make to the bottom lines of these companies. Then think about all the years of life they are destroying through negligent safety measures, and think about all the things those years of life could have contributed to the world. The more I type this out the more I realize how absolutely indefensible this argument is, "Yeah, we'll just carry on killing people, because preventing it would cost us a little bit of money..." That is just stomach churning in its crass indecency.

Retric 11y ago
In an Efficent market it's to buyers not the industry that pays for regulation. The only way raising rates hurts an industry is when it reduces demand. Full disclosure I have relatives that own and operate a fairly large shipping company they really don't care about industry wide effects like fuel costs. Thinks like software integration with their customers are compeditive advantages, regulation just gets passed along. Though, the overall economy is also important as people don't avoid shipping a PC because transportation is adding an extra 1/20th of a percent to the cost, but of nobody is buying then there is no need to ship.
- cb18 11y ago
  I'm not exactly sure what you're saying. Regulatory capture and efficient markets can't coexist. (My impression of regulatory capture on this matter comes from the OP, it's the first I've really heard of this safety issue.) I already explained in my above post that it is society at large that is currently paying for this with death and destruction on the highways. And that's why this is such a barbaric position. Say that the needed measures are put in place and this problem is alleviated. And during the implementation of the needed measures, costs get passed along the line and a few extra cents are tacked on to consumer products. Well, significantly reduced highway deaths and people paying a little extra for whatever is obviously the preferred situation. But then what will likely happen is that somewhere in the cost chain someone will improve/innovate something that lowers the cost of some particular element in the cost chain, then what the market will bear will adjust and we'll be back to the same or lower consumer product prices plus reduced highway deaths. What's blocking this process from happening is, according to this article, the short-term thinking and profits over lives stance of the trucking companies.

rodgerd 11y ago

> Trucking is a very low margin business. So... without subsidies (in the form of tolerating fatalies as well as monetary burdens imposed on the rest of the citizenry) it wouldn't be a viable industry? Sounds like there's a simple solution to the problem.