6 ms·

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 (

by 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?
    - nickff 11y ago
      Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.
      - michaelt 11y ago
        If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
        MichaelGG 11y ago
        I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.
        mcguire 11y ago
        I believe the industry successfully fought off a simple hours-of-service schedule like that several years ago. Instead, you have: http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-hours-service-regulations http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-h....
        BurningFrog 11y ago
        Not everyone is blessed with the capacity to sleep at will.
    - kw71 11y ago
      Nope, logs are all manual entries on sheets of paper.
  - ivanca 11y ago
    Easy enough, with the help of a GPS you can check that the driver can't be on the move for more than 16 hours straigh without an 8-hours reccess. If he wants to do something else instead of sleep that's his problem.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Pilots have rules like that and they seem to work. But I suppose the massive regulation of airline safety makes it rather much easier to implement. But how are they enforcing the anti drug stuff? A relative is a trucker and I recall him telling me it wasn't worth screwing around with alertness meds (speed, modafinil, etc) due to risks of getting caught. (And some similar stuff for taking on passengers/hitchhikers?) Seems like if that kind of oversight is in place then adding sleep restrictions is not hard. Or do you mean that they'd technically have had enough time to sleep, but in reality they weren't actually sleeping, but short of invasive biomonitoring it's impossible to tell? (One could be in bed, reading, for example.)
    - BurningFrog 11y ago
      Yeah, you can monitor the vehicle, but to ensure people sleep you'd need to enforce video evidence at least. Maybe people with no experience of insomnia just don't consider the possibility.
- Aloha 11y ago
  It would be resoundingly ignored, and its utterly unenforceable. Right now, if you're a driver and you decline a load, it may be days to get another one at times, especially if you're stuck in a city with a ton of inbound freight, but not too much outbound freight - so you take what you can, push your endurance, and hope you can get far enough out of town that they wont try to swap it on you.
  - op00to 11y ago
    ... So obviously the solution is to keep killing motorists so you can get a paycheck. Gotcha.
    - URSpider94 11y ago
      Drivers are fallible human beings. With families. And car payments. And mortgages. Many of them own their own trucks, and have to make payments on those as well. I'm pretty damned sure that nobody goes out on the road thinking that they're going to kill someone, while destroying their livelihood and injuring themselves in the process. If you knew that the difference between working today and not being able to work for another several days was to put in a few extra hours, are you telling me you'd never make that same decision yourself?
    - Aloha 11y ago
      The article is weasel worded, frankly. In 2013 there were 32,719 vehicle related deaths in the US, 3,964 of them involved a 'large truck' in other words about 12.5% of total deaths. According to the IIHS - the number of fatalities per 100 million miles traveled is significantly lower (.88 for passenger vehicles in a large truck involved crash and .21 for occupants of large trucks) than the average for all vehicle (1.10) - and in just 15 (1998) years the numbers have declined significantly (from 1.67 and .37, and 1.8 respectively). I'd be happy to hear what your solution to the problem is, I realize any death at all is a shame, but nothing can be made 100% safe - statistically, you're at a greater risk of dying of stomach cancer, suicide or malaria - than you are to die in a vehicle accident of any kind (11.6 deaths per 100,000 in the US), or for that matter you're more likely to die of Melanoma, Hepatitis B or an Upper Respiratory Infection then you are to die in an accident with a large truck (.9 deaths per 100,000 in the US are involving a large truck). The solutions are neither clear, nor easy, but if you have one, I'd be open to ideas.
- tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
  even if you enforce that it's still not gonna help with the fact that as much as people would like it circadian rhythms don't adjust instantly. Ever changing shifts are the bane of a good existence, working nights all the time is fine, working nights a week every 2-3 or worse, 2-3 days a week, is going to cause a lot of problems for everybody. From my perspective I would totally gamify cars/trucks for everybody, every time you want to go somewhere you get your reflexes tested, if your reaction time is higher than a certain amount the car won't start. This will catch anybody who is too tired just as well as anybody who has been drinking I would think, which in the end works about the same when it comes to road safety.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    Sounds foolproof. The first time someone can't start their car when they need it because of a glitch in your software/inaccuracies in the testing method, you are in serious trouble.
    - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
      isn't there already plenty of software involved in starting your car that could have bugs and prevent it from starting? I don't think an embedded reaction time test is that hard to get right compared to the software that has to deal with the engine internals and so on.
      - hyperpape 11y ago
        As a rule, things involving human action are unreliable and suffer from false positives.
Silhouette 11y ago
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 I don't doubt you about the dispatch issues. The article itself mentioned that the driver of the truck that caused a fatal accident had spent 12 hours driving from his home to pick up the truck before then spending 13.5 of the permitted 14 hours driving the truck at the time of the accident, and had been awake for 28 hours straight. But isn't the idea that anyone can safely handle that kind of vehicle for 82 hours per week also a bit crazy? That's roughly working 14 hours/day for 6 days/week. That's almost double what we'd allow here in the UK, for example.
- Aloha 11y ago
  The rules are 11/14/70. 11 Hours driving maximum per day, 14 hours on duty maximum per day, and 70 hours maximum per rolling 8 day period (or 60 hours per rolling 7 day period). Between driving periods, you must take 8 hours + 2 hours (most drivers just do a 10 hour rest period) in the sleeper berth. If you take 34 hours (knows as a reset) off duty, your rolling HOS clock resets to 0 and you can drive a full 70 again. Being awake for me, and functional for 14-18 hours continuous is never a problem for me, but when I drove I avoided being in a urban area when I was that tired - I'd stop short, sleep outside of town, and head in in the morning to drop the load at the receiver usually.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
stcredzero 11y ago
you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule The same thing happened to me when I was working the Halibut opener in Alaska. Switching to a midnight to noon shift can wreak havoc with your sleep cycle, and it is very hard to avoid falling asleep while driving. Happened to me.
rhizome 11y ago
An Uber for truck shipping, I See A Great Need.
- mcguire 11y ago
  As in, something that doesn't have an hours-of-service regulation?
mcguire 11y ago
"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..." I have no solid information about this, but I recently heard a driver complaining about some form of collision avoidance technology that had a tendency to malfunction on a loaded vehicle and was responsible for "putting trucks is the ditch". Any idea what he was talking about?
- Aloha 11y ago
  I don't - I've been out of the industry for a while now. But, I can tell you, the vehicle dynamics of a large truck are significantly different than a car, and in many situations such an unexpected change could cause an accident. With a car, you're only concerned about keeping one braking system in repair, when hauling a trailer you get a roll of the die every time you pick up a new trailer, some of them track straight, some of them don't - some of them brake asymmetrically side to side too. Air Brakes are also a completely different dynamic then hydraulic brakes used in cars, in a way I can't even reasonably explain, its just something you need to experience - but to give you a clue, you don't feel brake fade as a difference in pedal back pressure, your brakes just don't work as well. Consider this - the old adage when driving a combined tractor trailer is - "you're driving the trailer, not the truck"
cb18 11y ago
* 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* Yeah, that is ridiculous, and it would only take some slight adjustment in the dispatch software to keep people on their accustomed schedules. It might require drawing potential drivers from a slightly larger area or something. It sounds like just about the last thing on these companies minds is the safety of road users. Maybe their needs to be a fine imposed on them for every accident above the already too high non-truck accident rate.
snarfy 11y ago
If the government is going to regulate the hours per week, they should be regulating the schedule too. They wouldn't let a commercial jet pilot switch schedules like that.

by Aloha 11y ago

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?
  - nickff 11y ago
    Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.
    - michaelt 11y ago
      If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
      - MichaelGG 11y ago
        I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.
      - mcguire 11y ago
        I believe the industry successfully fought off a simple hours-of-service schedule like that several years ago. Instead, you have: http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-hours-service-regulations http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-h....
      - BurningFrog 11y ago
        Not everyone is blessed with the capacity to sleep at will.
  - kw71 11y ago
    Nope, logs are all manual entries on sheets of paper.
- ivanca 11y ago
  Easy enough, with the help of a GPS you can check that the driver can't be on the move for more than 16 hours straigh without an 8-hours reccess. If he wants to do something else instead of sleep that's his problem.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Pilots have rules like that and they seem to work. But I suppose the massive regulation of airline safety makes it rather much easier to implement. But how are they enforcing the anti drug stuff? A relative is a trucker and I recall him telling me it wasn't worth screwing around with alertness meds (speed, modafinil, etc) due to risks of getting caught. (And some similar stuff for taking on passengers/hitchhikers?) Seems like if that kind of oversight is in place then adding sleep restrictions is not hard. Or do you mean that they'd technically have had enough time to sleep, but in reality they weren't actually sleeping, but short of invasive biomonitoring it's impossible to tell? (One could be in bed, reading, for example.)
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    Yeah, you can monitor the vehicle, but to ensure people sleep you'd need to enforce video evidence at least. Maybe people with no experience of insomnia just don't consider the possibility.
Aloha 11y ago
It would be resoundingly ignored, and its utterly unenforceable. Right now, if you're a driver and you decline a load, it may be days to get another one at times, especially if you're stuck in a city with a ton of inbound freight, but not too much outbound freight - so you take what you can, push your endurance, and hope you can get far enough out of town that they wont try to swap it on you.
- op00to 11y ago
  ... So obviously the solution is to keep killing motorists so you can get a paycheck. Gotcha.
  - URSpider94 11y ago
    Drivers are fallible human beings. With families. And car payments. And mortgages. Many of them own their own trucks, and have to make payments on those as well. I'm pretty damned sure that nobody goes out on the road thinking that they're going to kill someone, while destroying their livelihood and injuring themselves in the process. If you knew that the difference between working today and not being able to work for another several days was to put in a few extra hours, are you telling me you'd never make that same decision yourself?
  - Aloha 11y ago
    The article is weasel worded, frankly. In 2013 there were 32,719 vehicle related deaths in the US, 3,964 of them involved a 'large truck' in other words about 12.5% of total deaths. According to the IIHS - the number of fatalities per 100 million miles traveled is significantly lower (.88 for passenger vehicles in a large truck involved crash and .21 for occupants of large trucks) than the average for all vehicle (1.10) - and in just 15 (1998) years the numbers have declined significantly (from 1.67 and .37, and 1.8 respectively). I'd be happy to hear what your solution to the problem is, I realize any death at all is a shame, but nothing can be made 100% safe - statistically, you're at a greater risk of dying of stomach cancer, suicide or malaria - than you are to die in a vehicle accident of any kind (11.6 deaths per 100,000 in the US), or for that matter you're more likely to die of Melanoma, Hepatitis B or an Upper Respiratory Infection then you are to die in an accident with a large truck (.9 deaths per 100,000 in the US are involving a large truck). The solutions are neither clear, nor easy, but if you have one, I'd be open to ideas.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
even if you enforce that it's still not gonna help with the fact that as much as people would like it circadian rhythms don't adjust instantly. Ever changing shifts are the bane of a good existence, working nights all the time is fine, working nights a week every 2-3 or worse, 2-3 days a week, is going to cause a lot of problems for everybody. From my perspective I would totally gamify cars/trucks for everybody, every time you want to go somewhere you get your reflexes tested, if your reaction time is higher than a certain amount the car won't start. This will catch anybody who is too tired just as well as anybody who has been drinking I would think, which in the end works about the same when it comes to road safety.
- hyperpape 11y ago
  Sounds foolproof. The first time someone can't start their car when they need it because of a glitch in your software/inaccuracies in the testing method, you are in serious trouble.
  - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
    isn't there already plenty of software involved in starting your car that could have bugs and prevent it from starting? I don't think an embedded reaction time test is that hard to get right compared to the software that has to deal with the engine internals and so on.
    - hyperpape 11y ago
      As a rule, things involving human action are unreliable and suffer from false positives.

Silhouette 11y ago

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 I don't doubt you about the dispatch issues. The article itself mentioned that the driver of the truck that caused a fatal accident had spent 12 hours driving from his home to pick up the truck before then spending 13.5 of the permitted 14 hours driving the truck at the time of the accident, and had been awake for 28 hours straight. But isn't the idea that anyone can safely handle that kind of vehicle for 82 hours per week also a bit crazy? That's roughly working 14 hours/day for 6 days/week. That's almost double what we'd allow here in the UK, for example.

Aloha 11y ago
The rules are 11/14/70. 11 Hours driving maximum per day, 14 hours on duty maximum per day, and 70 hours maximum per rolling 8 day period (or 60 hours per rolling 7 day period). Between driving periods, you must take 8 hours + 2 hours (most drivers just do a 10 hour rest period) in the sleeper berth. If you take 34 hours (knows as a reset) off duty, your rolling HOS clock resets to 0 and you can drive a full 70 again. Being awake for me, and functional for 14-18 hours continuous is never a problem for me, but when I drove I avoided being in a urban area when I was that tired - I'd stop short, sleep outside of town, and head in in the morning to drop the load at the receiver usually.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

stcredzero 11y ago

you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule The same thing happened to me when I was working the Halibut opener in Alaska. Switching to a midnight to noon shift can wreak havoc with your sleep cycle, and it is very hard to avoid falling asleep while driving. Happened to me.

rhizome 11y ago

An Uber for truck shipping, I See A Great Need.

mcguire 11y ago
As in, something that doesn't have an hours-of-service regulation?

mcguire 11y ago

"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..." I have no solid information about this, but I recently heard a driver complaining about some form of collision avoidance technology that had a tendency to malfunction on a loaded vehicle and was responsible for "putting trucks is the ditch". Any idea what he was talking about?

Aloha 11y ago
I don't - I've been out of the industry for a while now. But, I can tell you, the vehicle dynamics of a large truck are significantly different than a car, and in many situations such an unexpected change could cause an accident. With a car, you're only concerned about keeping one braking system in repair, when hauling a trailer you get a roll of the die every time you pick up a new trailer, some of them track straight, some of them don't - some of them brake asymmetrically side to side too. Air Brakes are also a completely different dynamic then hydraulic brakes used in cars, in a way I can't even reasonably explain, its just something you need to experience - but to give you a clue, you don't feel brake fade as a difference in pedal back pressure, your brakes just don't work as well. Consider this - the old adage when driving a combined tractor trailer is - "you're driving the trailer, not the truck"

cb18 11y ago

* 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* Yeah, that is ridiculous, and it would only take some slight adjustment in the dispatch software to keep people on their accustomed schedules. It might require drawing potential drivers from a slightly larger area or something. It sounds like just about the last thing on these companies minds is the safety of road users. Maybe their needs to be a fine imposed on them for every accident above the already too high non-truck accident rate.

snarfy 11y ago

If the government is going to regulate the hours per week, they should be regulating the schedule too. They wouldn't let a commercial jet pilot switch schedules like that.