3 ms·

I'm by no means an expert on this, but I do follow some trucking vlogs on youtube, but it amazes me how inefficient the loading and unloading process is. Someti

I'm by no means an expert on this, but I do follow some trucking vlogs on youtube, but it amazes me how inefficient the loading and unloading process is. Sometimes truckers have to waiting many hours just to get a place at a loading dock and then again many hours just so that a dedicated team can unload the trailer. What a waste of driver, truck, and trailer resources. The autonomous truck will most likely happen but my prediction is that the real revolution will be automated loading/unloading. And the automated forklifts will unload into fully automated warehouses. And fully automated pickers will pick orders for delivery to your doorstep via fully automated drones. And driven from the doorstep to your fridge by a cargo roomba...

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>What a waste of driver, truck, and trailer resources You think it's bad at face value, try considering it in the context of the DOT's rules on working hours.
- dmckeon 8y ago
  and the impact of electronic logbooks - drivers who could have driven an extra hour on Monday and an hour less on Tuesday now have to match their route and good stopping places with the DOT hours structure, or face penalties for violations. For a person driving a car, a penalty could be a fine and point(s) against their license, but for a commercial driver, loss of their CDL would mean changing careers.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    All of the elogs are data mined big brother style. Guys who run the same route with the same cargo every week and usually get waved through weigh stations get stopped and checked out because they decided to take their bathroom break on a different leg of the route.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    Instead of punishing the individual driver (which is what's done), ought to heavily punish the company instead. Right now, a driver can get threatened and written up if they refuse to drive, even if they would be breaking the law. There's no repercussions for a company to process through drivers. If instead the DOT focused on the companies, they could turn the companies themselves into enforcers as well of the law. The only group that could fall through the cracks are owner/operators. They would still have a justification and reason to skirt the law and fake the logbooks.
twblalock 8y ago
I always thought it was odd that we standardized shipping containers and pallets, but not truck trailers. Shipping containers and pallets have owners, but nobody minds leaving them behind at the point of delivery because they are interchangeable and they circulate around. If truckers could pull up to a loading dock, unhook the trailer and leave it behind, and drive away with an empty trailer, that would be pretty cool.
- marnett 8y ago
  Trucks typically have multiple customers freight with multiple destinations for drop-off. This would work for some customers, but not all.
- jhayward 8y ago
  > If truckers could pull up to a loading dock, unhook the trailer and leave it behind, and drive away with an empty trailer, That's called a 'hook and drop' load and they are very common. Usually used within a large customer's trailer fleet, such as ones who have distribution centers that then fan out to stores.
zackmorris 8y ago
Ya I agree in theory but disagree in practice. I moved furniture for 2.5 years and delivered appliances for 6 months for a warehouse from about 2001-2003 while I was trying to get my shareware business going. This meant sometimes loading and unloading full 53 foot semi trailers of furniture and boxes (typically 2 or 3 households worth) with just 2 or 3 people, up to 2 or 3 times a day if we were working in the warehouse itself and had a few stragglers who could help. For a while there I came up with roughly one invention per day that would radically reduce the amount of labor we performed or protect us from the sun and elements. For example, in big cities they use lifts to windows and chutes on stairs to get boxes up and down tall buildings. But they don't use anything in smaller cities except elbow grease usually. Anyway, whenever I brought up a new idea, it was soundly rejected by pretty much everyone. The standard answer being "that would put us out of a job!" There is massive resistance to any kind of innovation in the shipping industry. My gut feeling is that it won't change at all until it's too late, and then the whole thing will come crashing down when it's replaced by self-driving forklifts and drones. It's one of the few industries that still (under)employs millions of people, and I think that we should keep that in mind before we work so hard to automate it into oblivion. But automation is inevitable and will come within 10 years or so, so if we really want to help society, we should be focussing on education and vo-tech training in order to find meaningful work for everyone who's going to be misplaced. I know in my heart that that won't be enough though, which is why I'm a huge proponent of universal basic income.
- fineline 8y ago
  I did removals for a couple of years as a young man too. I disagree with your conclusion. There are so many different physical characteristics between each day's jobs - parking setups, strange paths through gardens, different types of building layouts and contents, different types of unusual belongings, the behavior of customers in one of the most stressful activities in most people's lives (possibly combined with other stressful circumstances such as divorce, bereavement or repossession), the need to pack and handle both very fragile items and very heavy and bulky items... People who reckon you're going to build a robot that can handle this huge diversity of demands at a cost that can beat low paid manual workers are being very techno-utopian. Same with cleaning hotel rooms, doing roadworks, building up and knocking down special events etc. Not to mention the immense amount of work in reconfiguring physical infrastructure if we ever get remotely serious about climate change. If anyone was making a betting market on achieving automation of those kinds of jobs within a specific timeframe I'd be an eager counter party. Now if you're a radiographer, legal assistant, project manager, sports reporter, then yeah the times are a changin'...
tombrossman 8y ago
The inefficiency isn't the problem, it is a symptom of the real problem, which is lack of trust. It's been a while since I drove trucks but I recall the absolute worst loads were deliveries to grocery warehouses. Because of DOT Hours of Service restrictions, it sometimes made economic sense to refuse these loads and instead sit idle a day with no work. You had to carefully budget your working hours over a rolling 8-day window and wasting hours at a grocery warehouse kills your earnings for days afterwards. Grocery warehouses took forever, mostly because of their insistence that I wait while they counted everything and broke down pallets of stuff and re-stacked it. The actual unloading was quick, it was the hours afterwards before they would acknowledge receipt of goods and sign your paperwork to release you. They also used 'lumpers', third-party laborers (who they also did not trust) to count and re-stack correctly so their own employees would have to come double-check everything. Some would expect me to pay the lumpers, which I would always refuse to do, which further delayed things. I think some drivers just paid to get out of there faster. Contrast this with more sophisticated operations such as a Wal-Mart distribution center where you could drop your loaded trailer and collect an empty one, then leave immediately for your next load. Wal-Mart wasn't worried about under-counted freight or breakage, they are big enough to just declare it unchallenged and the supplier accepts the loss and moves on. Trust doesn't factor into the process. It wasn't all bad, you could offer to unload yourself for extra pay on some loads, but I only did this very rarely, once when delivering electric cars (GEM cars, like a super-deluxe street legal golf cart) to a warehouse. I drove them out of the trailer onto the loading dock and got paid an extra $100 for about two minutes of work! Easy to count too...
a3n 8y ago
And consumed by automated consumers.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

>What a waste of driver, truck, and trailer resources You think it's bad at face value, try considering it in the context of the DOT's rules on working hours.

dmckeon 8y ago
and the impact of electronic logbooks - drivers who could have driven an extra hour on Monday and an hour less on Tuesday now have to match their route and good stopping places with the DOT hours structure, or face penalties for violations. For a person driving a car, a penalty could be a fine and point(s) against their license, but for a commercial driver, loss of their CDL would mean changing careers.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  All of the elogs are data mined big brother style. Guys who run the same route with the same cargo every week and usually get waved through weigh stations get stopped and checked out because they decided to take their bathroom break on a different leg of the route.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Instead of punishing the individual driver (which is what's done), ought to heavily punish the company instead. Right now, a driver can get threatened and written up if they refuse to drive, even if they would be breaking the law. There's no repercussions for a company to process through drivers. If instead the DOT focused on the companies, they could turn the companies themselves into enforcers as well of the law. The only group that could fall through the cracks are owner/operators. They would still have a justification and reason to skirt the law and fake the logbooks.

twblalock 8y ago

I always thought it was odd that we standardized shipping containers and pallets, but not truck trailers. Shipping containers and pallets have owners, but nobody minds leaving them behind at the point of delivery because they are interchangeable and they circulate around. If truckers could pull up to a loading dock, unhook the trailer and leave it behind, and drive away with an empty trailer, that would be pretty cool.

marnett 8y ago
Trucks typically have multiple customers freight with multiple destinations for drop-off. This would work for some customers, but not all.
jhayward 8y ago
> If truckers could pull up to a loading dock, unhook the trailer and leave it behind, and drive away with an empty trailer, That's called a 'hook and drop' load and they are very common. Usually used within a large customer's trailer fleet, such as ones who have distribution centers that then fan out to stores.

zackmorris 8y ago

Ya I agree in theory but disagree in practice. I moved furniture for 2.5 years and delivered appliances for 6 months for a warehouse from about 2001-2003 while I was trying to get my shareware business going. This meant sometimes loading and unloading full 53 foot semi trailers of furniture and boxes (typically 2 or 3 households worth) with just 2 or 3 people, up to 2 or 3 times a day if we were working in the warehouse itself and had a few stragglers who could help. For a while there I came up with roughly one invention per day that would radically reduce the amount of labor we performed or protect us from the sun and elements. For example, in big cities they use lifts to windows and chutes on stairs to get boxes up and down tall buildings. But they don't use anything in smaller cities except elbow grease usually. Anyway, whenever I brought up a new idea, it was soundly rejected by pretty much everyone. The standard answer being "that would put us out of a job!" There is massive resistance to any kind of innovation in the shipping industry. My gut feeling is that it won't change at all until it's too late, and then the whole thing will come crashing down when it's replaced by self-driving forklifts and drones. It's one of the few industries that still (under)employs millions of people, and I think that we should keep that in mind before we work so hard to automate it into oblivion. But automation is inevitable and will come within 10 years or so, so if we really want to help society, we should be focussing on education and vo-tech training in order to find meaningful work for everyone who's going to be misplaced. I know in my heart that that won't be enough though, which is why I'm a huge proponent of universal basic income.

fineline 8y ago
I did removals for a couple of years as a young man too. I disagree with your conclusion. There are so many different physical characteristics between each day's jobs - parking setups, strange paths through gardens, different types of building layouts and contents, different types of unusual belongings, the behavior of customers in one of the most stressful activities in most people's lives (possibly combined with other stressful circumstances such as divorce, bereavement or repossession), the need to pack and handle both very fragile items and very heavy and bulky items... People who reckon you're going to build a robot that can handle this huge diversity of demands at a cost that can beat low paid manual workers are being very techno-utopian. Same with cleaning hotel rooms, doing roadworks, building up and knocking down special events etc. Not to mention the immense amount of work in reconfiguring physical infrastructure if we ever get remotely serious about climate change. If anyone was making a betting market on achieving automation of those kinds of jobs within a specific timeframe I'd be an eager counter party. Now if you're a radiographer, legal assistant, project manager, sports reporter, then yeah the times are a changin'...

tombrossman 8y ago

The inefficiency isn't the problem, it is a symptom of the real problem, which is lack of trust. It's been a while since I drove trucks but I recall the absolute worst loads were deliveries to grocery warehouses. Because of DOT Hours of Service restrictions, it sometimes made economic sense to refuse these loads and instead sit idle a day with no work. You had to carefully budget your working hours over a rolling 8-day window and wasting hours at a grocery warehouse kills your earnings for days afterwards. Grocery warehouses took forever, mostly because of their insistence that I wait while they counted everything and broke down pallets of stuff and re-stacked it. The actual unloading was quick, it was the hours afterwards before they would acknowledge receipt of goods and sign your paperwork to release you. They also used 'lumpers', third-party laborers (who they also did not trust) to count and re-stack correctly so their own employees would have to come double-check everything. Some would expect me to pay the lumpers, which I would always refuse to do, which further delayed things. I think some drivers just paid to get out of there faster. Contrast this with more sophisticated operations such as a Wal-Mart distribution center where you could drop your loaded trailer and collect an empty one, then leave immediately for your next load. Wal-Mart wasn't worried about under-counted freight or breakage, they are big enough to just declare it unchallenged and the supplier accepts the loss and moves on. Trust doesn't factor into the process. It wasn't all bad, you could offer to unload yourself for extra pay on some loads, but I only did this very rarely, once when delivering electric cars (GEM cars, like a super-deluxe street legal golf cart) to a warehouse. I drove them out of the trailer onto the loading dock and got paid an extra $100 for about two minutes of work! Easy to count too...

a3n 8y ago

And consumed by automated consumers.