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New book considers the impact of electronic logging devices on drivers
- psunavy03 3y agoAny metric which people feel must be gamed ceases to be a good metric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
- Retric 3y agoEhh, the research is a little more mixed than that article suggests. It’s not really part of the narrative of the book but fatigue was only a contributing factor for ~13% of crashes historically so the maximum positive impact couldn’t be that large. Meanwhile there’s been a long term trend of significantly increased fatalities. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/trends-table-7-large-truck-injury-crash-statistics-1999-2019 https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/trends-... The comments on studies looking back 1 year while the transition happened 5 years ago looks like cherry picking data to fit a narrative. Yes the year after it was introduced was a 30 year high, so was the year after that, and the year after that…
- Aurornis 3y agoRight, but the ELDs didn't create the metric. The metric existed long before that, it was just gamed to an extreme degree because there was no accountability. ELDs brought accountability and made it harder to game. They didn't create the metric, they just reduced the gaming.
- Spooky23 3y agoMotor carrier stuff is incredibly complex with a bizarre patchwork of regulatory domains and a network of shitty operators, who employ shitty drivers who work the loopholes. The most egregious examples are the Chinatown busses, which routinely operate with material safety flaws. To understand safety data, you have to study the cohorts of carriers that comply with regulations. The Feds and state authorities working with them statistically approach compliance inspection, but the smaller, dirtier carriers tend to be fly by night. If you see a crazy trucker speeding at night in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, you’re probably seeing one of those trucks, schlepping stuff between distribution centers outside of federal enforcement scope. The skilled drivers are right - it’s bullshit. But you need to infantalize the 30 year Walmart driver who has 20 million miles and no accidents, because there’s a 22 year old driving a truck that’s overweight with bad brakes trying to meet a schedule he can’t keep.
- PedroBatista 3y agoPoor 22 year old driver, just entered the industry and already taking the blame for what a certain percentage of 60yo foxes have been doing. Also, many of the violations are a consequence on how this god forsaken industry is structured and that includes our Karen who wants that pink outfit NOW! Because they have tickets to see the Barbie movie tomorrow and the pink T-shirt is an essential part.
- dublin 3y agoELDs have been a predictably miserable failure - as the article points out, their very rigidity in draconian enforcement of "safety" rules actually creates perverse incentives to do unsafe things (like ignoring needed maintenance, etc.) This does not just affect truckers - as "driver monitoring" becomes an anti-feature in many new cars (especially EVs or "self-driving" cars), there will be more and more cases of people (quite reasonably) bristling at Big Brother looking over their shoulder and into their eyeballs every moment they are in their own car. As for me, I'm leaning heavily towards a life goal to never again buy a car with a screen in the dashboard.
- maxwell 3y agoYep, eyeball monitoring is over the line for me. Not planning to drive stock cars in the '30s. Looking ahead to electric crate motors and open source infotainment: https://electricvehicleforums.com/articles/electric-crate-motors-the-future-of-engine-swaps https://electricvehicleforums.com/articles/electric-crate-mo... https://i-carus.com https://i-carus.com
- lotsofpulp 3y agoImagine a society that never had cars, but did have things like eyeball monitoring technology, speed limiters, auto driving functionality, etc. If cars were then invented, would the populace entertain the notion of giving everyone complete control to a 2,000lb+ machine capable of moving at 100mph+? Is our acceptance of the risks of giving everyone complete control of these machines based on the cost:benefit analysis at the time of their advent, but not necessarily a cost:benefit analysis in the current?
- maxwell 3y agoYeah I used to make that argument about humans driving automobiles too. Before the pandemic.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoHow is the pandemic relevant?
- Aloha 3y agoThe problem with ELD's is the lack of flexibility. So I'm a former driver and I have a good example of this, with paper logs, I could fudge, I might log that I shut down at X time in Y place, when I actually shut down 20-30 miles further down the road - where I could get safe parking in a rest area - instead of on the side of the highway. I'd still take my 10 hour break from the time that I stopped, and mark my logs up as if I started a half an hour before I did. Was this illegal? yes, absolutely. Was it unsafe? no, I'd argue the opposite. Thats the rub, the ELD system is meant to eliminate the bad actors, but the flexibility and agency is steals from drivers makes everyone less safe, and make the job less pleasant to do. The road was fun, in the days when Truck Stops still had a decent restaurant, before paper logs went away, before the tightening of the DOT Physical rules - now, its not so fun anymore.
- Aurornis 3y ago> but the flexibility and agency is steals from drivers makes everyone less safe I have a hard time believing this. You gave a great example of fudging logs for the "right" reasons, but I have countless stories from my uncle who was a truck driver before ELDs who would drive well beyond the limit of what anyone would consider safe. Clearly, not every example of drivers breaking the rules was in the interest of safety.
- Aloha 3y agoDo you build rules just for the bad actors or to do you try to build a pleasant and equitable society? The bad actors in most cases won't follow them anyhow, no matter how draconian they are.
- not_alexb 3y ago> The bad actors in most cases won't follow them anyhow, no matter how draconian they are. IIRC, I heard a very liberal biologist (Robert Sapolsky @ Stanford) say capital punishment does stop a certain amount of the population.
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- awinter-py 3y agohttps://how.complexsystems.fail/#11 https://how.complexsystems.fail/#11 > Organizations are ambiguous, often intentionally, about the relationship between production targets, efficient use of resources, economy and costs of operations, and acceptable risks of low and high consequence accidents. All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system. After an accident, practitioner actions may be regarded as ‘errors’ or ‘violations’ but these evaluations are heavily biased by hindsight and ignore the other driving forces, especially production pressure. (taps the sign)
- LambdaComplex 3y agoSidney Dekker mentions this in "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error.'" Always remember: people generally show up to work with the intention of doing a good job. If someone causes an accident by doing something that is "obviously" unsafe in hindsight, step back and ask yourself why the person thought their "obviously unsafe" action was reasonable in the moment.
- Libcat99 3y agoLikewise with smaller scale "accidents". Did the ups driver fling my package over fence because he hates me, or because my long driveway interferes with his 3 minute per package metric. Measurements kill sensibility.
- yard2010 3y agoWhat about the people who make these half assed laws and regulations? Either they don't care about their job or their job definition is wrong to begin with
- Angostura 3y agoLet's apply Dekker's reasoning. Give me a example of a law/regulation that you think is half-arsed. I bet we can show why it was designed that way with good intent.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- samat 3y agoEvery time politicians vote on more privacy invading and controlling stuff — they should be wearing/using similar technology themselves. In this example with ELDs I’d propose a small wearable device that would monitor time when congressman or congresswoman came to work, time they spent eating and using the bathroom and sleeping. And speed they are driving, certainly. Our goal is safety, right? Oh, and to not make it too privacy invading, only their constituents should have real time access to this data, they are their employers after all, right? And make this mandatory legislative testing phase (MLTP) at least one year. We would be amazed at privacy protecting laws rivaled by none.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoLead by example like the good old days!
- lynguist 3y agoAren’t electronic logbooks for truckers used in Europe since 2006? And no one whines about here?
- Stranger43 3y agospeed and driving times have been recorded mechanically for drivers in Europe since at least the 90ies so going electronic was maybe not as radical a change for European drivers when they went electronic in 2006. It's also worth noting that a lot of the culture around the labor market is different as the European regulators tend to be a bit more of an aggressive stance on companies creating pressures on employees and then try to shift all blame when those pressure's lead to rule breaking and accidents.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoIndeed. I hitchhiked into the tens of thousands of km in Europe in the 2000s, much of it by the kindness of truck drivers, and I never heard a single complaint about the tachograph. What I did hear complaints about were GPS tracking systems, but in that case it was the employer and their quirks keeping a tight leash on the driver, not the state and its road-safety aims. Fun fact: it was helpful for a hitchhiker to ask the driver for one of the blank paper discs for the tachograph. Later, when standing beside the road and waiting for another lift, you could hold that up whenever a truck approached, and truck drivers would take it as a sign that you were relatively trustworthy.
- orwin 3y agoTruck drivers insurers don't allow them to take hitchhikers (or anyone, really) nowadays.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoDepends where. In the USA (and perhaps Canada) this has long been a concern -- dating at least back to Kerouac's time -- and a hitchhiker there relies e.g. on drivers who are owner-operators. In the rest of the world, including the EU, hitchhikers still easily move via trucks.
- isykt 3y agoThe high priests of AI are trying to make computers more like people and in the process making people more like computers.