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"A senior vice president at Walmart told Yahoo! Finance at the time it was because of a “shortage” of truck drivers. (Those who study the trucking industry disp

"A senior vice president at Walmart told Yahoo! Finance at the time it was because of a “shortage” of truck drivers. (Those who study the trucking industry dispute that such a shortage exists, concluding that drivers leave the industry for jobs with better pay and hours.)" It turns out that good truck drivers could also be doing other useful work, and want to be well compensated and taken care of for their labor.

jvanderbot 3y ago
> drivers leave the industry is basically the same thing as > there's a shortage If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright - I think the answer is something like remote operation, level 3-4 autonomy for highways, and nice comfy air conditioned driver hubs in cities so nobody has to be away from home for days at a time. Boom - all the drivers come back and get paid decent wages to drive trucks. Ideally the per-truck subscription fee for the service is an add-on to the cost of doing driver business.
- wil421 3y ago
  How realistic are the trucking sims? Do you actually get gas and unload? Highway stuff and regular driving sounds good but backing a trailer up to Walmart video game style sounds frightening.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    We can do that scary bit autonomously already: https://www.outrider.ai/ https://www.outrider.ai/ I'm not referring to "sim", I'm referring to remote piloting. Real time sensor and controls feedback from a truck that is only autonomous when it makes sense to be. We can pilot drones over 100s of yards in real time without a hitch. We just need a bit more range (few kms) via, say, the internet, and you can do this fairly easily. I don't see a research problem, I see a funding problem and an aversion to autonomous trucking b/c people think it's either completely infeasible, or completely solved by Aurora. I'm not sure of either.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      And what does the driverless truck do when it loses its internet connection at 70mph on a freeway?
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        The use case does not include operating remotely at 70mph on freeways, esp because internet connectivity is hard over most the USA. That bit is mostly lvl 3/4, and is something that is addressed well by other companies. It's the long tail between lvl3/4 and all the scenarios that remain in which a remote driver solves the problem. Esp in logistics yards, which are chaotic, fast paced, and driven by voice communication.
  - ikari_pl 3y ago
    OTOH we dock manned spaceships to the ISS video game style
    - foxyv 3y ago
      That is a much easier problem than backing a truck up to a loading bay. Even landing an airplane is a lot easier if you have an ILS. Space and the air are mostly empty. A warehouse loading area is cluttered with other trucks, debris, and cargo. Although I could totally see this being done remotely with VR and a ton of cameras.
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        Agree with you. Just to add spice the convo: Backing into a loading bay is quite easy, autonomously. Once you stage the truck you can push a button and just watch it go. See: https://outrider.ai https://outrider.ai (which is where I work, and we do all the staging _also_, but I'm actually interested in "everything else" as well). There's a lot of very human-ish problems to get to that state, that I think remote operators can really help with.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Pretty good for the expensive ones. They are not video games though, and so they are not making the shortcuts games do to make them fun. I've driven a few (snow plow, excavator) and they are very hard to control - then I see someone who drives that machine professionally get on: they get a near perfect score and comment about how real it feels. Note that part of the sim is the controls: they take the cab from a real machine and replace the windshield with a screen (for version 1, often version 2 starts to take away parts, but everything you touch including the seat is the real thing). I've long thought that to renew your drivers license you should have to spend a day every few months in a simulator to prove you can drive safely. Do you maintain a safe following distance? Can you maintain the speed limit? Do you stop for pedestrians? Do you zipper merge correctly? Here is a situation where someone else screwed up and you will crash, can you choose the best crash? Here is an icy road, can you control the car? there is a lot that modern simulators can do but few people have used them.
    - gooseyman 3y ago
      I agree with you on the DL renewal based on a sim. Interestingly: The base CDL is a one and done skill test. There are no CPEs like with other regulated industries (nurses/teachers/investment advisors) - but there is a health and fitness check.
  - AlwaysRock 3y ago
    The difficult part is actually the last mile/few miles in trucking. Open highway driving is a significantly less complicated problem than navigating down side streets then backing into a warehouse to complete a delivery. Freight tech companies have been talking about automating every BUT the last mile/last few miles for years. Have a stable of drivers who you have on hand to take over the last hour of a delivery. Automate everything else.
    - Yujf 3y ago
      The nice thing about this is also that truckers would be able to go home everynight which would make the job more attractive
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nradov 3y ago
  Remote operation on public highways is a dead end. There is no wireless data network with the latency and reliability guarantees necessary for safety. Particularly when it comes to tunnels, canyons, and heavy precipitation. And let's not have any ridiculous claims about how in case of a network connection failure the truck can just autonomously pull over and stop; that's not going to work safely for descending I-70 in a snowstorm. There may be some limited use cases for remote operation on specific local routes where sufficient network access points can be provisioned.
  - newsclues 3y ago
    It’s not a dead end, it’s a solvable problem but the issue is that no one wants to pay for infrastructure.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    You can't do it with autonomy, and you can't do it with remote piloting, but you can do it with a mix of both. That's my assertion. Spending 20 hours looking at Nebraska / Illinois farm fields is not the use case for remote operation - and as you say, you lack the infra for that anyway. And navigating traffic or interacting with distribution center logistics is not the case for autonomous operation - it's an infra nightmare to get a autonomous vehicle to integrate with all that radio-voice-comms madness. Even OTR drivers just want to get that part of the journey over with and get back to the hotel. Having a pod with local drivers near major hubs, for example, means the drivers take over when the trucks get close enough for it to matter. It wont' work for delivery to, say grocery stores (which can be local driving anyway), but it will work for center-to-center transport ala between Walmart hubs. It's the long haul OTR trucking that has high attrition / people shortages, because you're away from family for so long. That little bit can be somewhat autonomous, with handoff of remote operators only near hubs. Think air-traffic-control for trucks and hubs, except probably more hands on than just telling it what to do.
    - datadrivenangel 3y ago
      Like harbor pilots for ships, where someone comes out to join the ship to help navigate through potentially dangerous waters.
- LiquidSky 3y ago
  "> drivers leave the industry is basically the same thing as > there's a shortage" No, it's not. It means the drivers are not being paid enough to stay, as they explicitly say is the reason they're leaving. >If anyone wants to work on this problem with me Sure, here's the solution: pay the drivers more. Problem solved.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    > drivers are not being paid enough to stay therefore > drivers leave the industry therefore > there's a shortage ... at the going wage I don't see how we can argue over the problem statement. We can argue over the solutions, of which there are infinite, but at least two: 1. increase wages 2. decrease shittiness of the job via ideas like mine Or why not both? The only dichotomy here is a false one you've introduced.
    - LiquidSky 3y ago
      Because there's no problem. There's not "shortage", it's not that there just aren't enough people to be drivers. There are plenty, employers just don't want to pay enough to attract them. >We can argue over the solutions No, we can't, because there's no solution needed to this non-problem artificially created by employers unwilling to pay enough to attract and retain employees. Your ideas aren't needed except by the employers trying to perpetuate their false self-made "shortage", all to avoid just paying employees more. The only actual problem is uncritically accepting the narrative of the employers as you are doing here.
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        > There's not "shortage", it's not that there just aren't enough people to be drivers. There are plenty, employers just don't want to pay enough to attract them. OK, well, let's not mince definitions. For the purposes of my thought process, a shortage is defined as "Number of people we want to do a job" minus "Number of people who do that job". The semantic difference between that and what you said is so small as to be negligible to me and doesn't preclude "increase wages" as a solution. I think that's fine for you to have a preferred solution or even a different preferred definition.
- QuarterReptile 3y ago
  >If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright In the US, we un-solved this problem decades ago when we abandoned railroads for subsidized auto development.
gadders 3y ago
Like any other "good", there is only ever a shortage of a particular employee category at a particular salary rate (obviously there may be a lag between supply and demand).
- randomdata 3y ago
  A shortage, as it pertains to other "goods", is defined as a situation where an external mechanism prevents price from rising. A common example of a shortage is where price gouging laws are in effect. When a shortage occurs, a non-price based mechanism must be used to distribute "goods" instead, such as first-come, first served, a lottery, needs-based selection, etc. Only labour gets the special shortage definition seen here. Seemingly because shortage was originally used with respect to healthcare practitioners, where true shortages are possible with price ceilings often imposed by government in order to allow equal healthcare access to all citizens regardless of how much they can afford to spend, and then misconstrued onto other fields.
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    Can we not simply say a shortage is when there's not enough of something. In this case, available drivers willing to work for the compensation they're willing to pay?
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > Can we not simply say a shortage is when there's not enough of something. More or less, but "how much is needed" is dependent on price. You need an infinite number of truck drivers if they are driving for free. And you need no truck drivers if they are driving for $100,000,000,000 per day. In a functioning market, price will rise until you have exactly the right number of truck drivers. Remember that the dreamers not willing to pay the price are simply not in the market. You don't have a shortage of Ferraris when 10 year old boys with Ferrari posters on their walls can't have the real thing. However, if something stops the price from rising – such the government stepping in and saying: "It is now illegal to pay truck drivers more than $30,000 per year" – then you have a disconnect. The market wants more drivers and are willing to pay more to get them, but are not allowed to pay them more. That disconnect is what the shortage defines.
stavros 3y ago
What does "a shortage" mean in supply and demand? I don't understand, because it seems to mean "we want to pay less but then we won't find any people". Well, in that case, there's a shortage of Ferraris, because the ones I can find are too expensive.
- andy99 3y ago
  And if you were a big business, you'd hire lobbyists to petition the government for Ferrari subsidies and buy news articles talking about the Ferrari shortage, and tell all your friends that the only reason you don't drive a Ferrari is purely because of the shortage and has no relationship to your finances or priorities.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Technically, it means that there is some external mechanism that prevents price from rising. Typically that means government intervention. Healthcare often sees the government set a price ceiling on services to ensure that poor citizens are not priced out of receiving healthcare, so a shortage of medical doctors is quite possible. A shortage of truck drivers is unlikely. Under colloquial usage, as it is being used here, the term is meaningless. Under that definition, everything is always in "shortage". It is simply used as an attention grabbing mechanism to express some kind of emotion towards the subject.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >A shortage of truck drivers is unlikely. Surely a transient shortage is possible due to licensing requirements. You could offer ten million dollars a year, but there are only so many people with a current CDL and finite capacity exists to grant new licenses.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      The cool thing is that if we really did see ten million dollar per year offers, then most people wouldn't want to use the services of truckers anymore (too expensive), so you'd still have the right number of truckers, if not too many, among those currently able to drive, without the need for more. No need to wait on anyone else getting licensed. You have done well to highlight why a technical shortage is defined the way it is.
mixdup 3y ago
Walmart paying drivers above the typical trucker's wage is not new, driving for Walmart has always been a "prestige" job in trucking that paid well and that drivers wanted to drive for. The standards are high, though, and drivers are held to account so the penalties for not living up to them can be severe

jvanderbot 3y ago

> drivers leave the industry is basically the same thing as > there's a shortage If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright - I think the answer is something like remote operation, level 3-4 autonomy for highways, and nice comfy air conditioned driver hubs in cities so nobody has to be away from home for days at a time. Boom - all the drivers come back and get paid decent wages to drive trucks. Ideally the per-truck subscription fee for the service is an add-on to the cost of doing driver business.

wil421 3y ago
How realistic are the trucking sims? Do you actually get gas and unload? Highway stuff and regular driving sounds good but backing a trailer up to Walmart video game style sounds frightening.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  We can do that scary bit autonomously already: https://www.outrider.ai/ https://www.outrider.ai/ I'm not referring to "sim", I'm referring to remote piloting. Real time sensor and controls feedback from a truck that is only autonomous when it makes sense to be. We can pilot drones over 100s of yards in real time without a hitch. We just need a bit more range (few kms) via, say, the internet, and you can do this fairly easily. I don't see a research problem, I see a funding problem and an aversion to autonomous trucking b/c people think it's either completely infeasible, or completely solved by Aurora. I'm not sure of either.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    And what does the driverless truck do when it loses its internet connection at 70mph on a freeway?
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      The use case does not include operating remotely at 70mph on freeways, esp because internet connectivity is hard over most the USA. That bit is mostly lvl 3/4, and is something that is addressed well by other companies. It's the long tail between lvl3/4 and all the scenarios that remain in which a remote driver solves the problem. Esp in logistics yards, which are chaotic, fast paced, and driven by voice communication.
- ikari_pl 3y ago
  OTOH we dock manned spaceships to the ISS video game style
  - foxyv 3y ago
    That is a much easier problem than backing a truck up to a loading bay. Even landing an airplane is a lot easier if you have an ILS. Space and the air are mostly empty. A warehouse loading area is cluttered with other trucks, debris, and cargo. Although I could totally see this being done remotely with VR and a ton of cameras.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Agree with you. Just to add spice the convo: Backing into a loading bay is quite easy, autonomously. Once you stage the truck you can push a button and just watch it go. See: https://outrider.ai https://outrider.ai (which is where I work, and we do all the staging _also_, but I'm actually interested in "everything else" as well). There's a lot of very human-ish problems to get to that state, that I think remote operators can really help with.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Pretty good for the expensive ones. They are not video games though, and so they are not making the shortcuts games do to make them fun. I've driven a few (snow plow, excavator) and they are very hard to control - then I see someone who drives that machine professionally get on: they get a near perfect score and comment about how real it feels. Note that part of the sim is the controls: they take the cab from a real machine and replace the windshield with a screen (for version 1, often version 2 starts to take away parts, but everything you touch including the seat is the real thing). I've long thought that to renew your drivers license you should have to spend a day every few months in a simulator to prove you can drive safely. Do you maintain a safe following distance? Can you maintain the speed limit? Do you stop for pedestrians? Do you zipper merge correctly? Here is a situation where someone else screwed up and you will crash, can you choose the best crash? Here is an icy road, can you control the car? there is a lot that modern simulators can do but few people have used them.
  - gooseyman 3y ago
    I agree with you on the DL renewal based on a sim. Interestingly: The base CDL is a one and done skill test. There are no CPEs like with other regulated industries (nurses/teachers/investment advisors) - but there is a health and fitness check.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  The difficult part is actually the last mile/few miles in trucking. Open highway driving is a significantly less complicated problem than navigating down side streets then backing into a warehouse to complete a delivery. Freight tech companies have been talking about automating every BUT the last mile/last few miles for years. Have a stable of drivers who you have on hand to take over the last hour of a delivery. Automate everything else.
  - Yujf 3y ago
    The nice thing about this is also that truckers would be able to go home everynight which would make the job more attractive
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nradov 3y ago
Remote operation on public highways is a dead end. There is no wireless data network with the latency and reliability guarantees necessary for safety. Particularly when it comes to tunnels, canyons, and heavy precipitation. And let's not have any ridiculous claims about how in case of a network connection failure the truck can just autonomously pull over and stop; that's not going to work safely for descending I-70 in a snowstorm. There may be some limited use cases for remote operation on specific local routes where sufficient network access points can be provisioned.
- newsclues 3y ago
  It’s not a dead end, it’s a solvable problem but the issue is that no one wants to pay for infrastructure.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  You can't do it with autonomy, and you can't do it with remote piloting, but you can do it with a mix of both. That's my assertion. Spending 20 hours looking at Nebraska / Illinois farm fields is not the use case for remote operation - and as you say, you lack the infra for that anyway. And navigating traffic or interacting with distribution center logistics is not the case for autonomous operation - it's an infra nightmare to get a autonomous vehicle to integrate with all that radio-voice-comms madness. Even OTR drivers just want to get that part of the journey over with and get back to the hotel. Having a pod with local drivers near major hubs, for example, means the drivers take over when the trucks get close enough for it to matter. It wont' work for delivery to, say grocery stores (which can be local driving anyway), but it will work for center-to-center transport ala between Walmart hubs. It's the long haul OTR trucking that has high attrition / people shortages, because you're away from family for so long. That little bit can be somewhat autonomous, with handoff of remote operators only near hubs. Think air-traffic-control for trucks and hubs, except probably more hands on than just telling it what to do.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    Like harbor pilots for ships, where someone comes out to join the ship to help navigate through potentially dangerous waters.
LiquidSky 3y ago
"> drivers leave the industry is basically the same thing as > there's a shortage" No, it's not. It means the drivers are not being paid enough to stay, as they explicitly say is the reason they're leaving. >If anyone wants to work on this problem with me Sure, here's the solution: pay the drivers more. Problem solved.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  > drivers are not being paid enough to stay therefore > drivers leave the industry therefore > there's a shortage ... at the going wage I don't see how we can argue over the problem statement. We can argue over the solutions, of which there are infinite, but at least two: 1. increase wages 2. decrease shittiness of the job via ideas like mine Or why not both? The only dichotomy here is a false one you've introduced.
  - LiquidSky 3y ago
    Because there's no problem. There's not "shortage", it's not that there just aren't enough people to be drivers. There are plenty, employers just don't want to pay enough to attract them. >We can argue over the solutions No, we can't, because there's no solution needed to this non-problem artificially created by employers unwilling to pay enough to attract and retain employees. Your ideas aren't needed except by the employers trying to perpetuate their false self-made "shortage", all to avoid just paying employees more. The only actual problem is uncritically accepting the narrative of the employers as you are doing here.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      > There's not "shortage", it's not that there just aren't enough people to be drivers. There are plenty, employers just don't want to pay enough to attract them. OK, well, let's not mince definitions. For the purposes of my thought process, a shortage is defined as "Number of people we want to do a job" minus "Number of people who do that job". The semantic difference between that and what you said is so small as to be negligible to me and doesn't preclude "increase wages" as a solution. I think that's fine for you to have a preferred solution or even a different preferred definition.
QuarterReptile 3y ago
>If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright In the US, we un-solved this problem decades ago when we abandoned railroads for subsidized auto development.

gadders 3y ago

Like any other "good", there is only ever a shortage of a particular employee category at a particular salary rate (obviously there may be a lag between supply and demand).

randomdata 3y ago
A shortage, as it pertains to other "goods", is defined as a situation where an external mechanism prevents price from rising. A common example of a shortage is where price gouging laws are in effect. When a shortage occurs, a non-price based mechanism must be used to distribute "goods" instead, such as first-come, first served, a lottery, needs-based selection, etc. Only labour gets the special shortage definition seen here. Seemingly because shortage was originally used with respect to healthcare practitioners, where true shortages are possible with price ceilings often imposed by government in order to allow equal healthcare access to all citizens regardless of how much they can afford to spend, and then misconstrued onto other fields.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  Can we not simply say a shortage is when there's not enough of something. In this case, available drivers willing to work for the compensation they're willing to pay?
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > Can we not simply say a shortage is when there's not enough of something. More or less, but "how much is needed" is dependent on price. You need an infinite number of truck drivers if they are driving for free. And you need no truck drivers if they are driving for $100,000,000,000 per day. In a functioning market, price will rise until you have exactly the right number of truck drivers. Remember that the dreamers not willing to pay the price are simply not in the market. You don't have a shortage of Ferraris when 10 year old boys with Ferrari posters on their walls can't have the real thing. However, if something stops the price from rising – such the government stepping in and saying: "It is now illegal to pay truck drivers more than $30,000 per year" – then you have a disconnect. The market wants more drivers and are willing to pay more to get them, but are not allowed to pay them more. That disconnect is what the shortage defines.

stavros 3y ago

What does "a shortage" mean in supply and demand? I don't understand, because it seems to mean "we want to pay less but then we won't find any people". Well, in that case, there's a shortage of Ferraris, because the ones I can find are too expensive.

andy99 3y ago
And if you were a big business, you'd hire lobbyists to petition the government for Ferrari subsidies and buy news articles talking about the Ferrari shortage, and tell all your friends that the only reason you don't drive a Ferrari is purely because of the shortage and has no relationship to your finances or priorities.
randomdata 3y ago
Technically, it means that there is some external mechanism that prevents price from rising. Typically that means government intervention. Healthcare often sees the government set a price ceiling on services to ensure that poor citizens are not priced out of receiving healthcare, so a shortage of medical doctors is quite possible. A shortage of truck drivers is unlikely. Under colloquial usage, as it is being used here, the term is meaningless. Under that definition, everything is always in "shortage". It is simply used as an attention grabbing mechanism to express some kind of emotion towards the subject.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >A shortage of truck drivers is unlikely. Surely a transient shortage is possible due to licensing requirements. You could offer ten million dollars a year, but there are only so many people with a current CDL and finite capacity exists to grant new licenses.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    The cool thing is that if we really did see ten million dollar per year offers, then most people wouldn't want to use the services of truckers anymore (too expensive), so you'd still have the right number of truckers, if not too many, among those currently able to drive, without the need for more. No need to wait on anyone else getting licensed. You have done well to highlight why a technical shortage is defined the way it is.

mixdup 3y ago

Walmart paying drivers above the typical trucker's wage is not new, driving for Walmart has always been a "prestige" job in trucking that paid well and that drivers wanted to drive for. The standards are high, though, and drivers are held to account so the penalties for not living up to them can be severe