https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/us/colorado-lakewood-i-70-fiery-crash/index.html

Plenty of highways that you can drive on and you're surrounded by big trucks carrying all kinds of hazardous goods and even if they're not then you have their constant tire blowouts as well as windshield busting rocks they hurl behind them

Don’t worry. People like Elon Musk kept telling us that all semis and trucks will be autonomously driven within the next few years!

I travel all across the US on my business trips. Alot of time in the car, in between cities on highways.
Truckers are some of the worst and rudest drivers on the road today. And road laws are now favoring them, yet they still take advantage. Far left lane driving, despite having the right and middle, which impedes car flow. Speeding and tailgating. On their phones. Etc...

And the garbage from their blown tires everywhere. What sucks is that Law Enforcement wont go after them as its a hassle to check their logs. So they go after the easier cars.

So another crash caused by them and they'll continue as normal.

That doesn't make me feel any safer.

Even a first gen autonomous truck driving robot of average ability has to be better than some of the truck drivers I've encountered, driving side by side with another truck for mile after mile as the line of cars behind them grows longer and longer.

Truckers used to be the nicest drivers on the road. Don't blame it all on the drivers tho. This Just In Time is a major factor imho which gives no leeway for the driver for unexpected delays.

+1

I despise JIT inventory practices. All to often it ends up "just to late" and creates more money costing issues than money savings.

Rail is a far more efficient means of moving goods over any sort of distance, and would taken most of the bigger trucks off the road long ago if the trucking {and to some extent cargo ship} industry hadn't successfully lobbied to hobble rail freight enough as to keep them artificially competitive.

That's true IF you have rail access at both the shipping and delivery points. However, most towns in the U.S. do not have a rail terminal. And, while it is more efficient on a cost per mile basis, it takes a lot longer to ship from point to point on rail than it does by truck.

I used to be an owner-operator trucker hauling flatbed freight. I will agree many of the people driving trucks now show deplorable highway manners and even less truck handling skills. There is a national shortage of truck drivers so companies are apparently hiring a lot of drivers straight out of driving school and it shows. However, most people driving smaller vehicles show very little respect or common sense when sharing the road with trucks and many, if not most, accidents involving trucks can be traced back to something that the car driver did. Driving in a truck's blind spots, passing a truck and then slamming on the brakes to turn off, etc. And, because of this, some truck drivers become frustrated with the 'four wheelers' and show it by driving more aggressively. No, it shouldn't happen, but it's human nature.

As for cops not stopping trucks...I could sit here for hours and tell about being needlessly hassled by DOT inspectors. If people driving cars had to follow half the regulations that truck drivers do, most wouldn't be driving.

That's mostly a consequence of chronic underinvestment in the rail system.

Even here in traditionally more rail oriented Canada, it's been a LONG time since there has been much in the way of significant improvements to existing trackage, let alone major new developments.

Imagine being limited to a 1940s and older vintage road network that has seen only modest improvements and expansion to date.

Well, that's basically the current state of the rail system.

Even small railyards take up a lot of real estate, and you STILL need to get the goods carried on the trains to their destinations. That means trucks, unless you’re proposing every grocery store, car dealership, home improvement store, etc, have a rail spur going to it? Rail is like cargo ships, good for transporting enormous amounts of cargo to an intermodal terminal where it’s unloaded and sent off in different directions, but not for making door-to-door deliveries. Also, trucking is pretty much instantaneous - if a store needs something it’s loaded in a trailer at the warehouse and will be there in a day. You can’t do that with a train. Besides, can you imagine the traffic tie-ups from all those trains?

+1

I can't argue against commercial semi drivers being notably bad. I have one car that I put 300,000 miles on, and I haven't driven that car since 2006 so I must be closing in on a million. I've seen some really bad driving skills and habits from semi drivers.

Still, consider this: back in the '80s, it seemed SUVs were procreating like rabbits and it seemed like 'all SUV drivers suck'. Mitsubishi automobiles became popular and then 'all Mistsu drivers suck'. The reality of course is that there was something recognizable about those vehicles- they were very large or previously uncommonly seen. Naturally bad antics stuck out even more when the drivers of those vehicles were responsible.

I drove in the worst rainstorm I've seen, since I started driving in 1987, Friday night and Saturday morning. One half f that, I was behind the wheel the other half I was passenger. Pickup trucks were tailgating us. Sedans were cutting us off. SUVs were actually driving the wrong way up entrance ramps to leave the highway. Semis were leaving plenty of room. Shot of the horn if somebody needed waking up or couldn't see they were drifting out of lane. Wide berths, slow lane changes. Deliberate and dare I say, safe driving.

My point is this- yes semis drivers all too, too often display poor habits, bad skills, and a bad attitude. They should be much better- on average- because it is a profession. But on the other hand, "normal" drivers of cars pickups and SUVs do not make any sacrifices to accommodate the other guy either, and this undoubtedly exacerbates the problem with semis. And on top of it, you notice bad things from semis because they are so big. Many semi drivers are good attentive pros. But that only goes so far. Schedule decisions and the state of idiocy from 'normal' drivers means that the deck is already stacked. But what I've never heard of is some rep from a Union or other advocacy group for these professionals saying "Houston we have a problem", on either side of the coin, and so to me it is clear that the problems are acceptable to industry and the people at 10,000 feet at the trucking firms.

I wasn't suggesting to rail all the things, merely that high volume long haul is best done by train, although even inside cities, a cargo dedicated light rail system might be worth looking into.

At one time many businesses did indeed have a rail dock, although most have long since fallen into disuse.

Trains wouldn't tie up road traffic nearly as much if they weren't stuck with depression era infrastructure, they could have built under and overpasses everywhere long ago for a fraction of what they've spent on the road system, and the losses incurred by moving cargo through what's a less efficient means.

then you get their winter travel, look at the cause of most of the multi car pile ups are caused by... You can barely see because of the snow, yet they're still drive 50-60 mph... Then you get the frozen snow that flies off their trailer tops. In NH we have Megan's law which they can pull you over and fine you $200 if you don't clear off the snow from the top of your vehicles, yet the majority of the deaths are from semi's yet who pulls them over...

As a CDL driver, I can agree that the skill level of ALL drivers has gone way down hill over the last decade or so. With regards to commercial ones, these days it’s a lot of people that drive trucks vs “truck drivers” that were more prevalent in the past. I feel that the real “truck drivers” have been mostly weeded out due to constantly changing DOT rules and regs, on board monitoring, and just the simple fact that it is a tough lifestyle unless you’re lucky enough to land a cushy local run that actually pays well.

I'm surprised at the amount of female truck drivers you see now, not that it's so physical, but more because being alone on the road and some of these truck stops. As a guy I don't even like to stop in them at night...

Just saw this:

https://singularityhub.com/2021/06/...untry-42-faster-than-a-human-driver/amp/

Not truly driverless when you read the story... but a definite sign of what is to come.

An interesting development indeed but one that will need to have many, many questions answered. One of the big ones that comes to mind is legal liability. Suppose the AI malfunctions and makes an error in judgement and causes an accident? Who would be held legally liable? The owner of the truck? The developer of the AI software?

Yes, the legal stuff could be quite a quagmire early on. I half-way expect the A.I. purveyors to learn (perhaps the hard way) to sell the product on the condition that there always be a safety driver to oversee things, putting the onus upon the truck owners. If the A.I.s build up enough of a safety record eventually, then I could see that condition going away.

Yep. Truckers are toast.

Once a true central AI grid is implemented into roadways that autonomous AIs can snap into and access, they'll have situational awareness that could drastically exceed what our own brains are capable of.

Plus, AI is able to monitor all the sensors in a vehicle better than a human can--things such as engine temps, tire temps/pressures--heck, even tire wear sensors. What I'm a bit concerned about is Tesla's reliance on image recognition for self driving, versus the lidar tech that is used by most other manufacturers. Like or not, image recognition can be fooled--so can lidar, but lidar is an active technology that creates flowing data points that may be less prone to interpretation errors. Perhaps a melding of the two technologies would be the best solution, so if any discrepancies are detected in one, they can be cross referenced with a second layer of technology, increasing accuracy further.

I do believe this will happen but not in my lifetime. When it takes my county government and local contractors 5 fricking years to add 2 extra lanes to a neighborhood city street, how long would it take for a national road network to be upgraded so it can use this central AI grid that you mentioned? My educated guess is decades.

Factories/storage facilities are already have AI to move stuff around.

I think we have a quite good system here in Germany, overtaking on the right is not alowed, only on the left lanes. And it is forbidden to stay on the left lanes, they are only for overtaking. If you overtook a car, you have go back to the right lane again.That said, if it doesn`t make sense to go right again, because there are a lot of trucks on the right lane, you can stay left of the trucks, because you are continueously overtaking, so to say.

And yes, I think longhaul goods should be hauled by train, preferring trucks was a politcal error. Swiss and Austria have a much higher percentage of goods transported by train, because they have the political will to do so.

75% of Trucks, SUVs, cars, motorcycles, are all in a competition to see who the worst driver is. And they probably learned to drive by playing GTA.