This is becoming a real problem. I spend a good amount of hours driving across states visiting customers and hit few interstates busy with semis. I have seen so many close calls in the last few years and reckless maneuvers that I am now doing some of my work, which includes onsite product demos, remotely, with all the inconvenience and friction that adds in closing a deal. I am also warning family and friends who have long commutes to be extra careful with semis. Keep a good distance, stay out of their blind spots (when passing do it fast don’t drive next to them) and anticipate their actions. I don’t see how we fix this problem other than minimizing our exposure by not driving as much and avoiding busy highways even if that adds time to our commute.
Chicagoland here. We have a pet theory that covid changed how people drive. From where I sit, it is not just semis ( though those will have the biggest impact should something happen ). That said, just yesterday I was dodging ice balls falling from massive semi ( my only real question was how... was it just getting on the road or something? )
Ice forms on the roof and they need to get up there manually and clear it off and I don't think they do. :)
I was driving the Gaspe coastal road once after an ice storm and we were on the road with a bunch of semis early in the morning. The switchbacks had massive sheets of ice coming off them over the sides. It was wild.
It wasn't so thick that driving over the shattered pieces was an issue but it was a sight to behold and turned a white knuckle drive into a real jaw clencher.
Was there for a family issue and had to be somewhere otherwise I wouldn't have been on the road that day at all, let alone first thing.
The OP claims that deregulation efforts from 2016 to 2022, originally meant to address the truck driver shortage, actually led to many minimally trained drivers joining small truck fleets that pay below-market salaries and routinely run 14- to 20-hour days using tampered hardware for logging mileage. These poorly trained drivers, according to the OP, would not pass the vetting of large, compliant carriers. Freight brokers, which now "control" a third of all loads, typically award them to the lowest bidder, pushing spot rates "below the cost of legal operation." The consequences, according to the OP: legitimate carriers are barely breaking even, cargo theft is more prevalent, and roads are less safe.
Hmm... maybe? I'm not sure I agree. There's an alternate narrative that is also compelling. Could it be that the rise of freight brokers and the adoption of new technology by small fleets enables them to compete more effectively with large fleets, making this market much more competitive than it ever was? Could it be that shippers now have more viable truck-shipping options at a lower cost, thanks to less opaque freight pricing? Could it be that society as a whole benefits from less expensive truck delivery services? Won't this market, sooner or later, be dominated by self-driving trucks, bringing prices down much further, benefiting society as a whole even more?
> enables them to compete more effectively with large fleets, making this market much more competitive than it ever was?
Here's an idea: using slaves in coffee and sugar-growing plantations. This will enable slavers to compete more effectively with large non-slave plantations, and the society as a whole would benefit from less expensive coffee and sugar.
Yes, the OP claims many small-fleet drivers are being overworked, but provides zero evidence of it. By evidence, I mean data, not anecdotes. Do you have data on this?
The article provide this: "Despite billions spent on safety technology, fatal truck-involved crashes are up ≈40% since 2014"
Though I wonder how much that number compares to how much the trucking industry grew in that time. If it grew 200% that would actually mean a big win for safety.
Edit: some quick, AI driven research suggests it might've grown 20%. So... Still an issue
I just looked briefly at the data provided by the NHTSA, and what I see is a jump after the pandemic, followed by declines in 2022 and 2023, contradicting the OP:
Your second link shows a slight reduction from '21 to '22, but even then it's still significantly higher than during '18 - '20. And it doesn't show anything prior to '18.
Because you only went to 2018. The article mentions 2014, and if we use your own DOT tool to build a table [0] from 2013 to 2023 (the latest year available), and filter to include large trucks and fatal collisions, we see... a ~42% increase in fatal accidents from 2014-2023
Society might care about cost _including externalities_. A truck running on discarded frying oil might offer a lower price and there’s no way to account for the resulting health outcomes. Exceeding capacity lowers unit price and usually doesn’t lead to an accident. Many industries around the world have shown that without functioning enforcement of reasonable rules you immediately get the tragedy of the commons.
I agree. The OP claims that small fleets are cutting costs to extremes that are bad for society, but the OP provides no evidence of it. By evidence, I mean data. Do you have data on this?
You describe the two states as if those are mutually exclusive somehow. They are not. But that does not answer the real underlying question: is it true?
Or could it be that the tech bros have enabled shifting costs to externalities, like road safety, and the tax funded social safety net keeping underpaid drivers fed? Startup ideas that collect ongoing transaction fees are a hot pattern in investing. The money for those fees has to come from somewhere. Not necessarily a productive somewhere.
This sounds like an echo of ride hailing, where people will now pay a bit more to ride a Waymo so they don't have to tell their financially desperate driver that they'll get a bigger tip for calming down a bit.
I was reading a book recently called "the secret life of groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. He took a ride with truck drivers delivering groceries, and he found that they are terribly abused, underpaid, and that the truck driving schools will literally clean out halfway houses, drug clinics, shelters, anyone they can find who will sign on the dotted line and what is little more than indentured servitude.
If anything, deregulation of the trucking industry has had the exact opposite effect. There should be stringent rules on the drivers, but just as equally stringent rules on those that employ and train them. It's a horribly abusive industry, and we should regulate it.
This article appears to have some political bent to it based on comments about immigration.
I was made curious about the possibility of an "intentional backdoor" in ELD (Electronic Logging Devices) that allowed truckers to misreport their hours.
It is odd that they mention several plausible reasons for the problems they see but really seem to single out immigration as the key problem. That seems backwards to me. If safety regulations are no longer being enforced as they claim, where the drivers were born is irrelevant.
> These changes were driven by a long-standing belief—pushed hard by the American Trucking Associations (ATA)—that the U.S. faces a permanent truck-driver shortage. The ATA’s solution was to lobby Congress and FMCSA to lower every barrier to entry, convinced that new drivers would flow to large ATA-member fleets rather than small operators.
> That assumption was rooted in an old reality: twenty years ago, only the biggest carriers offered real-time tracking, electronic tendering, and direct shipper relationships. Small carriers and brokers were stuck with phone, fax, and leftover freight.
> That world no longer exists.
Coming from the software industry, I've seen similar things happen when decisions are made which turn out misplaced in the longer term.
And I've always wondered - why can't the management respond fast enough to the new scenario?
What I've noticed is that as long as the same management team is there which had made that decision, it becomes extremely difficult for them to admit and make that change. Change only happens when either things get really critical, or when the management changes.
I wonder whether something similar is involved here.
Yes, I think when you work in implementation, it's obvious that you made a bad decision (to yourself before others see it) and you are quick to say "I made a mistake, let's fix it before the mess gets worse". Your skillset in this hypothetical I'm creating is "implementation". You decided on the implementation but that's only part of the entire thing you are responsible for (plan, build, maintain).
For execs they are responsible for monitoring key indicators and deciding on what to do.
When things go wrong it could be they weren't monitoring the right things and missed it or the direction the took initially was wrong (either right away or as things changed and they didn't see it).
That's their entire job, more or less. Not trivializing it. The stakes are high pretty often.
We own a towing business focused on heavy recovery. It is true that a huge number of drivers are from eastern europe, and fraud is HEAVY! We take a picture of license, credit card, and the guy with the bill because they all try and scam out of it.
From the comments on the article, it sounds like regulators have been largely neutralized, and there are lots of shady semi fictitious brokers out there.
> As of this morning:
> 1,164,093 motor carriers are listed as “Authorized for Hire.”
> 107,757 freight brokers are “Authorized for Hire.”
> And right now, 206 of them list 30 N Gould Street, Sheridan WY 82801 as their primary address.
One state in India is particularly strong with its labour centric protectionism. As far as I have seen, most families' earnings come from one family member working in "Gulf". The labour unions there are a big reason why industry hardly ever takes root. One example: https://x.com/Bharatiyan108/status/1948757576427901138
The immigration route only works temporarily, of course: their children will no longer be immigrants and less likely to remain in that business. Hence why relying on immigration to keep replenishing some sector is like having anemia and living off blood transfusions. You’re effectively a vampire.
A relative ran a trucking operation for a few years and now says he’s significantly more wary of any trucks on the road.
At the same time, he says that it’s a miserable business because you’re constantly getting sued (at a level markedly higher than the admittedly poor driver performance)
So obviously, demand is going up while supply is running short. Why is supply failing? Because it is similar as hardhat jobs, marine job, army, tradesman, construction, mining or farming work.
People are no longer desperate to get into just any job. They get out of college expecting to get into an "office" work job, be it in marketing, front office, backoffice or middle-office (it does officially exist).
My dad retired from truck driving right before the covid lockdowns (2020). The regulations were a massive painpoint. During the Obama's last term they passed in strict time tracking regulations and forced everyone to have GPS trackers on their trucks to enforce the time tracking.
Due to this my dad had to drive a higher average speed of ~65-70mph to cover the distances required and not use up his available hours.
Before he'd drive slower 55-65 ave mph for longer hours and take frequent breaks.
Regulations are fine, but when you make them too strict it makes it difficult for new drivers to join and usually it's easier to be part of a corperation than an owner-operator (my dad).
> Due to this my dad had to drive a higher average speed of ~65-70mph to cover the distances required and not use up his available hours.
> Before he'd drive slower 55-65 ave mph for longer hours and take frequent breaks.
The hours pre- and post-strictness changes were the same, it's just with electronic logbooks it's harder to fudge the numbers than the older paper charts.
This would imply he was worker longer hours than was strictly allowed (at a slower pace/speed). After hours could not be fudged, it meant that the pace had to go up to cover the same distance.
What should have happened was that the expectations of what was possible in a work-rest cycle should have been adjusted.
Further, one big issue with trucking (often came up in Bloomberg's Odd Losts podcasts on this topic) is that drivers are paid per load, rather than (say) per hour. Often what happens is that they're stuck at a warehouse waiting to un/load for potentially hours, which they're not paid for. The source/destination doesn't care because whether the driver is waiting for 30 or 300 minutes the fee is the same: they have no motivation to be efficient. This kills what the driver can earn in a day/week if warehouse folks lollygag.
You are drawing a picture of where individual decisions are ineffective in a deregulated environment. Either collective action through a union, or state action through regulation, are needed to induce a safe and sustainable work environment.
>Freight brokers now control ≈⅓ of all loads and often award them to the lowest bidder, pushing spot rates below the cost of legal operation
...
routinely run 14–20-hour days using tampered ELDs.
Is the sort of "innovation" you often hear here about when people say "EU can't innovate because of regulations"?
Regulations are only as good as the will of the enforcers. It would be trivial and cheap to use all the technology available today (GPS, broadband mobile networks, high definition cameras, image recognition) to enforce the laws, but the overwhelming political priority is keeping goods cheaper, at the expense of a few more collisions and casualties.
> Am I alone in thinking that truck driving is an arduous job that ideally shouldn't be done by humans at all?
There are lots of people that do not have the capacity to move up the 'value chain'. All they are capable of doing are 'simple' jobs:
> To enlist in the Army, aspiring recruits typically must take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test and earn a passing score. The ASVAB, with a maximum score of 99, requires a minimum score of 31 for Army enlistment.
> The ASVAB test encompasses various subject areas or subtests, including general science (GS), arithmetic reasoning (AR), word knowledge (WK), paragraph comprehension (PC), mathematics knowledge (MK), electronics information (EI), auto and shop information (AS), mechanical comprehension (MC), and assembling objects (AO).
If all/many of those jobs are automated away, how are those people supposed to make a living? It's possible to be 'too stupid' to even be in the military (or at least be in it and have a useful role).
Ideally you would also think about what the truck drivers would do in this new reality where they aren't just unemployed but rather unemployable.
Truck driver is the most numerous blue-collar profession in the US, if I remember correctly it counts several million people. I wouldn't expect all of them to become automotive AI model trainers overnight.
I agree completely, and I think it's only a matter of time until the short haul is completely autonomous. The trucking industry is slowly working themselves out of a job, and it's not just deplorable working conditions, or terrible pay, outright fraudulent schools, or the predatory trucking companies, it's also the rising cost and antipathy towards the very, very very critical role that truckers play in modern society.
This is a bit complicated even in Czechia, with its densest network of railways in the world.
Trains are most efficient when they are long. 30+ cars, ideally. Capacity of railway lines is limited and lines tend to be shared by passenger traffic as well, so freight mostly moves at night and short freight trains are economically unviable.
It might take a long time to gather enough stuff/containers to fill 30 freight cars in one particular railway head (obvious exceptions such as Port of Rotterdam apply). Which means that you may have to wait for 10 days before your shipment actually starts to move.
>long hours and days spent in loneliness, away from family and friends
Calling bullshit here. If they weren't doing that work, they probably would not, in fact, get extra time with family/friends.
>the need of humans to sleep and relax means that the trucks cannot legally move for majority of the day, thus there is a need to have more of them,
Team drives can cover a majority of the day if need be for long hauling. Short hauling/last mile is capped not so much by miles traveled, but cargo load and unload times.
N == 1, but I used to live in a block of flats with three truck driver families. All three marriages collapsed over their fathers' frequent absence from home.
You can say that they would have collapsed over something else if they stayed at home, but this is what the people themselves told me.
Driving to Spain and back takes two weeks. After two weeks of his absence "I felt like a young widow already", said Hana, the youngest of the wives.
"The Biden-era immigration surge delivered millions of new arrivals seeking work; foreign-owned fleets recruited aggressively—higher pay than at home, no experience needed, free “housing” in the sleeper berth."
I was talking to a retired trucker recently. They described a situation where one driver would get the CDL, but shared the cab with 2-3 others (no CDL, maybe family or friends). They would all rotate driving, so at any given time there was a chance the driver actually had no CDL.
get calls from "shippers" and "logistics", every few days, and notice that the faces and trucks and logo's(or total lack thereof), change just as fast.
The only thing happening is a massive increase in costs.
So more and more I say fuck it, local only, and I do 90% of my own picks and drops, charge the same flat rate for everything I do, which works out just fine and breaks up the routine.nicely.
But the poor basterds doing "piecework" trucking got that maddness in there eye's, got sold on it, and dying trying pull it off.local boys, but people from infinetly bussier and competitive places, just roll with it, and always see the upward oportunity, and move when it's good, and grind harder, when it's not.
This is becoming a real problem. I spend a good amount of hours driving across states visiting customers and hit few interstates busy with semis. I have seen so many close calls in the last few years and reckless maneuvers that I am now doing some of my work, which includes onsite product demos, remotely, with all the inconvenience and friction that adds in closing a deal. I am also warning family and friends who have long commutes to be extra careful with semis. Keep a good distance, stay out of their blind spots (when passing do it fast don’t drive next to them) and anticipate their actions. I don’t see how we fix this problem other than minimizing our exposure by not driving as much and avoiding busy highways even if that adds time to our commute.
Chicagoland here. We have a pet theory that covid changed how people drive. From where I sit, it is not just semis ( though those will have the biggest impact should something happen ). That said, just yesterday I was dodging ice balls falling from massive semi ( my only real question was how... was it just getting on the road or something? )
Ice forms on the roof and they need to get up there manually and clear it off and I don't think they do. :)
I was driving the Gaspe coastal road once after an ice storm and we were on the road with a bunch of semis early in the morning. The switchbacks had massive sheets of ice coming off them over the sides. It was wild.
It wasn't so thick that driving over the shattered pieces was an issue but it was a sight to behold and turned a white knuckle drive into a real jaw clencher.
Was there for a family issue and had to be somewhere otherwise I wouldn't have been on the road that day at all, let alone first thing.
Yes UK Hn'er, here... have observed the same. Covid did a number on people's driving sense.
Interesting.
The OP claims that deregulation efforts from 2016 to 2022, originally meant to address the truck driver shortage, actually led to many minimally trained drivers joining small truck fleets that pay below-market salaries and routinely run 14- to 20-hour days using tampered hardware for logging mileage. These poorly trained drivers, according to the OP, would not pass the vetting of large, compliant carriers. Freight brokers, which now "control" a third of all loads, typically award them to the lowest bidder, pushing spot rates "below the cost of legal operation." The consequences, according to the OP: legitimate carriers are barely breaking even, cargo theft is more prevalent, and roads are less safe.
Hmm... maybe? I'm not sure I agree. There's an alternate narrative that is also compelling. Could it be that the rise of freight brokers and the adoption of new technology by small fleets enables them to compete more effectively with large fleets, making this market much more competitive than it ever was? Could it be that shippers now have more viable truck-shipping options at a lower cost, thanks to less opaque freight pricing? Could it be that society as a whole benefits from less expensive truck delivery services? Won't this market, sooner or later, be dominated by self-driving trucks, bringing prices down much further, benefiting society as a whole even more?
> enables them to compete more effectively with large fleets, making this market much more competitive than it ever was?
Here's an idea: using slaves in coffee and sugar-growing plantations. This will enable slavers to compete more effectively with large non-slave plantations, and the society as a whole would benefit from less expensive coffee and sugar.
Yes, the OP claims many small-fleet drivers are being overworked, but provides zero evidence of it. By evidence, I mean data, not anecdotes. Do you have data on this?
---
EDIT: Link to data is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46173013
It looks like crash rates jumped after the pandemic, then declined in 2022 and 2023, contradicting the OP.
The article provide this: "Despite billions spent on safety technology, fatal truck-involved crashes are up ≈40% since 2014"
Though I wonder how much that number compares to how much the trucking industry grew in that time. If it grew 200% that would actually mean a big win for safety.
Edit: some quick, AI driven research suggests it might've grown 20%. So... Still an issue
I just looked briefly at the data provided by the NHTSA, and what I see is a jump after the pandemic, followed by declines in 2022 and 2023, contradicting the OP:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/crash-data-systems/fatality-analysis-r...
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/learn-safety/roadway-safety-...
Your second link shows a slight reduction from '21 to '22, but even then it's still significantly higher than during '18 - '20. And it doesn't show anything prior to '18.
Because you only went to 2018. The article mentions 2014, and if we use your own DOT tool to build a table [0] from 2013 to 2023 (the latest year available), and filter to include large trucks and fatal collisions, we see... a ~42% increase in fatal accidents from 2014-2023
[0] https://cdan.dot.gov/files/files/e2451bc7-e1c3-4942-93f2-af6...
I get a 401 unauthorized for that link
Good find!
No, he's intentionally misconstruing the data. It spiked and went down, but it's still almost 50% higher than 2014 - the article's date range.
Society might care about cost _including externalities_. A truck running on discarded frying oil might offer a lower price and there’s no way to account for the resulting health outcomes. Exceeding capacity lowers unit price and usually doesn’t lead to an accident. Many industries around the world have shown that without functioning enforcement of reasonable rules you immediately get the tragedy of the commons.
I agree. The OP claims that small fleets are cutting costs to extremes that are bad for society, but the OP provides no evidence of it. By evidence, I mean data. Do you have data on this?
You describe the two states as if those are mutually exclusive somehow. They are not. But that does not answer the real underlying question: is it true?
Or could it be that the tech bros have enabled shifting costs to externalities, like road safety, and the tax funded social safety net keeping underpaid drivers fed? Startup ideas that collect ongoing transaction fees are a hot pattern in investing. The money for those fees has to come from somewhere. Not necessarily a productive somewhere.
This sounds like an echo of ride hailing, where people will now pay a bit more to ride a Waymo so they don't have to tell their financially desperate driver that they'll get a bigger tip for calming down a bit.
I was reading a book recently called "the secret life of groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. He took a ride with truck drivers delivering groceries, and he found that they are terribly abused, underpaid, and that the truck driving schools will literally clean out halfway houses, drug clinics, shelters, anyone they can find who will sign on the dotted line and what is little more than indentured servitude.
If anything, deregulation of the trucking industry has had the exact opposite effect. There should be stringent rules on the drivers, but just as equally stringent rules on those that employ and train them. It's a horribly abusive industry, and we should regulate it.
This article appears to have some political bent to it based on comments about immigration.
I was made curious about the possibility of an "intentional backdoor" in ELD (Electronic Logging Devices) that allowed truckers to misreport their hours.
I was not able to find results to directly confirm or deny that this was true, but it certainly seems like these recently-mandated ELDs come with security concerns: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/vehiclesec...
It is odd that they mention several plausible reasons for the problems they see but really seem to single out immigration as the key problem. That seems backwards to me. If safety regulations are no longer being enforced as they claim, where the drivers were born is irrelevant.
From the article -
> These changes were driven by a long-standing belief—pushed hard by the American Trucking Associations (ATA)—that the U.S. faces a permanent truck-driver shortage. The ATA’s solution was to lobby Congress and FMCSA to lower every barrier to entry, convinced that new drivers would flow to large ATA-member fleets rather than small operators.
> That assumption was rooted in an old reality: twenty years ago, only the biggest carriers offered real-time tracking, electronic tendering, and direct shipper relationships. Small carriers and brokers were stuck with phone, fax, and leftover freight.
> That world no longer exists.
Coming from the software industry, I've seen similar things happen when decisions are made which turn out misplaced in the longer term.
And I've always wondered - why can't the management respond fast enough to the new scenario?
What I've noticed is that as long as the same management team is there which had made that decision, it becomes extremely difficult for them to admit and make that change. Change only happens when either things get really critical, or when the management changes.
I wonder whether something similar is involved here.
Yes, I think when you work in implementation, it's obvious that you made a bad decision (to yourself before others see it) and you are quick to say "I made a mistake, let's fix it before the mess gets worse". Your skillset in this hypothetical I'm creating is "implementation". You decided on the implementation but that's only part of the entire thing you are responsible for (plan, build, maintain).
For execs they are responsible for monitoring key indicators and deciding on what to do.
When things go wrong it could be they weren't monitoring the right things and missed it or the direction the took initially was wrong (either right away or as things changed and they didn't see it).
That's their entire job, more or less. Not trivializing it. The stakes are high pretty often.
We own a towing business focused on heavy recovery. It is true that a huge number of drivers are from eastern europe, and fraud is HEAVY! We take a picture of license, credit card, and the guy with the bill because they all try and scam out of it.
From the comments on the article, it sounds like regulators have been largely neutralized, and there are lots of shady semi fictitious brokers out there.
> As of this morning:
> 1,164,093 motor carriers are listed as “Authorized for Hire.”
> 107,757 freight brokers are “Authorized for Hire.”
> And right now, 206 of them list 30 N Gould Street, Sheridan WY 82801 as their primary address.
Damn, funny now seeing this when they were blaming immigrants instead of the lax standards due to aggressive lobbying. “Every. Damn. Time”
You can make a job not suck or you can hire immigrants.
Guess what happens in capitalism.
Which economic system makes jobs not suck?
Labour centric protectionism.
One state in India is particularly strong with its labour centric protectionism. As far as I have seen, most families' earnings come from one family member working in "Gulf". The labour unions there are a big reason why industry hardly ever takes root. One example: https://x.com/Bharatiyan108/status/1948757576427901138
The immigration route only works temporarily, of course: their children will no longer be immigrants and less likely to remain in that business. Hence why relying on immigration to keep replenishing some sector is like having anemia and living off blood transfusions. You’re effectively a vampire.
A relative ran a trucking operation for a few years and now says he’s significantly more wary of any trucks on the road.
At the same time, he says that it’s a miserable business because you’re constantly getting sued (at a level markedly higher than the admittedly poor driver performance)
> Non-domiciled CDLs introduced, permitting foreign nationals to obtain U.S. commercial licenses
In many countries it's common to see freight being driven by foreign drivers simply because that's how cross-border deliveries are done.
If a truck of widgets is made in Poland and shipped to a store in Spain, a Polish driver will drive it the whole way.
Yeah, and they have exactly the same problem.
So obviously, demand is going up while supply is running short. Why is supply failing? Because it is similar as hardhat jobs, marine job, army, tradesman, construction, mining or farming work.
People are no longer desperate to get into just any job. They get out of college expecting to get into an "office" work job, be it in marketing, front office, backoffice or middle-office (it does officially exist).
My dad retired from truck driving right before the covid lockdowns (2020). The regulations were a massive painpoint. During the Obama's last term they passed in strict time tracking regulations and forced everyone to have GPS trackers on their trucks to enforce the time tracking.
Due to this my dad had to drive a higher average speed of ~65-70mph to cover the distances required and not use up his available hours.
Before he'd drive slower 55-65 ave mph for longer hours and take frequent breaks.
Regulations are fine, but when you make them too strict it makes it difficult for new drivers to join and usually it's easier to be part of a corperation than an owner-operator (my dad).
> Due to this my dad had to drive a higher average speed of ~65-70mph to cover the distances required and not use up his available hours.
> Before he'd drive slower 55-65 ave mph for longer hours and take frequent breaks.
The hours pre- and post-strictness changes were the same, it's just with electronic logbooks it's harder to fudge the numbers than the older paper charts.
This would imply he was worker longer hours than was strictly allowed (at a slower pace/speed). After hours could not be fudged, it meant that the pace had to go up to cover the same distance.
What should have happened was that the expectations of what was possible in a work-rest cycle should have been adjusted.
Further, one big issue with trucking (often came up in Bloomberg's Odd Losts podcasts on this topic) is that drivers are paid per load, rather than (say) per hour. Often what happens is that they're stuck at a warehouse waiting to un/load for potentially hours, which they're not paid for. The source/destination doesn't care because whether the driver is waiting for 30 or 300 minutes the fee is the same: they have no motivation to be efficient. This kills what the driver can earn in a day/week if warehouse folks lollygag.
This is some relatively neutral contemporary coverage of the Obama regulations:
https://www.ttnews.com/articles/teamsters-call-obama-move-fo...
The effect you describe of pushing independent drivers into (union?) corporate jobs seems like it was intentional.
You are drawing a picture of where individual decisions are ineffective in a deregulated environment. Either collective action through a union, or state action through regulation, are needed to induce a safe and sustainable work environment.
I knew a driver that quit at the same time, exactly because of these regulations. She was very upset about them.
She was fine with things before they came into effect, though.
The market response to a labor shortage is to pay people more. It seems as if the industry has taken significant steps to do anything but that.
>Freight brokers now control ≈⅓ of all loads and often award them to the lowest bidder, pushing spot rates below the cost of legal operation ... routinely run 14–20-hour days using tampered ELDs.
Is the sort of "innovation" you often hear here about when people say "EU can't innovate because of regulations"?
Tough timing for a condescending "why can't everyone's regulatory regimes just be like the EU" comment: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...
Regulations are only as good as the will of the enforcers. It would be trivial and cheap to use all the technology available today (GPS, broadband mobile networks, high definition cameras, image recognition) to enforce the laws, but the overwhelming political priority is keeping goods cheaper, at the expense of a few more collisions and casualties.
[flagged]
and way more high-profile individual ones across politics and finance
Fairly recently, Bernie Sanders complained in The Guardian about the risk that AI will destroy various jobs, including truck driver jobs.
Am I alone in thinking that truck driving is an arduous job that ideally shouldn't be done by humans at all?
* long hours and days spent in loneliness, away from family and friends,
* possibility to stretch and move your body is very limited,
* bad hyper-processed food, hence so many drivers are obese,
* the need of humans to sleep and relax means that the trucks cannot legally move for majority of the day, thus there is a need to have more of them,
* plus, as mentioned here, both the drivers and their managers are incentivized to break and bend the law, resulting in unsafe driving.
All of the above would be mitigated by robots taking the wheel.
> Am I alone in thinking that truck driving is an arduous job that ideally shouldn't be done by humans at all?
There are lots of people that do not have the capacity to move up the 'value chain'. All they are capable of doing are 'simple' jobs:
> To enlist in the Army, aspiring recruits typically must take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test and earn a passing score. The ASVAB, with a maximum score of 99, requires a minimum score of 31 for Army enlistment.
> The ASVAB test encompasses various subject areas or subtests, including general science (GS), arithmetic reasoning (AR), word knowledge (WK), paragraph comprehension (PC), mathematics knowledge (MK), electronics information (EI), auto and shop information (AS), mechanical comprehension (MC), and assembling objects (AO).
* https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/asvab/asvab-and-a...
If all/many of those jobs are automated away, how are those people supposed to make a living? It's possible to be 'too stupid' to even be in the military (or at least be in it and have a useful role).
Ideally you would also think about what the truck drivers would do in this new reality where they aren't just unemployed but rather unemployable.
Truck driver is the most numerous blue-collar profession in the US, if I remember correctly it counts several million people. I wouldn't expect all of them to become automotive AI model trainers overnight.
I agree completely, and I think it's only a matter of time until the short haul is completely autonomous. The trucking industry is slowly working themselves out of a job, and it's not just deplorable working conditions, or terrible pay, outright fraudulent schools, or the predatory trucking companies, it's also the rising cost and antipathy towards the very, very very critical role that truckers play in modern society.
Ideally, long-haul freight transportation would be handled by trains and trucks would only be used for last mile deliveries. Ideally.
This is a bit complicated even in Czechia, with its densest network of railways in the world.
Trains are most efficient when they are long. 30+ cars, ideally. Capacity of railway lines is limited and lines tend to be shared by passenger traffic as well, so freight mostly moves at night and short freight trains are economically unviable.
It might take a long time to gather enough stuff/containers to fill 30 freight cars in one particular railway head (obvious exceptions such as Port of Rotterdam apply). Which means that you may have to wait for 10 days before your shipment actually starts to move.
We aren't that patient anymore.
Most of that does not have to be that way. Relentless capitalism and profit maximisation resulted in that.
>long hours and days spent in loneliness, away from family and friends
Calling bullshit here. If they weren't doing that work, they probably would not, in fact, get extra time with family/friends.
>the need of humans to sleep and relax means that the trucks cannot legally move for majority of the day, thus there is a need to have more of them,
Team drives can cover a majority of the day if need be for long hauling. Short hauling/last mile is capped not so much by miles traveled, but cargo load and unload times.
Folks, get over robotically doing these things.
N == 1, but I used to live in a block of flats with three truck driver families. All three marriages collapsed over their fathers' frequent absence from home.
You can say that they would have collapsed over something else if they stayed at home, but this is what the people themselves told me.
Driving to Spain and back takes two weeks. After two weeks of his absence "I felt like a young widow already", said Hana, the youngest of the wives.
> Driving to Spain and back takes two weeks.
From Czechia (based on your name)? Why so long?
* Trucks are slower than personal cars.
* Pauses are required.
* Some roads cannot be used by some vehicles and/or cargo, especially in the Alps. Same with tunnels.
* Some countries ban trucks from their roads on certain days and hours, so a day off whether you want it or no.
* Sometimes your employer tells you to avoid some extra expensive road even at the cost of longer driving time. (Europe has a myriad of toll systems.)
* The cargo for the return journey is usually not ready on the same day, might well take five.
"The Biden-era immigration surge delivered millions of new arrivals seeking work; foreign-owned fleets recruited aggressively—higher pay than at home, no experience needed, free “housing” in the sleeper berth."
I was talking to a retired trucker recently. They described a situation where one driver would get the CDL, but shared the cab with 2-3 others (no CDL, maybe family or friends). They would all rotate driving, so at any given time there was a chance the driver actually had no CDL.
It feels like the cry of a yellow cab company operator after Uber came to the town
get calls from "shippers" and "logistics", every few days, and notice that the faces and trucks and logo's(or total lack thereof), change just as fast. The only thing happening is a massive increase in costs. So more and more I say fuck it, local only, and I do 90% of my own picks and drops, charge the same flat rate for everything I do, which works out just fine and breaks up the routine.nicely. But the poor basterds doing "piecework" trucking got that maddness in there eye's, got sold on it, and dying trying pull it off.local boys, but people from infinetly bussier and competitive places, just roll with it, and always see the upward oportunity, and move when it's good, and grind harder, when it's not.
Has anyone looked at the author’s body of work to get a sense of how they think? What is their analytical toolkit? Professional and personal biases?
STEM is the same. The expression "fell for the STEM meme" encapsulates it nicely.