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Big Rigs Go High Tech
pottercw writes "Trucking may not seem like a high-tech industry to the casual observer, but major carriers are starting to adopt an array of emerging technologies to combat rising fuel costs, tighter regulation and fierce competition. The technologies include systems that monitor and communicate vehicle conditions and performance, enhanced GPSs that keep tabs on tractors and trailers, and safety systems which issue warnings or even take action to help drivers avoid an accident — all working in real time. Computerworld has a cool mouseover diagram highlighting some of the gadgets we're beginning to see on high-tech trucks."
Once everyone finds out that the Semi Trucks drive themselves, the truckers' union will overthrow society!
Slashdot really needs to get with the times. The Navitron Autodrive System is nearly ten year-old news, though remains a little known secret known to many truckers falling asleep at the wheel.
If only it could have saved poor Red from beef poisoning at Sirloin A Lot, sadly that feature was still in beta.
-Matt
viva Homer!
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Who read the title and thought "OH NO, A SEQUEL!?"
Does this help with the fact that a lot of stuff can be shipped more efficiently by train?
Communications (CB radios and trunked radio) have always been associated with truckers.
Big rigs were also the first to use significant engine management. J1939 (one of first uses of CAN) was originally done for big rigs.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What's next Slashdot... are you going to tell me NASCAR is complicated too?
Something witty.
I don't care for long haul trucking. Especially those damn double trailers. It's insane! Like most accidents the cause is the driver. Will all these gadgets keep him awake? Automated rail is the only way. I just cannot imagine riding your hog, and getting smacked by that goddamn retread coming apart in front of you. It's only a little bit better than some guy leaking his load of gravel on the interstate.
What?
Combat rising fuel costs? They aren't serious, yet. Otherwise, we'd be moving everything we could via railroad, not road. We'd see a lot more aerodynamics. It'd be so easy to make a few small aerodynamic changes to the trailers. That's seriously low hanging fruit, and it's been almost entirely ignored. As it is, while many of the tractors aren't too bad, the average truck trailer has all the aerodynamics of a brick. We'd also see lighter trailers with more aluminum and composite carbon fiber in them, more efficient engines, and better tires.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Most of this stuff has been on trucks for ten years. Eaton's VORAD anti-collision radar goes back further than that. But now, everybody with more than one rig has some kind of tracking system.
Warning: You are about to experience a collision. Now applying automated force feedback controls and intelligent brake assistance on a large vehicle hauling an unpredictable, possibly liquid or poorly secured load to avoid detected hazard.
Problem?
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Maybe some day, hundreds of truckloads of shipments will be piloted by one (maybe two) people. Who knows, maybe there will be just one engine for a hundred containers, and it will be smart enough to generate energy very efficiently, regulate it's own speed, and react to hazards. Maybe they will even make special thoroughfares criss-crossing the nation, on which these super-movers of the future will ride on... The future is bright indeed! I just have one question: what might we call them?
How can locally produced goods compete with the shipped in versions? Raw materials have to be shipped in, even in agriculture where fertilizer and fuel are real costs. My impression was that goods from China were inexpensive because they had a large supply of very cheap and poorly treated labor. Just about everyone now uses material from there if they bother making anything. What is left of US and Western manufacturing? If you know so much about Ag shipping, can you tell me why so much cheap food at the grocery store now comes from China?
What competition do you see in the oil market after the merger of Exxon and Mobil? They closed half of their stations, major refineries and fired plenty of people so they could tighten up the market. Their "Project for the New American Century" has been a disaster for the rest of us and may even bite them in the ass when the US economy collapses under the cost of the Iraq war failure, Iran refusing to sell oil in dollars and persistent problems in Afghanistan. Sooner or later our weakened prestige and currency will ruin their string of "best year ever" profits.
I don't have a fancy degree in Economics nor do I trade commodities but the ruin of the US economy is easy to see. Excuse me while I drive my H2 to pick up another load of Chinese stuff at Walmart.
The summary underestimates the technology development in the trucking industry. Since at least the early 70's oil crisis, no effort has been spared to wheedle out ever last cent per lb-mile. The engine controls are exceptionally sophisticated and the scheduling/routing software is similarly complex. This is not a bunch of stereotypical yokels. Most people here would go broke if they tried to do it.
While we are at it, a lot of people might be surprised how sophisticated trains and train operations are - modern locomotives were the prototypes of Prius' and othe hybrids, complete with regenerative braking.
Brett
I wish they would clean up their emissions. Too bad there's no financial incentive or laws to force that.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
High tech isn't just digital. Plenty of other folks out there are finding ways to save on overall oil usage. Filters that can extend the time between oil changes can save thousands for long haul, and extended operation vehicles.
http://www.ctifilters.com/
Can all this tech stuff prevent truckers from swinging in front of me in the left lane when there's no one behind me for miles?
And then they would proceed to take forever to pass the slower vehicle and move back in the right lane so I can finally move on.
Trucks high-tech??? who would have thought??? WOW I would never have thought!!
If you look at the emissions associated with the delivery of a new TV, most of it is in the last leg from the store to the buyer's home. Trucking 500 TVs across the state using a big rig produces less emissions per TV than that last ride home.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Will it stop directing them through tiny villages with roads too narrow to cope?
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Truckers may not be able to pronounce "Illinois" real well, but they did adopt CB Radios back in the 1970s. That was the closest thing to the Internet until... the Internet.
In case your memory is short: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaammaHevT0
Back in '91, IBM won a contract from J.B. Hunt to develop a satellite based system for trucks. It used a Qualcomm satellite system, a 486SX based tablet computer (I designed the keyboard controller, power management processor and did a lot of the BIOS work on it), and a docking station.
:)
The tablet ran a program designed by a sub-contractor that allowed the trucker to do things like checklists, fuel management, figure his trip earnings, report emergencies, etc.
One of J.B. Hunts driving (heh) reasons was that after a driver delivered his load, he might spend 30 minutes thumbing the same quarter into a payphone trying to call the dispatcher. With this system, he could send a communique that he was done, and the system would turn around with new orders in less than 2 minutes.
One of the other neat things was the Qualcomm dish could do triangulation that was accurate to a few hundred yards. At least twice I know of, rigs were stolen and recovered because of the satellite tracking.
Now the little antenna packages are ubiquitous on trucks. Look behind the air dam on the roof, or the back of the cab, and you'll see a white dome that's about 12" in diameter, and 10" tall. Odds are that's a Qualcomm satellite link.
The tablet system was pretty neat, too. It was an extremely dense PCB at the time, 16 layers. It supported the original Sundisk (before they became Sandisk) 2.5MB flash drives, touch screen, used Peltier devices to allow operation in extreme temperatures, had RS-232, RS-422, infrared, keyboard & mouse port, expansion connectors, LCD controller, all that stuff, in an aluminum frame with this heavy duty rubber covering over it.
The holster interfaced to the trucks wiring harness and could pick off speed (we were pre-GPS), RPM, voltage, stuff like that. Our group didn't handle the holster, so I only know vague details about it, but I do know that while they were considered some of the vehicle data busses for the future, they interfaced the old-fashioned way.
Most of the drivers were moderately receptive to the system, since it sped up their turn-around time, which meant more money. However, since it could tattle on exceeding maximum allowed drive time, over-revving, and of course speeding, there were some drivers that had real problems with it.
Incidentally, at that point in time, J.B. Hunt was a VERY large customer of IBM main frames. For the previous 7 years, they upgraded every year to IBMs newest mainframe offerings. Their big data center was somewhere in the Mid-west, I believe. With their route planning, logistics management, service records system, dispatch system and everything else, they burned a lot of CPU cycles.
Somewhere in my basement, I have one of the docking holsters and the tablet computer, and as of about a year ago, it powered up and booted into DOS.
J.B. Hunt and IBM learned an important lesson from this, too: Don't let the driver be able to see the tablet. Before they started positioning them where the driver couldn't read it while in motion, at least one accident occurred because of fixation.
While new technologies have brought more to the table, what the system offered 17 years ago isn't all that drastically different. Satellite is still the best choice, since cell phone coverage is not 100% pervasive.
The project name was Road Rider. Naturally, we called it Road Kill internally
A train? Welcome to the 19th century. James Watt will be proud.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I've been getting full semis delivered to me from Ohio to Minnesota for exactly $1050. This price has not changed in the past 4 years.
Just the other day, I had a competing trucking company come in and quote out the job. Their quote was... $1050.
The price of diesel fuel has quadrupled in this time.
I can not believe that technology is making the difference here. I think truckers are getting screwed.
I know there were some threats of a trucking strike a month or two ago that came to nothing. I would not be surprised to see this happen, and if it did, the country would be brought to its knees.
But does it have a helicopter cab which can detach and fly away?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That's because rail travel is the most energy-efficient we have, with respect to transporting massive amounts of materials across land. Such a comeback would require double-tracks between all pairs of destinations. And regular reliable schedules, heh.
Once everyone finds out that the Semi Trucks drive themselves...
:-)
Most people who have only ever driven cars fail to appreciate that driving heavy trucks is actually quite a demanding job, and not one for dummies. Those rigs are expensive, and no factor that saves fuel or wear and tear can be neglected. It may be popular to label truckies as ignorant yokels, but it is a fact that they need to be quite technically astute. For instance, tyre wear alone is a huge factor when you consider the cost of replacing over 40 tyres on a multi-combination rig.
As an aside, this reminds me of one time back in my trucking days, some idiot tried to steal my rig. He might have thought he was a shit-hot car driver, but couldn't even muster the coordination required to get the crash box into gear. He was still struggling with it when the police arrived...
The technologies listed here are pretty old now.
You now have systems where you have one truck with a driver is followed by several driverless trucks. You also can have automatic parking / reversing.
I can't find any links at the moment but I've seen them demo'd at tradeshows.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Rail sure is way better where it can be used.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I used to be a truck driver before I got into Unix Administration (long story but backing up is now a lot safer). When I left the profession in 1999 the truck stops were just putting rj11 jacks for dial up in the trucker section of the restaurants...Not exactly fast but computers had not hit the real of being personal communication yet....which truckers adopt pretty fast. In 1995 I used to feel like a big shot for walking around with a cell phone when I was among non-truckers but truck drivers already had them and owner-operators began to depend upon them immediatly.
...I had gauges that used dials and not a single LCD was present and I relied soley on mirror placement and use to avoid accidents.
But back then fuel was relatively cheap and the only modifications we had on our engines were a governor that restricted top speed (mine was annoyingly set at 68). Now I hardly recognise the cab of a modern truck
Oh, and laminated maps. That was the top technology for finding my way around Houston.
but an onboard computer AND handheld computer. Impressive!
A small while ago I had an occasion where a friend was giving me a lift *don't worry he got the OK from his company first* as I thought it would be a fun experience to go on a run. I was expecting some run down, greasy, loud U-haul type experience. I was blown away by his Modern Machine. It was Swankier the my damn apartment.
He had a Built in computer with LCD in the sleeper.
High Speed Internet
A HIdeaway full shower.
A mini drink fridge.
A GPS System
Hands Free Cell hooked up to his stereo
2 Reverse Cameras
20 Inch DVD Entertainment system with Xbox 360
ect... ect...
This doesn't even include the major Job enhancing features he pointed out. They have some sort of wireless system where Weigh Stations are not even needed anymore. His dash has a little blinking light to let him know he can drive right past. The downside was some sort of "Tattler" that over the internet was sending all sorts of info to his company. It had a little screen that showed when he had to stop. He hated the damn thing. It even did all his logging for him, but somehow he said it was a bad thing.
I worked for a large (LARGE) national trucking corporation for seven years in their IT department. Occasionally, I'd go to the terminals to talk with dispatchers / drivers to see how IT could make their jobs easier or faster. What I heard a lot about was how much they hated the invisible boss watching over their shoulder, monitoring every little detail of their workday and questioning them about anything that wasn't according to the way the corporation wanted it to be. "Why did you stop at the rest area off of 101 for 15 minutes at 12:33 PM on August 3?" "I needed to take a leak" "It shouldn't have taken you 15 minutes to take a leak" - and you can imagine where it goes from there.
Does all this monitoring and control increase efficiency and reduce costs? That's open to debate; while it may cut out some unscheduled downtime, it also cuts out some unscheduled overtime and / or supra-legal speeds. Net effect at the bottom line? Who knows, but it's mighty close to a wash. Where the real difference is - the drivers attitude about their job. They used to be "captain of their ship", piloting their load of valuable cargo to its destination - using the routes and methods that their years of experience had shown to be best. Now they're just cogs in the machine; follow the route you're given, operate the tractor according to corporate policy - and we're going to monitor you carefully to make sure you do - and punish you for every transgression. How can you take pride in your job under those conditions? Very dehumanizing and it just gets worse year after year. Each year the corporate overlords refine their expectations of what it takes to operate a truck at maximum efficiency.
Ultimately, what the corporation is thinking about is how much they pay those drivers - and how they could reduce that expense. Refining the task of "drive a truck" to the point where it's just a matter of following instructions is the first step. Once they've achieved that, there'll be no more need for those highly experienced drivers - someone with a new commercial license could do the same job at about one third the salary. This would cut those labor expenses and allow the corporation to post increased profits.
But how would you feel about no longer being able to assume that those big trucks are being driven by professional drivers. How would you feel to know that 80,000 pounds of freight in the lane next to you is being driven by a dropout that's talking on his cell phone?
This isn't idle speculation - this is the way things have been going for quite a few years now. All that's changed is the price of fuel; as that climbs, the transportation companies are faced with a hard choice - cut expenses to compensate or raise their rates. Raising the rates enough to cover the new improved cost of fuel would chase away a substantial number of customers so the pressure is on to cut labor expenses. After numerous reorganizations and cuts it's now the drivers turn on the hot seat. Next time you see one on the road, give him a smile and a wave. Those guys work long hours for not a lot of money and do all they can to keep everyone around them on the roads safe. Everything you buy - EVERYTHING - got to you in the back of a big rig. Think about the people who have dedicated their lives to making sure your store has an adequate supply of canned beer and what's being done to them in the name of "increased efficiency" and tip your hat; these guys deserve your gratitude.
All they need to do is to tell the Navigation System not to use small roads. i.e. in the UK stick to A and B roads.
As usual it's not the technology it's the morons unable to read the instructions that come with them.
...when did they invent mouseover??
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
In the UK with have heavy goods vehicles typically with 420-480BHP pulling 44 tonnes (88000lbs) and managing to return 8-10MPG despite the fact that the geography of the UK means we don't benefit from the long straightish free-flowing road system the USA has.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
You and Ayn Rand!
----
"help drivers avoid an accident, all working in real time" The trouble they had with the old systems was they weren't real-time. "*beep* You should have avoided that collision."
My father is a life long trucker, and when I was younger I went with him on several trips, learning the business.
Most trucking companies with their own trucks have regulators in them with limit the speed to California highway spec for semis(I think 55). Swift is the biggest one I can think of that does this. These companies generally charge per-hour or trip, and not per hour, which also minimizes speed. They also have pretty good safety enforcement, and trip monitoring. The ones to worry about are the independent contractors. They are paid per mile, or make money based on the speed of their delivery, thus have an incentive to speed, and be reckless. They also have far less safety and maintenance requirements than corporate drivers.
The margins in modern trucking are pretty damn slim, so sometimes people cut corners.
If you want to be afraid, just wait until the foreign trucking provisions of NAFTA come through, and we're flooded with Mexican truckers, driving Mexican trucks, completely immune to American safety, and EPA standards, much less CDL standards.
Most of my "bad trucker" experiences were due to morons in cars acting recklessly. People don't realize that trucks have a MASSIVE stopping distance, miles of blindspots, and the empty trailers REALLY suck. I see so many people change lanes 10ft in front of trucks going 75mph, thinking it is safe. Sometimes I hope that something terrible happens, just so I can feel good about Darwin.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Blah blah blah... ...cool mouseover diagram...
blah blah blah
Let me second that from a UK perspective.
Since the inclusion of the former Eastern European states into the EU, we have seen a huge rise in traffic accidents caused by foreign drivers, especially Eastern Europeans with badly maintained rigs.
Disclaimer - I'm not a trucker, but I regularly do about 40,000 miles a year on the roads, and have never had an accident while moving (been rear-ended twice, but hey, what can you do?).
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Slashdot is even further behind the times than that. Well, the submitter, but still.
Before Qualcomm made it big with CDMA, their first major product was a satellite based truck tracking/logistics systems (called OMNITrack). It came out, oh, in 1985 or thereabouts.
Amazing that the summary said we're just now seeing high tech stuff appear in the world of trucking... pfft.
Of course, I only knew about that since I went to college at UC San Diego, and Qualcomm was the local high tech company that hired a huge number of our engineering graduates.
If america truckers weaned themselves off their love of conventionals and used cabovers where the engine goes under the cab (like 99.9% of euro trucks) that 2 metre hood/bonnet at the front could vanish and with it about 1 or 2 tons of unnecessary dead weight. Not only that - a shorter tractor is more manouverable and because its lighter can haul a larger load for the same engine size.
I wish I knew.
I always have to laugh when I see american trucks. They try so hard to stay a decade behind the rest of the world. They are failing though, that adaptive cruise control and lane change detection are fairly new.
Isn't that more "steel/aluminium for gas"? The water doesn't get used up in fuel cell processes if it's done right.
which is totally what she said
I guess you never heard of the second law of thermodynamics.
Much as I like trains in principle, it has to be said that trucks are not that bad especially where they can run at constant speed and be Diesel fueled. Problems come when they have to mix with other traffic, and that was the strategic error- not providing dedicated truck lanes and separating them from other traffic. One factor driving up SUV/light truck use, in Europe as well as the US is surely fear of heavy trucks.
However, in many countries exactly the same mistake was made with rail - the traffic pattern meant that passenger trains had to be built to the same shunting capability as freight trains, making passenger trains unnecessarily heavy and lacking in efficiency.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I thought this article would be more on the lines of a giant hybrid, maybe a modification of this: 400 hp Hybrid mini Cooper Most of that tech was on my father's truck years ago; onboard logs, gps tracking, etc.
Earlier this year I wandering around the local county fair. A compnay was exhibiting its latest in tractor cabs. It looked like an airplane cockpit. First,there were 360-view TV screens to see what what is happening everywhere. These things take a while a while to stop and start and you want to be stopping for every bump. Then they had GPS navigation for precision planting and harvesting. Not a foot of land would need go to waste. Plus there are computers and sftware to optimize energy usage.
We are getting hit with an additional fuel surcharge for every feed delivery now, that is recent over the past few months. Along with an increases in the feed itself (and propane, offroad diesel, electricity, local taxes, water, machinery repair parts, etc..all up over last year). Prices paid by the packers have remained constant. Hmmm This is the poultry biz, only a handful of packers to choose from and they all have basically the same contract they offer the growers so the point is moot there.
Now my analysis isn't so much the oil producers (the gulf nations are barely maintaining parity with what they were getting before the recent cash infusions diluting the dollar's worth, they are complaining about it *loud*) or the other farmers (grains) who start the feed stack making more, the big increases seem to be coming from the big investment places and traders speculating on commodities now that they screwed mortgage lending so bad combined with the Fed bailing out those big investment banks and them taking that new cash and gambling with it.
In short, rapid inflation, with the inflationary dollars going to commodities speculation driving up prices.
Your truckers aren't complaining yet about fuel costs? You use independents or have your own fleet and hired drivers? A lot of the independents are on the razor's edge right now from what I hear.
In the construction industry freight prices ARE going up.
6-7 years ago some suppliers started adding a fuel surcharge to shipments.
Just recently, one supplier instructed us to adjust the freight prices in the estimating software by adding 22% to the shipping milage. Note this supplier rarely sends LTL shipments, and often an order takes more than 1 truck.
ABIL
Apparently, you don't know any truckers, have never been a trucker, or been in a truck.
The speed limit is fine. It is four-wheelers like you who get in the safety margin truckers leave that are the problem.
A good example happened in LA. A trucker was sited for following too close. He fought the ticket, and his defense was that it was impossible to not follow too close because any space he left in front of his truck was immediately filled by a car. He took the judge for a ride and showed him. The case was dismissed because within 5 minutes they were at a complete stop while the driver tried to comply with the law.
Oh, and about truckers and speeding, if you want to slow them down, change the law so they are not paid by the mile. The faster one drives, the more one makes.
I should I know. I drove a semi for Warner for a year.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Rail companies do however have BIG investments in intermodal transport which usually includes trucking as well as ocean freight components. Container shipping is what drives our economy these days and the rail companies know it. The nice thing about container shipping is that there is no need to handle the freight itself directly except at the destinations which saves a lot of money; you just strap the ISO standard container to the truck/train/ship of your choice and use the most efficient transport method available.
Having had to speed up to 65 in a 55 to pass a Swift truck going 60 about a million fucking times, I have to say, *cough*bullshit*cough*. In fact, if I see a trucker in California going the 55 limit, they MUST be pulling a mobile home.
Most of my "bad trucker" experiences are related to the fact they won't use a fucking turnout when there's thirty people behind them. I live in Lake County, California and when going between Upper Lake and Clear Lake (highway 20 between the junctions of highway 29 and highway 53) I have time and time again been stuck behind truckers doing ten or more miles under the speed limit who will happily ignore the MANY extremely broad places for them to pull over and let people pass. A large number of them appear in some town when they have to go slowly anyway and it would not be exceptionally arduous.
I understand they're under pressure to conserve every dime. I don't care - they're still assholes in my book when they do that shit. Nazis were just doing their job too - this is only a matter of degree.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
..it and earlier water and alcohol injection like with fighter planes in ww2, is that it improves the efficiency of the burn so much that you gain more power and better mileage. It not only helps cool the intake so you can run a leaner mixture, but if you use hydrogen and oxygen together it is an additional fuel source at the same time, in a perfect ratio. It has nothing to do with disregarding thermodynamics, it follows the "laws" completely and takes advantage of them along with chemical realityon. Yes, you lose a little with alternator drag making the hydrogen, but you get more back because the hydrogen really expands in the cylinder and acts as a big flame propagation source that insures all the macromolecules of the normal hydrocarbon fuel that have been partially atomized by the heat of the intake combined with the fuel injectors or venturi/vacuum action from the carb spreads out better inside the cylinder and burns there and not get exhausted unburnt and wasted. Ever hear of catalytic converters? What do you think they do, why are they even needed? Answer = they try to get the wasted fuel that is not burnt to finish burning so the exhaust is cleaner. A huge power waste, but it cleans the exhaust better. It is much better for efficiency and power to burn the fuel inside the engine and not outside the engine. All sorts of various schemes have been devised and are in use to increase this efficiency, multiple valves, variable valve timing, multiple plugs or sparks like the old mallory dual point, etc, whereas a hydrogen boost system just approaches it from a chemical viewpoint, not mechanical.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Solution: Don't allow anything over a class B truck on California Freeways. It's just not safe for full-sized Big Rigs to be on the roads here anyways.
But what about Interstate trucking? Ship it by train. That's what freight trains are for.
Any thoughts as to how to prevent truck races? You know, where one rig climbing a long grade at 47 MPH figures he can pull out to pass a line of other trucks only doing 43 MPH. When the speed limit, and everyone else, is doing 70 MPH.
Have gnu, will travel.
enhanced GPSs that keep tabs on tractors and trailers, and safety systems which issue warnings or even take action to help drivers avoid an accident -- all working in real time.
As opposed to what?
Alert! Alert! You are about to get into an accident, 5 hours ago when this data was collected! Take immediate evasive action 5 hours ago!
Comment of the year
We gotta great big convoy!
yeah, that will work~
It is obvious you have no clue about transportation and logistics.
I never had any trouble driving in CA. In fact the worst places are in the NE because many of the locations were designed with 40ft or shorter trailers.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I haven't found Big Rigs to be driving over the speed limit or dangerously on the road. It's the short haul local trucks that seem to be doing the vast majority of reckless driving.
Frankly, I feel for the big rig guys, spending hour upon hour on the road just trying to make a living safely, when they've got the fragile little minnows drafting or cutting into their carefully maintained gap.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's obvious that you live nowhere near Los Angeles or Orange County.
Having had to speed up to 65 in a 55 to pass a Swift truck going 60 about a million fucking times, I have to say, *cough*bullshit*cough*. In fact, if I see a trucker in California going the 55 limit, they MUST be pulling a mobile home.
:)
Perhaps I'm wrong on the specifics, maybe the regulator is set to 60, and not 55. Its been about 10 years since I used to ride along with my father, and he's mostly local, and short-hop now. I had two complaints about California trucking laws, both as someone in a truck, and someone in a car, restricting trucks to a lower speed limit AND to the right two lanes is daft. Especially at choke points like Needles and Blythe. Trying to merge past a lumbering line of behemoths was annoying as hell in a car, and, in a truck, it let me see just how reckless it forces drivers to be.
It depends on the trucking company of course, as well. Probably more than half of trucks, back then, didn't have regulators. Listening to CB chatter was enlightening, since the truckers know where every damn cop and speed trap is located, thus go as fast as they feel like. If a truck gets pulled over, or even sees highway patrol, guaranteed every truck in radio range knows what mile marker to slow down to the legal limit at.
I live in Lake County, California and when going between Upper Lake and Clear Lake (highway 20 between the junctions of highway 29 and highway 53) I have time and time again been stuck behind truckers doing ten or more miles under the speed limit who will happily ignore the MANY extremely broad places for them to pull over and let people pass.
Is there a grade? Even a 1% grade can be a bitch in a loaded semi. I'm not sure of the terrain. But yes, truckers are just as disposed towards being asses as the rest of the population.
Comparing trucker to Nazis might be a stretch though. They really aren't out to get you.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
well, if you didn't drive on the wrong side of the road...
The "unmanned" trains aren't being driven by robots or computers. They are being driven by traincrew who are on the ground (where they can throw track switches and couple/uncouple cars) and are using a beltpack locomotive remote control http://www.beltpackcorp.com/products.html .
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Furthermore, you compare the best case efficiency of small plants (diesels-electrics attaining 30% efficiency) with what is almost the worst case for large plants (45% at the generator and 30% after distribution). This is inappropriate for a number of reasons. First of all, transmission losses only average around 7% in the US. Even with fairly old power stations supplying the electricity this compares well with modern diesel prime movers. Modern power stations, on the other hand, can achieve efficiencies of almost 60% and can scrub the exhaust gasses of practically everything except CO2. Additionally, as you suggest, advanced nations get a fair amount of their electricity from non-fossil fuels. Over 30% of America's base load power generation releases practically no emissions into the atmosphere.
Finally, expecting long haul freight and express passenger service to share tracks is ridiculous. This is only done in the US to maximize utilization of small investments in infrastructure. Even local routes where freight and passenger service may run on the same lines, the efficiency of the system is only lacking with respect to rail transportation on dedicated lines. In the worst case scenario (steam engines on the local lines?) passenger rail will still beat individual vehicles for efficiency and emissions.
BTW, the factor that is driving up SUV use is not fear of commercial vehicles, but rather fear of other SUVs. Commercial vehicles, particularly in the US, are driven by skilled professionals whose actions almost NEVER result in accidents. SUV drivers, on the other hand, tend to be far from professional. Feeling secure in their Hummer, they are comfortable in treating driving as a full contact sport.
European truck surround their wheels with astroturf-lined flaps that keep spray down. I do not see much in the way of road spray suppression gear around the tires of tractors and trailers in the USA. The only reason I can think for this is that encasing the wheels would lead to heat-build up, which is more likely to be a problem in the USA's hotter climate.