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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!?"
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.
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"
No... and it doesn't help the transportation industry one bit that transportation costs are approaching a threshold where locally produced goods can compete.
/me stands by for the screams about cartels and oil company profits.
For generations, moving goods around has been treated as nothing but a small marginal cost. This means we have been able to take for granted the origin of goods.
Of course the fact is, margins still allow us to take it for granted, and they still would, even with a doubling of the current prices of fuel. Fuel does not yet dominate the cost of transportation, and the cost of transportation does not yet dominate the the cost of agricultural commodities.
But, don't listen to me. Listen to the voices that really want you to be angry about fuel prices. Maybe there really is some conspiracy driving up the prices (while staying hidden within the competitive, transparent marketplace where the value is established, and where the prices can only be explained by investor behavior, since the only other factors of supply, demand, and reserves do not explain it.)
Oh, that's scarier than any boogeyman can possibly be: what if the market really does bear $136/bbl crude, without any nefarious or criminal interference in the market?
Well, it's the only commodity that has a scoreboard on every corner, and the only one where people honestly expect me to get upset about it, to make it a priority.
Tell you what: When fuel reaches 1% of my annual budget, I'll give it a line item. When fuel reaches a level that it is a significant marginal cost in delivering goods to retail marketplaces, I'll buy locally produced goods. Local economy will be happy.
If you have experience in commodities or degrees in economics, you might be able to persade me.
I've been called clueless for my opinions. I do happen to know a thing or two about the transportation business, particularly trucking, particularly in the ag sector.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
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?
fuel isn't 1% of your budget? I'm impressed. If you have to fill up your tank once a week, then you're spending at least $40. This is a weekly income of $4K, or over $200K/annually. I consider myself a conservative driver. I hate cars and I hate traffic, but between my wife & I, fuel costs are far above 1% and even approaching 5%.
Technology Consulting & Free Downloads
Transportation is already factored into about 24% of the economy. From the manufacture of cars, planes, etc., to the cost of moving people and goods, fuel for police cars and fire trucks, fuel for the construction equipment that paves the roads, removes the snow, delivers mail and packages, runs the trucks that install and maintain your internet access, etc. So, unless you're not paying taxes, not buying anything, not eating, never sending or receiving mail, or surfing the net, you're already paying more than 1% of your income, either directly or indirectly, in diesel and gasoline.
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
Some of us live in these places called cities, where we can walk to places, and if that is too far we can take a bus or subway for next to nothing. :)
I don't know about the guy who posted the original message, but many people in cities don't even own cars. I own a car, but I only use it when I want to move furniture or buy a lot of groceries... my gas expenditure is nowhere near 1%.
1% is low for the suburbanite / rural folk, but not for the urbanite.
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
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.
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...
I consider myself a conservative driver. I hate cars and I hate traffic, but between my wife & I, fuel costs are far above 1% and even approaching 5%. I only wish I had the money to where less than one percent was for gas. In my case, it's almost ten percent, and that's with a car that gets better than 30 mpg city (a '96 Saturn--1.9L I-4 w/5 a speed gearbox). Granted, I don't make much money, but unless you get obscene gas mileage, you'd have to pull down six digits to spend less than one percent of that on gas.
I'd guess that the vast majority of households are at least 5 percent of income to fuel. Figure that based on average yearly fuel costs on the following minimums: two fill-ups per month at 50 dollars (12 gallons E to F) to 70 dollars a visit (17 gallons E to F), plus an extra two visits because there are four weeks extra spread over twelve months, for a yearly total of 1300 to 1800 dollars at current prices. That's just for one typical (Accord, Camry, etc) car, and before taxes are taken out. If taxes suck away a third of your income before you see it, then that almost doubles your percentage of income for fuel.
Thank the piss-poor US dollar, inflation, needless war in Iraq, greedy oil execs, or whatever else suits your fancy. The 1920's will look like a cakewalk compared to what awaits us on our current course, and those of us who still have money will wish they could only spend a handful of percent of it on gas.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
Disregarding everything else you said (I just don't feel like typing =] )...
When fuel reaches 1% of my annual budget, I'll give it a line item.
I just graduated from high school yesterday. I don't exactly make bank, but it's not minimum wage by a longshot. However, just in fuel to get to school, work, and home, i was spending up to 40% of my income. Even if I were just going to work, it would be nearly 30% of my income.
I think the price of fuel hits harder for those in the lower classes, but I'm not an expert so take it with a grain of salt.
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
They have been emissions laws in place for Diesel engines for a long time already. The EPA 2007 emissions were a huge step forward from the EPA 2002 emissions in using a diesel particulate filter DPF to filter out the soot and aggressive exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) to reduce NOx emissions.
My beef with the EPA and the government is how they handled the enforcement of the 2007 emissions law. In Europe they have the Euro emissions standard for diesel engines and they are currently at Euro 5. But that does not mean that truck makers must only offer Euro 5 engines to its customers. See the EU was smart and rather then force everyone to switch they said you can still buy Euro 4 and 3 engines but you pay higher registration fees and I believe even higher road usage taxes (can anyone clarify?) for the Euro 3 and 4 engines.
In the USA the EPA forced all the engine makers and truck makers to only offer 2007 emissions rated engines in all trucks made after October 2007. Now the 2007 rated engines add another six to eight thousand dollars to a truck so guess what happened? Thats right, in 2006 trucking companies scrambled to purchase pre-2007 trucks not only because they were cheaper but the reliability of 2007 engines was unknown and untrusted. So now you have plenty of 2006 sales but sales were dead in 2007 threatening truck makers here in the states. If the EPA did what the EU did they would have eased the pain in transitioning and we would have more cleaner trucks on the road.
Now just wait till EPA 2010 when we will most likely combine the 2007 DPF and EGR systems with a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Also Europe will combine a DPF system with their Euro 5 SCR/EGR system for Euro 6 emissions. At that point diesel engines will be cleaner than gasoline engines.
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.
Regarding the article you linked to: this is extremely rare. You can't make any money operating equipment like that, except for certain short haul dedicated stuff like construction haulers. Trucks require constant maintenance or they break down in extremely expensive ways.
Regrooved tires are dangerous in general, and there's no benefit to using them. It costs a lot more to have a tire truck come out than to just buy a retread (not regroove) tire and have it done at a shop. You can't use retreads on the steering axle, and many trucking companies don't use them on the drive axles. Trailers are a different thing - you can go cheap on trailer tires because if one blows out, you can still go down the road for a bit. The other seven are adequate for getting you to the nearest tire shop.
Now as far as the "dirty and unsafe" part - that doesn't describe the modern trucking industry. Most trucks on the road are less than five years old, with hardly any older than ten. Emissions have been lowered dramatically compared to the old days, and the new fuels are almost sulphur-free. The black stuff you see coming from the stacks? That's soot - unburned carbon. It's not particularly dangerous, although it can contribute to smog. You only see that when the engine is doing something dramatic, like changing gears or taking off. Most of the time a truck is in motion, the engine is working as efficiently as possible and minimizing unburned fuels.
Most trucks are moving towards having small "lawnmower" engines called APUs (axillary power units) that power the heat/AC system and provide electricity when the truck would normally be idling. I don't have one, but hopefully I will when the lease runs out on my truck. (You have to idle or have one of these APUs in inclement weather - a trucker needs to be fully rested to drive, and that's hard when you're in a truck in the middle of the desert during the summer with no A/C. Not that California cares.)
Drivers have strict rules they have to follow regarding hours of service and inspections, and while every driver breaks the rules from time to time, you develop a sense of when you need to get off the road. A wreck can destroy your career, and equipment failure can delay your load (and your paycheck). DOT inspects trucks randomly, and they're pretty thorough. Safety is a huge concern for truckers as well as trucking companies, since accidents translate to lost money. It's not worth pushing your drivers past the rules, since DOT can audit you at any time and any accident can turn into a million dollar lawsuit.
Bear in mind this article is talking about the port of Los Angeles, which just recently banned owner-operators and trucks more than a few years old. California is a very truck-unfriendly state in general and I wouldn't be surprised if this article you pointed out was just propaganda pointing out the worst case.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
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.
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
Your thinking of those vertical, high population density cities on the east coast right?
My city is 550 square miles, not counting the suburbs (around 9000 square miles, including the full metropolitan area), and has around 2000 people per square mile. Compare to New York city, with 300 or so square miles, with TWICE the population (27,282 per square mile, more and an order of magnitude larger).
Most cities in the west are huge sprawling behemoths. Even with public transportation, it still would add around an hour to the average commute, or more. Sadly, Phoenix doesn't even really have that. Our bus service is spotty, infrequent, and unreliable, and barely covers most of the central part of the city, much less the outskirts.
We also have the same problems as other cities, the closer to the city center (thus jobs) you are, you either have to cope with high prices, or nasty ghetto. The only middle-class compromise is to move further and further out, thus increasing trip times, and eliminated public transit as a viable, and timely option. Statistically, only 3% of people in Pheonix use public transit to commute, while 72% drive their own cars to work.
There is much more to the US than the east coast.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
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
Ayn Rand hasn't been hoping for anything for quite a while.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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."
Please, allow me to translate his comment from jerk to English.
Good for you, to be able to manage 1%. Unfortunately, for most Americans, it's closer to 10%, if not higher, and even if we can cut out all extraneous driving, going to work is getting less and less profitable due to the increased costs of going. I respectfully disagree with your position that our sharply rising fuel costs are not going to increase the costs of transported goods, but even if that is the case, the supply of money people have to buy said goods is going down. This -is- a problem, and it's a problem that's going to affect just about everyone.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Your city must be in Europe, possibly eastern Europe. In most US mass transit systems, fares are at least a dollar each way. Ten bucks a week is 1% of a $52,000 annual gross income, which is certainly in the middle-class ballpark, though on the low side for a technology professional.
I personally live in a dense east-coast US metropolis that happens to have the most expensive mass transit in the US, and found a good job that happens to be in the burbs. I can spend almost ten bucks a *day* if I commute by subway. It does keep the *gas* expenditures down to do that, so I guess I can compete with all the other urbanites on that score.
Exercise for the reader: Name that metropolis!
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
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.