...to move in and sell products in direct competition with Mack and Freightliner? Which nobody is forcing anyone to buy? Which could raise the bar and spur on competition?
Correct, it's a good opportunity. I don't see the downside.
See the problem is the flawless and totally Autopilot Full Self-Driving systems somehow got excluded from the Tesla Semi for some inexplicable /cought crashes with big explosions and potential of tens of fatalities /cough reason, so cant really enter trucking market without hiring humans and admitting something is not right with a "tech company".
I don’t want this to imply that autopilot is somehow flawless and not allowing/including it is the wrong choice. However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen so I’ve always found it shocking just how much they’re highlighted and focused on when a computer causes them. I just think these things need to be looked at from a much more statistical angle than they currently seem to be. Innovation has kind of always been dangerous and risky throughout history with unfortunate lessons learned. Mitigating them should obviously be the goal but some level of risk kind of has to be acceptable.
These are the people who presume all undocumented aliens are dangerous, and that voting fraud is statistically meaningful, and that sports leagues with 0 trans players are consumed by trans players’ problems. Quietly moving quickly will probably work better than a long, thoughtful campaign of Carter-esque nagging.
They're saying that human accidents happen at a much higher rate while self driving cars nearly never have accidents, yet people fixate on the relatively few examples when self driving cars do have accidents.
If human drivers were held to anywhere near the standard that robots were then nobody could drive.
And yet disingenuously you avoid the fact that centralizing the act of automating transit by delegating it to the manufacturers of an automated transit system is one of not the lynchpin to fully technologically enforceable tyranny.
You can stop a protest with a geofence with self-driving cars. You cannot stop every state's worth of pissed off people driving to the center of power and raising hell with human driven vehicles, maintaining the possibility of active revocation of consent to be governed at scales that require governments to come back to to the negotiating table.
Canada learned this the hard way with the trucker protests during COVID, and agree with the protestors position or not, you can't argue with the results. The federal government pushed the little red button by sanctioning their own citizens, freezing assets, trying to turn the tables; demonstrating to anyone paying attention we have already reached a point of technical centralization harmful to peaceful resolution of issues, as small groups are making decisions so vast, that the only response to things is to physically show up, and in doing so, scare the ever loving hell out of residents as a feedback mechanism to those causing the problems.
Those that look at self-driving as only a safety metric, and not simultaneously a sovereignty metric, are either crushingly naive, or haven't put anywhere near the thought into downstream effects as they should have.
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
Sounds like your previous LTL had market headroom to be merely twice as expensive while still beating the next cheapest option. And if they'd done so who knows, they might have stayed in business.
Idiots is a overstatement. This is why trucking brokers exist. These small trucking outfits can barely hold a conversation, much less deal with a end-consumer on anything customer service related.
Trucking companies for shipping are easy to setup and take down.
I wonder if anyone here has shipped anything by freight directly (like a car) and done the research on USDOT / MC Numbers / VIN for their truck. It's a shady system.
Mind you there's a hefty tax surcharge on Diesel that could easily be lowered if the trucking economy was that important to states like California. Two years ago Diesel was at 8$ when it was 4 everywhere else, last year 9$, 5-6 in most other states. Now 10$? Haven't been there lately but it's still at 6 in MO/AR. It's not the oil price that's the problem with the Diesel price.
In the the Space Exploration overhaul mod I once played for Factorio, at one stage the game progressed to the point that many/most resources could be converted into matter.
This matter could be transported from A to B.
And at the destination, this matter could be converted back into resources.
Mine uranium and/or copper and turn them into generic matter? Sure, why not.
Turn that matter into iron somewhere else? Of course!
And since matter could be transported in pipelines, it was just one tube for ~everything at that point. Some processes put matter into the tube, and some other processes took matter out of that same tube.
(It was very energy-intensive to make these conversions, but intense amounts of electrical power was also a solved problem by that point in the game.)
I did a quick check to see how unusual this is. According to LLM-assisted research on actual U.S. trucking companies filing Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 (rather than carriers simply shutting down) the number appears to be in the realm of ~100 companies per year in recent years. Typically between 75 and 150 per year.
Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
So should we then makes buses also pay their fare share? I know you will then respond with second-order effects of buses and public transportation without considering that for trucks.
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
Buses? Where? In the US they are as rare as unicorns. It depends on location. In third world countries metros, it is best to run electric buses for free and tax cars. It will reduce traffic and avoid hundreds of billions of road expansions if everyone is driving a car.
Fighting for free roads is a sure way to have crap or no roads to a lot of places. If you (or any consumer) gets value from there bring roads, then you should pay some for that value. It’s not subsidizing the super rich - sounds like you want others to subsidize you.
Would be nice if it actually worked that way. Here in my state we've paid for the tollway 50 times over but we'll never get to stop paying a premium over and above the repairs.
I can no data even close to your 50x claim. The most toll intensive states ($ of toll per mile driven) don’t even break even on annual maintenance costs, much less initial outlay for the roads. The gap is covered in other state and federal programs.
So, care to cite the states where the tollways paid for the road costs by 50x?
> Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs.
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.
1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.
3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.
4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)
5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen
5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust
6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.
7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.
8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.
10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.
11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.
A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.
> 8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
Checks out. The residential suburban streets I've lived on have been resurfaced on about that timeframe, maybe a little less, with patch-ups in between. Say, how do the houses on those streets get built without trucking? What about the food in the nearby (much closer than the nearest train line) shops get supplied?
I'm one of those people whose brain works such that that rail and nuclear power plants are how we should be solving problems because I know how good they look to a physicist and engineer, so I am right there with you. But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.
There are some externalities we can afford to subsidise, and unless you've the stomach for putting in 100x as much public money into rail for a ROI measured in half-centuries, paying for high quality roads that you also get the direct benefit of should grind your gears less than most of the other economic imbalances you could name.
> But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.
Properly taxing trucks will be mostly passed onto the consumer, not reducing their compensation much, and it would significantly reduce the number of trucks on the road (a good thing). Out of equilibrium, it would cause many of them to go under and compensation would crater... so of course it would be wildly unpopular.
> Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
That’s puzzles me a loot - there are many countries which hardly have any money for social safety net yet they keep fuel and electricity prices very low as a matter of government (social) policy and poor people benefit the least because they don’t drive and use little electricity.
Noise is also a form of pollution we never seem to price in. You can hear trucks on the highway from several miles away in many cases, and I was regularly woken up by very loud construction vehicles going by my house in Austin around 5am.
The Santa Clara HWY 85 extension because it was built without federal funds was able to totally ban trucks over 4 tons and 30 years later is in decent condition. It was also built lighter and thus cheaper to build.
And pedestrians, cyclist and such pay nothing. We should easily gate all sidewalks and make them pay fair share of cost needed to build that infra. Just have payment terminals before and after each crosswalk allowing them to pay their fair share of use of roads.
In many cases the infrastructure is better for cyclists and pedestrians _before_ the government spends money on it. I made a video about this if you're curious - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew - rural Ireland is a much safer place to cycle where the roads are still gravel and dirt.
With trucking CO2 is the least of your problems. The fumes are carcinogenic. Brake and tire dust doesn't help either.
Electric trucks would be a huge improvement on all fronts.
Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves. In a way you can see this as regular drivers subsidising the price of food for everyone else, which is not at all a bad deal if one looks at society as a whole. Or we can make truck companies pay 10 times more on road tax and then pass down those taxes to the poorest among us, but I don't think that that would be a good deal when it comes to our society as a whole.
Or we can have a highly functional train system and not use freight trucks for long haul transportation. Small and medium sized trucks for last mile delivery is significantly less problematic.
Comparing miles of track to square miles of a country the US ranks 40th, with ~26 miles of track per 1,000 square miles of land. Just under South Africa, Pakistan, and Tunisia. #1 Switzerland has ~208 miles of rail per 1,000 square miles of land.
The US moves up to 25th comparing miles of rail per million people, with 278, but is trounced by #1, Canada, with 782 miles of rail per million people.
>>Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves.
This doesn't make any sense.
If total subsidy is X and you remove it then prices should at most raise by X (in aggregate). It is at best an even trade. In reality it's worse because it creates perverse incentives.
If you want to help people then you can spend the same money by subsidizing groceries directly. You can also lower taxes for workers or 101 different things that help lower income people without promoting one way of doing transport.
> Road damage is proportional to the 4th power. Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable.
Why not use trains for heavy transport?
I lived in a country where the roads between major cities were constantly swarming with hundred trucks coming and going. Even as a kid I thought that can't be efficient! It's certainly not comfortable for everyone else. Sometimes they'd be tipped over on their side. Sometimes there would be a tiny car crushed under them.
The barons certainly don't care about pollution, but don't they see the increased cost of paying each individual driver and risk of accidents per vehicle?
The government added more lanes and diverted routes just for trucks, but still no rail...
Tyres are also a massive source of micro plastics in the environment, as another example of one of the "uncounted externalities".
This suggests it may be the source for over a quarter of all environmental micro plastics [0]
Some reports suggest it could be even higher, this article [1] references a pew report suggesting tyres could be the source for over three quarters of the micro plastics found in the ocean.
Though it's not as if they're just driving around for fun (most of the time), but not costing these sort of externalities means the market doesn't realistically consider alternatives even if they "should" be more efficient, to "cheaper" when all the /real/ costs are added up.
The price of the goods being shipped. Perhaps, subsidized trucking reduces incentives for rail infrastructure which is cheaper transportation in the long run.
Don't let "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough."
Rail is not perfect for everything; however, it is a heck of a lot better than 100+ trucks all driving to the same place that a single train could go much more efficiently.
Ships aren't perfect either, but you don't see anyone driving a truck across the pacific do you?
Replace the majority of trucks with rail and use trucks for last mile (from the rail terminal to delivery point), or truly remote deliveries (from the nearest rail yard! even if that is 500 miles away).
Is it just a given that subsidizing people to live in Aniak is a good thing?
To be fair, there's a counterargument - namely, that people who live a long ways away from infrastructure have been forced to by the very NIMBYs who made it illegal to build more homes where the infrastructure already exists. Population density near some BART stations is scandalously low.
In my town of 700 people there is already a rail line built before trucks were common. It still runs to this day, but almost entirely just to ship sugar beets a few times a year. The majority of 1000 people towns ive been to or lived in in my state have rail either through town or within a 10 minite drive.
If they could put this much rail up 100 years ago, its a cop out to say its too difficult today with equipment able to lift the equivalent of 1000 men.
Discussion about this I heard 50 years ago is the alternative to trucks tends to be rail. The real unfairness is railroads have to pay to maintain their infrastructure while trucks do not pay anything close to the costs for theirs.
If you forced trucks to pay for the damage they do to roads rail freight would be far more competitive.
>Who do we think those costs will be passed on to....
Those costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone, that's the entire problem! Externalized costs are still costs, someone (or everyone) must still pay them. But when they're externalities instead of internalized, then they're hidden (which leads to gross inefficiency) and they're imposed on people who get no benefit and no choice (which is theft). Mass pollution is literally stealing money and life from a population and inefficiently funneling some of that back to the thief/thieves. It's as if transport companies were stealing 50% of the fuel they used to fill their trucks, and people came along saying "you need to pay for all the fuel you use", and then you argued against that saying "well who do we think those costs will be passed on to...."
When the costs are built into the price, then the direct participants pay, that filters out, and everyone can see exactly what they are and are appropriately incentivized to search for solutions to reduce them, same as every other cost that goes into a good or service. The Free Market is essentially a massively distributed constraint solver, and the "invisible hand of the market" is the cumulative billions of independent actions taken by participants in response to the system constraints and what they know. To function sustainably and efficiently, there has to be a high degree of information symmetry and cost internalization, or else decisions will obviously be distorted.
If one is worried about cost burdens, the best general place is direct unencumbered monetary payment to end consumers in need. That is both very low administrative overhead, and still leaves them in a position to make the most efficient decisions for their own personal situation and fully reward producers who do a better job and reducing costs/improving quality.
>> "Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable" Who do we think those costs will be passed on to....
> Those costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone, that's the entire problem!
I think, you're confused about "the entire problem" - it's not that "costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone" it's about the alternative approach leading to the same result.
Actually, now the costs are passed mostly to drivers, in the case of making trucking pay more, they will be passed to all consumers, a minor difference.
> If one is worried about cost burdens, the best general place is direct unencumbered monetary payment to end consumers in need.
And the cost of that subsidy will be passed to? ... Again, everyone else of course. No change in actual outcome.
I'm not saying all subsidies are bad and I hate toxic fumes as much as anyone but solving these problems requires an approach much deeper than rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.
But if the companies actually creating the costs have to bear their burden directly—even if they can pass some portion of that cost on to their customers—that means they have a direct incentive to do something about it.
Prioritize routes that have higher-quality roads, rather than just going the fastest from point A to point B.
Maybe so, but it will also push smaller providers out of business and foster monopolization, the latter is usually more costly and less concerned about environmental impacts. As I said, when the system is chaotic, something is going to get in the way.
This idea gets brought up every time someone suggests adding regulations to prevent some harm large companies are doing—no matter how common-sense, no matter how great the harm, if you're adding regulations, that must hurt the little guy more; that must increase monopolization.
So I gotta ask:
What solution would you actually propose?
Do you genuinely think that the system as it exists today is the best it could ever possibly be?
Do you think we should be removing regulations? Sure, that would mean that big companies have even more freedom to ruin our roads and wreck our health, but hey, maybe an extra 3% of small businesses might be able to become profitable!
Because I'm pretty sick of people pushing the idea that any change we make to improve things is necessarily going to backfire and we're just too stupid and naïve to see it.
> if you're adding regulations, that must hurt the little guy more; that must increase monopolization.
That's the opposite of my position, adding regulations can work both ways, I meant it the other way around.
> Do you genuinely think that the system as it exists today is the best it could ever possibly be?
Again, the opposite of what I said. Improving the system requires systematic approach, fixing here and there without it results in a mess worse than before.
> Sure, that would mean that big companies have even more freedom to ruin our roads and wreck our health, but hey, maybe an extra 3% of small businesses might be able to become profitable!
Removing the income of "extra 3%" which is many thousands people for a rather minuscule, supposed reduction of pollution isn't worth the tradeoffs. If you can't solve the big problem don't mess with an already unstable system - fix the system first.
> Because I'm pretty sick of people pushing the idea that any change we make to improve things
We're where we are because of much emotion and many changes to improve things, to paraphrase, The road to hell is covered with many changes to improve things. This is what happens without a systematic approach to improvement.
A 9th-power law is most predictive when the road is barely able to withstand the 6T load; and the per-crossing damage is roughly linear to axle-weight when the pavement is able to withstand much higher loads than 6T per axle.
This is insightful. Explains why roads in third world countries are pothole ridden. Even new roads have potholes as soon as they are laid. Of course, this is exceptionally good money for the politicians and their contractor buddies. Always broken, always spending, significant amount is pocketed away. Roads are a terrific business for every politician, no one is opposed to them.
Yes, let's cause the last lifeline that keeps society afloat to fail.
This is all very nice in theory but you do realize that if US nationwide trucking is no longer able to operate profitably (and they are barely profitable as it is, see TFA for a nice illustration) that you are looking at absolute chaos in short order.
You'll have some nice and undamaged roads to look at though, but I'm not sure if that will make up for the downside.
The point isn't to preserve roads, but to expose the true cost of damage to the industry causing it. It can be phased in over time. Trucking will become more expensive and businesses will respond by optimizing transportation and raising prices. This will be offset by much lower taxes because trucks cause the vast majority of road damage from vehicles.
> Yes, let's cause the last lifeline that keeps society afloat to fail.
Perhaps society would be more resilient if important parts of its infrastructure was not subsidized but costed in a sustainable way.
"Cheap" roads — the users of which do not pay the full costs (see also fossil fuel use and climate change externalities) — caused sprawling development, which itself has been called a Ponzi scheme:
The idea is that people would design and use things differently if they had to pay the (break-even) cost of maintaining them for the amount of damage they cause to them: perhaps things would not be built as far apart if transportation was not subsidized, perhaps there would be more rail, etc.
How many roads and bridges are towards the end of their design life but are not being replaced because there is no money? Some communities gave up on pavement and went to gravel because of costs:
I think this isn't strictly true, and heavy vehicles in the US have to pay a "Heavy Highway Vehicle Use Tax." Whether that's commensurate to the damage they do, I don't know.
I thought after previous fuel price shocks that freight companies had a separate line item on their invoices for fuel that was actual cost or close to it.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
Only partially and it depends on their contracts. And only when transporting goods. They also have to cover empty miles in between gigs when they are not getting paid. Or when idling. And of course fuel prices differ between states. So, it depends but mostly cost goes up for truckers. Some trucking companies might be very vulnerable to high prices like this.
While that won't help most current truckers, the shift to electrical trucks is going to create some opportunities for the companies that buy them to undercut diesel trucks on price. Electrical trucks are still scarce and expensive and infrastructure is also lacking (in the US at least, EU/China is a different story). But of course with diesel prices spiking this high, it only exaggerates the benefits. And it looks like price uncertainty in general is could be here to stay with e.g. Russia probably needing many years to rebuild their oil infrastructure and the middle east also needing a lot of time if/when some sense of normality is restored there.
There are likely to be a lot more EV trucks on the market over the next years. China is already heading for 40+% of trucks sold (of all types, including heavy trucks) to be electric. They are way past the testing and experimenting phase there.
Transitioning the whole truck fleet in the US will take many years of course. But with Tesla bringing their factory online, other truck companies are likely to also increase production. This could quickly go from thousands of trucks sold per year in the US to tens of thousands. Tesla alone has the ambition to do 50K semis per year. We'll see if they manage. But it's going to disrupt truckers that are highly dependent on diesel prices when whole fleets start becoming immune to diesel price uncertainty.
We've been the target of a stochastic economic sabotage campaign for years. I've been surprised the US economy has been in as good of shape as it is, considering all the obvious sabotaging events/trends.
I'm sure there's something to this but unless I missed it this story is missing the one piece of data you really want in order to contextualize: how many trucking companies ordinarily go under any given month?
Truckers aren't just rolling around out there for their own enjoyment they're transporting the goods we all use every day, on pretty thin margins at that. I guess if you're trying to indirectly tax the users of trucking then OK.
Roads are subsided by people - what else would they be subsidised by, aliens?
Why is it that we need subsidies? Farmers and truckers "cannot make do" without subsidies! This is a well known "fact". But it seems very lopsided and most likely is why we can't have nice things.
Some farm subsidies are necessary to stabalize food production against yeild variability. It is the only alternative to a mass granery system which has historically failed many cities and nations. Yearly yields can be 30% off your prediction due to normal weather patterns and only even out over decades.
All that said, many crop subsidies are horribly mismanaged and selectively targeted for political reasons.
You people who think this is a great thing really need to put more thought into what you propose as the migration to your better future, because what it looks like to everyone else is that you’d really love them not to able to afford heat, rent, and groceries
"Some were small, single-operator outfits. Others were larger, operating dozens of vehicles."
Arn't there hundreds of thousands of owner-operators? I don't doubt high costs drive some people out of business, but this seems insignificant to report on. An engine failure could bankrupt a poorly run operator too. What are the typical numbers?
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadCorrect, it's a good opportunity. I don't see the downside.
Have they? https://robotaxireport.com/data/waymo-vs-tesla-safety-record...
They're saying that human accidents happen at a much higher rate while self driving cars nearly never have accidents, yet people fixate on the relatively few examples when self driving cars do have accidents.
If human drivers were held to anywhere near the standard that robots were then nobody could drive.
You can stop a protest with a geofence with self-driving cars. You cannot stop every state's worth of pissed off people driving to the center of power and raising hell with human driven vehicles, maintaining the possibility of active revocation of consent to be governed at scales that require governments to come back to to the negotiating table.
Canada learned this the hard way with the trucker protests during COVID, and agree with the protestors position or not, you can't argue with the results. The federal government pushed the little red button by sanctioning their own citizens, freezing assets, trying to turn the tables; demonstrating to anyone paying attention we have already reached a point of technical centralization harmful to peaceful resolution of issues, as small groups are making decisions so vast, that the only response to things is to physically show up, and in doing so, scare the ever loving hell out of residents as a feedback mechanism to those causing the problems.
Those that look at self-driving as only a safety metric, and not simultaneously a sovereignty metric, are either crushingly naive, or haven't put anywhere near the thought into downstream effects as they should have.
Optics change when an 80000 lbs rig inevitably crashes into stopped cars creating multi car inferno ball of death.
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
I expect these are small companies surviving month to month without the ability (or skill) to plan for catastrophic changes in the future (present).
16 companies seems like standard churn (if not a significantly lower than what I'd expect in a low margin business like trucking).
I wonder if anyone here has shipped anything by freight directly (like a car) and done the research on USDOT / MC Numbers / VIN for their truck. It's a shady system.
16 companies is nothing.
500k trucking companies = 1 company per 700 people in the US, which would be crazy if they were actual organizations
This matter could be transported from A to B.
And at the destination, this matter could be converted back into resources.
Mine uranium and/or copper and turn them into generic matter? Sure, why not.
Turn that matter into iron somewhere else? Of course!
And since matter could be transported in pipelines, it was just one tube for ~everything at that point. Some processes put matter into the tube, and some other processes took matter out of that same tube.
(It was very energy-intensive to make these conversions, but intense amounts of electrical power was also a solved problem by that point in the game.)
--
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freight-market-pushes-anot... (Early 2026)
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/bulmaks-files-chapter-11-ba... (Late 2025)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/an-unusually-terrible-frei... (Mid 2023)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-trucking-bloodbath-isn... (Mid 2022)
https://www.truckingdive.com/news/trucking-fleet-bankruptcy-... (Early 2021)
https://www.propertycasualty360.com/fcs/2020/01/13/another-o... (Early 2020)
Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
Each category has a very different profile for road-usage.
So, care to cite the states where the tollways paid for the road costs by 50x?
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
Indeed!
Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.
1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.
3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.
4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)
5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen
5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust
6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.
7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.
8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.
10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.
11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.
A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.
Checks out. The residential suburban streets I've lived on have been resurfaced on about that timeframe, maybe a little less, with patch-ups in between. Say, how do the houses on those streets get built without trucking? What about the food in the nearby (much closer than the nearest train line) shops get supplied?
I'm one of those people whose brain works such that that rail and nuclear power plants are how we should be solving problems because I know how good they look to a physicist and engineer, so I am right there with you. But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.
There are some externalities we can afford to subsidise, and unless you've the stomach for putting in 100x as much public money into rail for a ROI measured in half-centuries, paying for high quality roads that you also get the direct benefit of should grind your gears less than most of the other economic imbalances you could name.
Properly taxing trucks will be mostly passed onto the consumer, not reducing their compensation much, and it would significantly reduce the number of trucks on the road (a good thing). Out of equilibrium, it would cause many of them to go under and compensation would crater... so of course it would be wildly unpopular.
That’s puzzles me a loot - there are many countries which hardly have any money for social safety net yet they keep fuel and electricity prices very low as a matter of government (social) policy and poor people benefit the least because they don’t drive and use little electricity.
When they see the flow of money, the politicians first thought would be how do I capture the money? All of it? Or some percentage of it?
The countries that thought about it a little bit (China) understand this and are rapidly electricifying.
If trucks were forced to bear their share of the burden we might see a significant shift in how we transported goods, including more rail.
(Yes, I know rail doesn't work for last mile.)
Obviously, that would be a very good thing, just pointing it out!
The US moves up to 25th comparing miles of rail per million people, with 278, but is trounced by #1, Canada, with 782 miles of rail per million people.
This doesn't make any sense. If total subsidy is X and you remove it then prices should at most raise by X (in aggregate). It is at best an even trade. In reality it's worse because it creates perverse incentives.
If you want to help people then you can spend the same money by subsidizing groceries directly. You can also lower taxes for workers or 101 different things that help lower income people without promoting one way of doing transport.
Why not use trains for heavy transport?
I lived in a country where the roads between major cities were constantly swarming with hundred trucks coming and going. Even as a kid I thought that can't be efficient! It's certainly not comfortable for everyone else. Sometimes they'd be tipped over on their side. Sometimes there would be a tiny car crushed under them.
The barons certainly don't care about pollution, but don't they see the increased cost of paying each individual driver and risk of accidents per vehicle?
The government added more lanes and diverted routes just for trucks, but still no rail...
This suggests it may be the source for over a quarter of all environmental micro plastics [0]
Some reports suggest it could be even higher, this article [1] references a pew report suggesting tyres could be the source for over three quarters of the micro plastics found in the ocean.
Though it's not as if they're just driving around for fun (most of the time), but not costing these sort of externalities means the market doesn't realistically consider alternatives even if they "should" be more efficient, to "cheaper" when all the /real/ costs are added up.
[0] https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/protectin...
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/02/toxic-tyre-dust-this-sou...
Who do we think those costs will be passed on to....
And no one is going to build rails to such areas like the 500 people living in Aniak, Alaska, or similar.
Edge cases shouldn’t determine our infrastructure and hybrid models have always been the norm.
Rail is not perfect for everything; however, it is a heck of a lot better than 100+ trucks all driving to the same place that a single train could go much more efficiently.
Ships aren't perfect either, but you don't see anyone driving a truck across the pacific do you?
Replace the majority of trucks with rail and use trucks for last mile (from the rail terminal to delivery point), or truly remote deliveries (from the nearest rail yard! even if that is 500 miles away).
To be fair, there's a counterargument - namely, that people who live a long ways away from infrastructure have been forced to by the very NIMBYs who made it illegal to build more homes where the infrastructure already exists. Population density near some BART stations is scandalously low.
If they could put this much rail up 100 years ago, its a cop out to say its too difficult today with equipment able to lift the equivalent of 1000 men.
If you forced trucks to pay for the damage they do to roads rail freight would be far more competitive.
Those costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone, that's the entire problem! Externalized costs are still costs, someone (or everyone) must still pay them. But when they're externalities instead of internalized, then they're hidden (which leads to gross inefficiency) and they're imposed on people who get no benefit and no choice (which is theft). Mass pollution is literally stealing money and life from a population and inefficiently funneling some of that back to the thief/thieves. It's as if transport companies were stealing 50% of the fuel they used to fill their trucks, and people came along saying "you need to pay for all the fuel you use", and then you argued against that saying "well who do we think those costs will be passed on to...."
When the costs are built into the price, then the direct participants pay, that filters out, and everyone can see exactly what they are and are appropriately incentivized to search for solutions to reduce them, same as every other cost that goes into a good or service. The Free Market is essentially a massively distributed constraint solver, and the "invisible hand of the market" is the cumulative billions of independent actions taken by participants in response to the system constraints and what they know. To function sustainably and efficiently, there has to be a high degree of information symmetry and cost internalization, or else decisions will obviously be distorted.
If one is worried about cost burdens, the best general place is direct unencumbered monetary payment to end consumers in need. That is both very low administrative overhead, and still leaves them in a position to make the most efficient decisions for their own personal situation and fully reward producers who do a better job and reducing costs/improving quality.
> Those costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone, that's the entire problem!
I think, you're confused about "the entire problem" - it's not that "costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone" it's about the alternative approach leading to the same result.
Actually, now the costs are passed mostly to drivers, in the case of making trucking pay more, they will be passed to all consumers, a minor difference.
> If one is worried about cost burdens, the best general place is direct unencumbered monetary payment to end consumers in need.
And the cost of that subsidy will be passed to? ... Again, everyone else of course. No change in actual outcome.
I'm not saying all subsidies are bad and I hate toxic fumes as much as anyone but solving these problems requires an approach much deeper than rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.
Prioritize routes that have higher-quality roads, rather than just going the fastest from point A to point B.
Improve emissions.
Reallocate loads where possible and helpful.
So I gotta ask:
What solution would you actually propose?
Do you genuinely think that the system as it exists today is the best it could ever possibly be?
Do you think we should be removing regulations? Sure, that would mean that big companies have even more freedom to ruin our roads and wreck our health, but hey, maybe an extra 3% of small businesses might be able to become profitable!
Because I'm pretty sick of people pushing the idea that any change we make to improve things is necessarily going to backfire and we're just too stupid and naïve to see it.
That's the opposite of my position, adding regulations can work both ways, I meant it the other way around.
> Do you genuinely think that the system as it exists today is the best it could ever possibly be?
Again, the opposite of what I said. Improving the system requires systematic approach, fixing here and there without it results in a mess worse than before.
> Sure, that would mean that big companies have even more freedom to ruin our roads and wreck our health, but hey, maybe an extra 3% of small businesses might be able to become profitable!
Removing the income of "extra 3%" which is many thousands people for a rather minuscule, supposed reduction of pollution isn't worth the tradeoffs. If you can't solve the big problem don't mess with an already unstable system - fix the system first.
> Because I'm pretty sick of people pushing the idea that any change we make to improve things
We're where we are because of much emotion and many changes to improve things, to paraphrase, The road to hell is covered with many changes to improve things. This is what happens without a systematic approach to improvement.
A 9th-power law is most predictive when the road is barely able to withstand the 6T load; and the per-crossing damage is roughly linear to axle-weight when the pavement is able to withstand much higher loads than 6T per axle.
It seems like trucks just drive through the middle of every town even if they aren't going there.
This is all very nice in theory but you do realize that if US nationwide trucking is no longer able to operate profitably (and they are barely profitable as it is, see TFA for a nice illustration) that you are looking at absolute chaos in short order.
You'll have some nice and undamaged roads to look at though, but I'm not sure if that will make up for the downside.
Perhaps society would be more resilient if important parts of its infrastructure was not subsidized but costed in a sustainable way.
"Cheap" roads — the users of which do not pay the full costs (see also fossil fuel use and climate change externalities) — caused sprawling development, which itself has been called a Ponzi scheme:
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-pon...
The idea is that people would design and use things differently if they had to pay the (break-even) cost of maintaining them for the amount of damage they cause to them: perhaps things would not be built as far apart if transportation was not subsidized, perhaps there would be more rail, etc.
How many roads and bridges are towards the end of their design life but are not being replaced because there is no money? Some communities gave up on pavement and went to gravel because of costs:
* https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34469490
* https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1109605_americas-infra...
* https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/7/26/the-un-pav...
The coasts would be fine, but getting stuff in and out of interior states would instantly hyperinflate.
The roads are for the people
Companies also use roads and cause more damage than the people
Companies use roads to transport goods to people
People buy goods
People subsidize roads
Making trucking companies pay for road upkeep just means your costs get a little more direct I guess?
So transportation costs go up by about the same amount, and then, what, the government voluntarily lowers taxes?
I guess it would have the benefit of making other forms of transit like rail more economical
I think this isn't strictly true, and heavy vehicles in the US have to pay a "Heavy Highway Vehicle Use Tax." Whether that's commensurate to the damage they do, I don't know.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
While that won't help most current truckers, the shift to electrical trucks is going to create some opportunities for the companies that buy them to undercut diesel trucks on price. Electrical trucks are still scarce and expensive and infrastructure is also lacking (in the US at least, EU/China is a different story). But of course with diesel prices spiking this high, it only exaggerates the benefits. And it looks like price uncertainty in general is could be here to stay with e.g. Russia probably needing many years to rebuild their oil infrastructure and the middle east also needing a lot of time if/when some sense of normality is restored there.
There are likely to be a lot more EV trucks on the market over the next years. China is already heading for 40+% of trucks sold (of all types, including heavy trucks) to be electric. They are way past the testing and experimenting phase there.
Transitioning the whole truck fleet in the US will take many years of course. But with Tesla bringing their factory online, other truck companies are likely to also increase production. This could quickly go from thousands of trucks sold per year in the US to tens of thousands. Tesla alone has the ambition to do 50K semis per year. We'll see if they manage. But it's going to disrupt truckers that are highly dependent on diesel prices when whole fleets start becoming immune to diesel price uncertainty.
Roads are subsided by people - what else would they be subsidised by, aliens?
All that said, many crop subsidies are horribly mismanaged and selectively targeted for political reasons.
Arn't there hundreds of thousands of owner-operators? I don't doubt high costs drive some people out of business, but this seems insignificant to report on. An engine failure could bankrupt a poorly run operator too. What are the typical numbers?