Technology Can’t Come Too Soon to Trucking

One of the more controversial claims in the book Superfreakonomics was that, according to the statistics, if you get drunk at a party it’s actually safer for you to drive home drunk than to walk home drunk. Your chances of being killed are about eight times greater for every mile of walking-while-intoxicated, as opposed to driving-while-intoxicated. The catch, of course, is that although drunk driving may be safer for you personally, it is highly dangerous to other people, which is all the reason we need to make drunk driving illegal.

We could make a very similar argument for regulating how large tractor trailer trucks are operated, because when a driver gets careless or loses control of one of these big rigs, it poses far less danger to the driver than to innocent bystanders in the truck’s path.

Sometime today, truck driver Kevin Roper is expected to make his first appearance in a New Jersey court after plowing his Walmart truck into a limo bus, killing one of its passengers and injuring four others, including the comedian and actor Tracy Morgan. Roper is being charged with one count of death by auto and four counts of assault by auto, under the New Jersey law which provides that these charges are called for if a driver knowingly operates a vehicle after being awake for more than 24 hours. (And Walmart did the honorable thing, issuing a statement that if it’s shown their truck was at fault in the accident, they’ll take full responsibility.)

The authorities haven’t yet specified how they know Roper went so long without sleep, but all big trucks are required to maintain detailed driving logs that would reveal how many hours a driver has been operating a vehicle, and there is a regulatory push to require the installation of electronic logging devices – presumably to avoid sloppy record-keeping or manual fudging of the numbers.

Just last year new safety rules reduced the maximum number of hours drivers are allowed to operate their vehicles to 70 (down from 82), and even though 70 hours is still ten hours a day, seven days a week, drivers complained vociferously. The American Trucking Associations lambasted the new requirements as being harmful to the industry’s productivity, which they undoubtedly are.

But leave this controversy behind for a minute and take just a few steps into the future with me, to visualize the take-charge role that information technology will soon play in the trucking industry. Within a very few years now – certainly within our lifetimes – we will see completely safe and driverless cars operating on our streets and highways. This means we will soon have fleets of “ownerless cars,” too – that is, robotically operated cars that you can literally summon to your location with an app on your smartphone. So at least some cars will be available “in the cloud,” to be paid for on a per-usage basis. You’ve heard of “software as a service?” Well think of this as “driving as a service.”

But of course, along with driverless passenger vehicles we can expect driverless taxis, driverless pizza-delivery vehicles, driverless utility vans, and of course, driverless long-haul trucks. And robotic trucking will dramatically improve the productivity of the long-haul shipping industry, although sadly it will also push yet another whole class of perfectly innocent skilled laborers into unemployment.

This is, however, an inevitable and undeniable future, because Moore’s Law defers to no man. One of the upsides is that computer-operated trucks will be far less dangerous to others. Robotic drivers will always live within the rules, drive within the speed limit, and operate within safe parameters. And they will do this not just 70 hours a week, but 168 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, with no paid holidays, no overtime, no amphetamines, and no sleeper cab in the rear.

Before you object, let’s all agree that it won’t be perfect. There will definitely be hiccups and problems along the way to this future. But one of the benefits of robotic trucking will be that data will be ubiquitously available to do an immediate post mortem whenever anything goes wrong, without having to worry about distorted memories, self-serving stories, or lack of eye witnesses.

Unfortunately for Tracy Morgan and the other victims in this most recent, high-profile accident, this technological future just hasn’t come soon enough.