Alex Botta is one of the reasons why the Comment sections on Price Tags are consistently worth reading: thoughtful, researched and original. (And he’s not the only one.)
Here’s his latest – a comment on Counterintuition: Automation, cars and jobs – that’s worth reprinting as a separate post:
I haven’t read a cogent argument yet that provides sufficient evidence that AVs will change cities and shift transportation paradigms radically. Conjecture is not bankable when it comes to long-range urban planning.
Now it’s trucks. I wonder how many researchers actually talked to truckers, or better yet, ridden with them through varying driving conditions? A long-distance trucker cousin once regaled several of us for hours about his lifetime of experience. On one day he would deliver freight to warehouses in LA, the next to Dallas, the next Toronto.
A few things stand out as very difficult to manage with this guessing game on automated / autonomous trucks. First is shifting cargo. Transporting liquids by truck (fuel, milk, water …) is very tricky on curves at speed and takes special skill to manage. Beef is another, because carcasses are hung on hooks and swing in the opposite direction to the line of travel on a curve. When you here a trucker talking about swingin’ beef, this is what s/he is referring to.
Another element not on the AV radar for trucks is wind, specifically crosswind. The side of a long trailer presents a massive “sail” for the wind to play with. Large trailers with light loads (e.g. potato chips) or empty trailers are especially susceptible to being blown over.
Still another big concern is theft of freight. Most long-distance truckers live in their rigs while on the road, which can actually be very well appointed with audio visual equipment, comfy beds, lots of storage and so forth. The driver often stays with the truck at or near their destination if they arrive after hours and cannot dock and unload until the next day. Thieves often work in organized gangs and target high-value loads, such as frozen prepackaged meat or electronics, and are usually deterred by the presence of the driver. Sometimes not! Now and again a truck driver can be held at gunpoint while the most expensive items are off-loaded, or the truck is stolen outright leaving the driver in a god forsaken industrial warehouse complex in the middle of the night.
There is just no way all of the above situations could be preprogrammed into an autonomous truck. I believe electric vehicles will have a far greater impact on cities and demand for oil sooner, and there is a lot of data and media information out there to back that up.
Back to trucking, I urged my cousin to write a short book on his 40 years of trucking all over the continent. I felt his stories were fascinating enough to foster good sales, especially in places where country music is played night and day and where big Ram pickup trucks driven by insecure little men dominate the streets.
Very interesting and bought up many issues that I have not thought of. That being said, I have always thought that autonomous trucks would require a human on board, except for industrial applications, such as mining.
These are key observations and they back up what is being said by the Oxford University group that leads the world in predicting the automation and computerization of labour. My son works with that group and he says people usually assume that computers or robots will replace whole jobs, but the reality is much more subtle.
Parts of jobs, not whole jobs, go first. Long before on-road drivers disappear, off-road drivers disappear because off-road is more predictable. Fork lift trucks that do repetitive work have become more and more automated, but fork lift trucks doing complex tasks have not. And then controls develop to do more complex tasks automatically and then more fork lifts become unmanned. The same with farm and mining vehicles.
In the trucking world it will likely be the same. Long haul, simple driving will likely be automated long before short haul, complex environment driving. But over time the economics of eliminating labour will push more and more parts of jobs, and then more and more jobs, into full automation.
I’m not in trucking. I’m and architect and over 25 years I’ve seen the complex tasks of my job become more and more automated and computerized. We do more work with 2 people now than we did with 7 in 1995. Not one single job has been completely computerized, but so many pieces of all our jobs have been computerized that we need far fewer people to do them. Trucking will be the same.
An excellent commentary. It will be fascinating to see how moving freight across the land will evolve.
“There is just no way all of the above situations could be preprogrammed into an autonomous truck.” This misses the point of why AVs are being considered seriously at all. You wouldn’t preprogram those situations. AI learns. Sort of like humans do but ultimately faster and better.
A good point, Ron. I wonder how long the machine learning evolution will take with trucks? I would think that rail would be first because tracks encompass all route possibilities and the freight and vehicles are heavier and less susceptible to wind. Roads are vast by comparison.
But the most interesting part to me is the planned move into EVs, both in trucks and cars (potentially grid-connected on the highways i.e. trucks with trolleys). That will arguably be more revolutionary to Western Canada considering the current desperation of Alberta to push through a pipeline into BC based on the premise that transportation energy will forever be based on refined oil products being burned in internal combustion engines.
In this respect, the world may pass Alberta by when EVs are eventually imported to Canada in ever increasing numbers via he Port of Vancouver and shipped eastwards, and take away the market for bitumen everywhere.
Perhaps Alberta will need to do an environmental review of EVs being shipped east ?
Oil by rail is plan B, with a 50% indigenous ownership structure https://biv.com/article/2017/12/multibillion-dollar-oil-rail-plan-aims-alaska
Do not overestimate the EV pickup pace as there are no economic benefits until price is at par.
The entire food chain relies on oil, for example. Where are the inexpensive e-combines, e-tractors, e-trucks or e-ships that form the backbone of the food chain for billions and billions of people ? Ditto surviving in Canada in the winter. A CO2 tax on gas burners in rural AB, northern BC or SK or MB is a mere tax grab.
Happy to pay more for cleaner fuel or renewable energy based EV but can the struggling senior, the single mother, the handicapped or the rural African farmer ?
Cheap energy is THE key to progress. Mess with it and starvation on a grand scale and increased poverty is the result.
Price of energy matters a lot.
As a society we have to ask: if we spend a billion or 20billion, where is it best applied? Where is this analyzed, besides at http://www.lomborg.com ?