> For all the clients that have asked me about the political and economic problems associated with the rise of autonomous vehicles and more unemployed truckers, I keep telling them they’ve got it backwards: the US has had a trucker shortage for the last few years, and it’s projected to get worse.
In addition to the need to point out that "shortage" just means "I don't want to pay market rate", a shortage of truck drivers does not negate the concern of automation causing mass unemployment of truckers.
The concern is that the 450,000 truckers will lose their jobs. "We want to have 500,000 truckers who would lose their jobs" doesn't addresses that issue.
To be clear, I'm still very much in favor of automation, but people aren't "getting it backwards" here. These are two different problems.
Yes, on the contrary, if the labor market wasn't tight, there would be little investment in automated trucks in the first place.
But if we were really serious about the driver shortage and freight bottleneck issues, we would simply build more rail. We've had (basically) driverless trucks before the driverful kind!
The fact that investors flock to AI hail maries and not tried-and-proven infrastructure demonstrates the limitation of the demand on one hand, and asset bubble in tech on the other.
The cost of roads and their maintenance is externalized to the taxpayer, whereas rail requires more fully internalizing the infrastructure costs. Road damage scales with something like axle weight to the 4th(!!) power: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
California seems uniquely incapable of building anything, so of course a freeway there has stalled.
Elsewhere the US continues build tons and tons of roads. According to the Bureau of Transport Statistics the US highway system went from 4,050,717 miles in 2009 to 4,171,125 miles in 2019. This is a delta 120,408 miles, or an increase of 2.9%.
The 710 might be an interesting example, but it's not exactly indicative of a trend.
It is significantly simpler to build a local road on the land owned by people who want that road, than it is to eminent domain your way across the country, fighting hostile property owners you’re confiscating, NIMBYists, environmental activists etc.
That’s a good theory, until you investigate the fate of light rail in most American cities. By your theory light rail should be easy to build; it’s built by local authorities for local consumption. Yet, most of these projects fail to a combination of local incompetence and NIMBY action.
According to the Bureau of Transport Statistics the US highway system went from 4,050,717 miles in 2009 to 4,171,125 miles in 2019. This is a delta 120,408 miles, or an increase of 2.9%. This is system miles, not even lane miles, so it will not include highway expansion.
Actually correlating this down to individual routes in an exhausting endeavor, given all the places these could be recorded. But I found that we did designate 7 new highways in the past 10 years, including I-14, I-11, I-87, I-41, I-42, I-2, and I-22.
Expansion doesn't take land if the state already had reserved that land for itself. Many highways have huge rights of way beside them because the state had grand plans for expansion when they were built in the 50s-70s.
Which is kind of like an accounting trick. The state already has the land, run a rail line through it instead of expanding it, etc.
But ultimately the expansion of the highways has downstream effects - state will buy new land, build new roads, etc. as density flows out. If you have a two lane highway going into a city and it's congested, and then you expand it, more people move out of the city or more further away - obviously someone is building new roads or expanding existing ones as that occurs.
No, it's because rail doesn't get the massive subsidies that roads do. Roads are artificially cheap to use, especially for trucking that does the majority of the damage and pay minimal road fees, while rail has to pay for itself. It is very hard for rail, passenger or freight, to compete with the largess of federal tax dollars for road usage. If road fees were matched to the actual cost of road maintenance, like they are with rail, a lot of freight would shift over to barge and train overnight.
Simply put, railways are much more efficient between two fixed points than roads. They require much less fuel per ton, and they require much less labor, land, and capital equipment per person mile or ton mile. If the costs were properly priced in, consumers of various different types would strongly prefer rail for transit between fixed points (e.g. city to city). But currently the inefficiency of road usage is paid for by the federal government.
The density argument is massively overstated. Ohio has roughly the same density as France 282/mi^2 vs. 269/mi^2, and it's not even our most dense state. The fact that states like Ohio don't have anywhere close to the rail network that France has is a consequence of political decisions, not economics or the built environment.
We are talking about freight rail here. Ohio already has more intrastate freight volume than France, and that’s only a small fraction of the remainder of inbound, outbound, or freight traffic passing through. It is France that would need to seriously shape up if it is to keep up with Ohio. Alas, it will not do so, because rail freight volumes in France have fallen by almost half over last 20 years, as France is moving away from rail to road freight.
Don’t project differences between passenger rail systems to freight rail. It is by all means clear that US has the best freight rail system in the world.
This is completely irrelevant to the point I was making: arguments about how America "isn't dense enough" for rail is ignoring the fact that America actually is quite dense ... where Americans actually live. Our tenth densest state is denser than a country famous for its usage of high speed rail for passenger transit. Any difference in infrastructure is down to political choices, not density.
If the Jones act was repealed, wouldn't everyone just ditch the American ship registration and choose a country with lower taxes, less safety standards, and lower crew wages?
I first learned about the Jones act while reading about cruise ship port destinations (since most cruise ships have flags of convenience, a notable exception being the cruise ship based out of Hawaii for Hawaiian ports).
The big restriction is using only American built ships (which we don't make anymore). You can keep the American flagged/crewed restriction and it would still significantly change the dynamics of shipping.
The big shipping companies are still European but their ships are built in Asia and crewed with whoever is cheapest.
Its a relentlessly efficient industry and I don't think a lot of Westerners are willing to spend an entire year on a cargo ship. The Jones act is actually an admission that the US cannot compete.
The Jones act restricts ship traffic between US ports solely to US-flagged vessels dramatically reducing competition and increasing costs, and you move freight by ship across a continent with rivers and canals
Is anyone really going to move coal by barge via the Mississippi on a foreign flagged vessel if the Jones act didn’t exist? And if so, how could that be cheaper unless they were cutting scary amounts of corners no sane person would want them to cut?
I think the issue is more that you can’t ship between Florida and New York either with a foreign ship.
This prevents someone from say dropping off all their goods in Miami, then letting a British liner pick them up later and drop half off in NYC, and the other half in London.
Instead you have to either ship it yourself to NYC and Miami, or you have to send it by train to NYC from Miami.
> Yes, on the contrary, if the labor market wasn't tight, there would be little investment in automated trucks in the first place.
If automated trucks result in a lower capital and operational cost on behalf of the business, even with an ample supply of qualified truckers, why wouldn't that necessitate investment in that space?
They rather take the risk of unproven tech if it means they need to invest less, than go with the more expensive but proven option.
Keeping in mind the relationship between liquidity and risk, this shows they don't need new capacity too soon/desperately.
Also keep in mind things like making delivery cheaper in city than suburbans. There's lots of small cheap (in terms of investment, if not revenue hit) ways to make things more efficient. In that case, the fact that they rather make shipping rates artificially flat for appearance's sake says something about the long-term large-scale laxity of the economy, these recent specific bottlenecks not withstanding.
> If automated trucks result in a lower capital and operational cost on behalf of the business, even with an ample supply of qualified truckers, why wouldn't that necessitate investment in that space?
No. The premium on known legal liability and working tech would outweigh a certain amount of opex (and capex can just be amortized into opex). And the research would need to pay itself off at several multiples. If the truckers were making minimum wage, it's unlikely that the amount you could charge would justify the investment ever. If they were all making $500/hr it would justify a huge research project.
Being able to drive continuously is worth it in many cases even if it didn't directly save money on driver costs. 1/2 the time spent in transit is half the capital costs for a given level of goods moved.
No, owning only half the number of tractor trailers is half the cost of capital (bond interest rate or loans or so on) is a cost savings. Plus a single driver can't go 12 hours a day any day of the week, let alone continuously.
Isn't that more of a lower bound? You're assuming the drivers can each drive 12 hours at a time, and they wouldn't ask for any increased pay for the worse conditions (having to be continuously on the move, sleeping on the move).
Continuously on the move/sleeping in the move is a benefit for truckers. It's not a cost. The issue is, if we are already labor constrained, what is 2x the new going rate for drivers with a sudden doubling in demand.
That said, the benefits also assume that for some reason the only time the goods are idle is on a truck, which makes no sense in many cases.
Sure, but that is icing on the cake. The fact of the matter is we are demand-constrained, so a new tech supply bonanza is a very risky thing. It is essential the holy grail self-driving trucks can compete on cost before/while more demand from its elasticity is "unlocked".
Because the odds of automated trucks costing less from a capital perspective are near zero, and operational costs are highly correlated with labor costs - if truckers are cheap, no one is likely to bother with maintaining and keeping likely fussy self driving vehicles operating
That is a relatively big if. It is possible that R&D and the cost of the hardware needed for autonomous driving amortize to a bigger value than just paying some person minimum wage to drive the truck.
We are a very, very long way away from the point where shipping by rail gets hard due to last mile problems. Currently we're shipping tons of stuff cross country in trucks.
Think its the opposite, appears its the first mile problem. Its cheaper to just load it onto a truck at the source and drive it across country rather than loading on a truck, drive it to the rail and reload it and then unload it back onto a truck and drive it the last mile.
That inconvenience seems like it could be resolved with containerization, only at a smaller scale than the current 40-foot containers. Small standardized containers could be rapidly transferred between truck and train.
20 foot (nominal) containers are standardized and common. On rail, they usually put two on one car; I'm not sure if that's done with the same type car that takes a aingle 40 ft, or if they're different cars.
That unfortunately is under loading the car by quite a bit. Semi truck trailers are limited to 80,000lbs, including the trailer itself. Rail cars are usually rated for much more, the Union Pacific will accept up to 268,000 lbs including the car itself. Loading two tractor containers on a rail car is leaving ~100,000 lbs of cargo capacity on the table, so to speak.
You can also double stack on the well cars (subject to height limits of the route); if you really want to hit the car weight limit, four 20foot containers at road limit should be close to the rail limit, depending on how much trailers and well cars weigh.
Retail last mile by rail is impractical, but you can have industrial last mile by rail. If you're in the Bay Area, and ride CalTrain, you can see all sorts of junctions where they used to do last mile by rail to some facilities. Of course, those rails are hard to use now, what with the fences over them, but it's possible to make this work for industry (generally by locating industrial facilities where rail access is easier).
Not really, in many places we actually still have the (disused and unmaintained) rail for last mile industrial delivery, which used to be the norm. Maybe at one point it would have required land use expansion, but we already paid that cost in the previous century.
Overall rail is generally going to be much, much more land efficient than roads. Yes, rail has a limited turning radius that must be accounted for[0], but rail can also deliver a lot more cargo than a road can for less maintenance. The Union Pacific indicates that the maximum weight for a shipment is 268,000 lbs per car. Meanwhile a semi-truck cannot exceed 80,000 lbs pretty much anywhere. A single freight train can pretty easily deliver a couple thousand tons of cargo, something that would take a hundred semi-trucks to deliver. This will almost certainly result in extra lanes and parking facilities for semi-trucks, increasing land use.
And then there's the fact that semi-trucks are really, really hard on roads. They do the overwhelming majority of the damage to them, due to their weight. From an infrastructure cost perspective, the best thing you could do is try and shift as much industrial shipments off of roads and onto railways. Obviously last mile will always be an issue, chances are your local target will be stocked via truck, but we could at least connect factories and ports via rail.
Factories and ports with particularly heavy goods, it might make sense. On the land usage of highways yes, they use land but it's a sunk cost - every building already has (and needs) road connectivity, rail would be an addition in 99.9% of cases.
> investors flock to AI hail maries and not tried-and-proven infrastructure demonstrates the limitation of the demand on one hand, and asset bubble in tech on the other.
Not at all.
VC investors flock to Hail Marys because industry disruption makes outsized returns (which is their investment thesis).
Investors who want stable, predictable, long term returns (eg retirement funds) love infrastructure projects.
Investors who want stable, predictable, long term returns (eg retirement funds) love diversified protfolios. FTFY.
Nobody is doing infra at scale in the private sector. Part of the reason I is lied -- it is risky not because it won't work, but simply because of the shear amount of upfront cost and duration of construction up front.
Of course, safe investor flocking to indexes of existing things does not missing big infra investment make.
Could we reframe this in a way that takes both supply and demand sides into consideration?
Something like: There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.
I would add that if manufacturing moves back to the US in any meaningful way, prices across the board will go up and consumption will go down. A lot of those thin margins will get crushed anyway, especially because - as you pointed out, much of the demand is elastic.
Shipping things across the ocean is externalizing carbon impacts of shipping emissions. It shouldn't be nearly as cheap as it is.
Also, overseas manufacturing amounts to environmental law arbitrage, enabled by falsely cheap shipping costs, so you can pollute as much as you want in Indonesia or China or India or whatever and then ship it to environmentally-restricted US.
And we're enriching our enemies (China) and technologically and infrastructurally enabling them. All things that also aren't priced into the "cheap goods".
Free trade arguments also fail when China does massive government investment to block access to emergent manufacturing markets by unsubsidized countries. And they manipulate their currency.
America should be onboard with righting the actual carbon emissions cost of goods shipment, but come on, the rich are getting rich off of that in America and don't give two shits about the middle class or future prosperity of the USA.
After all, they're all buying fortress estates in New Zealand for the forthcoming collapse that they themselves are willfully enabling.
Maybe that's a a good thing? Per https://phenomenalworld.org/interviews/trade-wars-are-class-... the rest of the world is chucking all sorts of junk at once --- per the high elasticity of the demand we barely want it but "oh fine" we'll take another shift if they are just that cheap.
If we're the dollar exporter, we should be able to call the shots in other ways. Dollars for democracy (hah), dollars for rail not cars, etc. etc. It's a massive soft power and develop-for-greater-good opportunity, but we choose to get inundated with cheap crap instead.
Thank you. The one sided view we typically see on this, while in m supporting my views on paying people what they are worth, often glosses over that this isn't evil fat cat monopolists with monocles trying to keep the man down in all these cases.
Entire business models or industries may no longer be viable without major pricing changes throughout the solid k supply chain, which will ultimately give the consumer sticker shock.
It's a hot mess. Doesn't mean drivers shouldn't get paid more, but also doesn't mean it's pure selfish capitalism on behalf of those hiring them.
Truck drives tend to be truck owners doing independent jobs. And when the switch from wages to this happened, they were in fact massively taken advantage off. There was a lot of fraud or at least lying involved. A lot of one sided contracts putting all disadvantages on drivers. And then working drivers to exhaustion just pay debts.
It is not that customer would not buy product for 10 cents more. It is that, companies that took advantage of drivers had competitive advantage and grew to own market.
Yep. Without regulations that restrict people from taking new jobs, any labour 'shortage' can be solved by offering better conditions and/or higher pay. Take it to a hypothetical extreme: if truckers were offered $500k/yr and had to work 20 hours a week there would be no shortage.
There would be an instant shortage of schools to train and credential the new drivers. Then there would be a backlog at DMVs to issue licenses. And on and on.
> And according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, state governments issue more than 450,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year. A large fraction of those drivers enter the long-haul trucking industry.
> "It's just simple math," Spencer says. "If every year there are an excess of over 400,000 brand-new drivers created, how could there possibly be a shortage?"
> In a 2019 study published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists Stephen V. Burks and Kristen Monaco investigated claims by industry leaders that the trucking labor market was somehow "broken" enough to create a decades-long shortage. Standard economics says if you don't have enough workers, you raise wages and within a reasonable amount of time, presto, no more shortage. Is trucking somehow different? A thorough investigation led them to conclude that the trucking labor market is not different. It is not broken. Yes, they say, the trucking labor market is "tight" — meaning that companies are competing to fill open jobs — but it functions in the same way as any other labor market.
I'm not sure but there might be a correlation to the fact that millions of babies are born every year but we somehow aren't seeing population growth to match...
Where there's an entrance there's also an exit.
If there's 400,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year then how many existing commercial driver's licenses expire / die / move to a different job / whatever?
The article I linked to talked about retention being the major issue in the trucking labour market - Which only re-enforces the grandparent's (yyy888sss) point - the issue is with the pay-to-work match, not some pipeline issue. In fact, the pipeline is probably so good that it prevents the industry from needing to solve the retention issue. If there are always fresh truckers to burn out, there's no need to pay better.
> If there's 400,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year then how many existing commercial driver's licenses expire / die / move to a different job / whatever?
I don't know how the licenses work in US but here in Finland a lot of people have truck drivers licenses and the permits to do it commercially (2 different things here) but do not actually work in trucking in the traditional sense.
For example got a friend who has those as he works construction as a crane operator. He needs the licenses/permits to be able to move his crane which is classified as a truck when driving on the roads to move it from site to site. Another one works in selling earth/dirt. He needs the licenses to drive his own truck to move stuff around the quarry (required as it is not fenced and gated off from public roads). Also loads his loader on the truck to move it between the sites he owns as needed.
Also a lot of people go into the field for a year or two and quit as it is hard work with long/bad hours and thus miss out on family life etc.
It could also be solved by government resorting to issue large numbers of an easy to get, "lorry driver" temporary visa for example of 1 year duration.
I've never heard the phrase "lorry driver" in a context where I had to think about what it meant. I think I've been picturing taxi drivers and not delivery drivers.
I would expect a significant number of the immigrant drivers in this scenario would live extremely modestly, like sleeping in their cabs all the time. And they would send as much money back to their families in their home country, this behavior is seen in other such scenarios with imported labor.
It's tough on the worker, but good for their family and home country. It's cheap and compliant labor for the employer. But for the host country as a whole is it good? All that money being sent out of the country instead of spent locally can't be good for the host country vs a native worker.
> Not to mention that there is an upper limit on supply of labor in almost all markets.
You don't think the hundreds of thousands or millions of workers that work at jobs like an Amazon warehouse and make 15/hour would switch to being truck drivers for 500k/year? My job is easy but shit, I would seriously contemplate becoming a truck driver for a that much.
It's supply and demand. Supply is low, increase pay and supply increases.
Do you know how to drive a truck? I don't. It takes time to learn. Increasing wages for truck drivers doesn't make it faster to learn how to drive a truck.
> It's supply and demand. Supply is low, increase pay and supply increases.
And demand decreases. But sometimes demand _can't_ decrease, and that's another source of shortages.
If there's not enough food to go around you can't just raise prices to solve the problem (well, you can, but it's not really an acceptable solution).
Point being, shortages are a real thing.
See also: HN's favorite topic, housing in the Bay Area.
There are a lot of people with a truck driving license that work in other fields. With good incentives you could get them to become tricky drivers again.
> Supply is low, increase pay and supply increases.
“Supply” is the function mapping price to quantity supplied. With normal shape of a supply curve of a good or seevice in an idealized Econ 101 economy with no sharp supply constraints but the usual increasing marginal costs, increasing price increases quantity supplied.
Yup, I work in logistics. Driver wages have been stagnant at best, dropping at worst for many many years. Outside specialized drivers, it's a horrible career choice.
> Oppelaar's first trucking job, in 1977, paid $5 an hour — or $21.50 an hour in 2018 dollars, he said. That was soon bumped up to $30 an hour in today's dollars.
> But now, as a line-haul driver for XPO Logistics, one of the world's largest logistics companies, Oppelaar earns about just under $25 an hour, he told Business Insider.
Not discounting the possibility wages have declined. However, just comparing hourly rate in trucking is over-simplifying. Does the company cover any expenses? Does the driver own the cab? Is there a federal mandate on rest hours per day/week/month? And it is always misleading to compare wages "in today's dollars" as if every item and wage and asset inflates perfectly evenly.
At some level of detail you're right of course but I feel completely safe ignoring all that when we're talking about someone being paid $25/hr. It's objectively low. Is the employer paying the drivers' rent?
Does this particular guy have a clean driving record? Is he reliable? Here's a pretty well-known company stating they pay about $50k annually to 1st year drivers, with the potential for more than double that down the road. Walmart drivers average $87,500 annually. Of course, these companies won't even talk to you if you have a DUI or accidents, and then sure, your earning is going to be much lower.
What really changed in those 40 years? He is still doing the same job, with the same effectiveness. It's not really unexpected that the $/hr would remain the same. Honestly I am more surprised that it correlates that well to inflation.
This gives me the sads. I grew up around truck drivers. Back in the 80s, it was considered a good, middle-class job. I knew plenty of families that were supported by truckers.
Trucking is an industry that while it does have good jobs for people, it is just a pure cost for literally everybody. Everybody except the truckers themselves would benefit from lower trucking cost.
There are certain areas companies strategically benefit from spending in, usually capital expenditures or payroll, and certain costs companies don’t (paying suppliers, shipping, taxes, interest). The costs companies want to pay tend to be oriented around improving the product set for the future, like R&D, or improving profitability, like marketing or sales.
> Trucking is an industry that while it does have good jobs for people, it is just a pure cost for literally everybody. Everybody except the truckers themselves would benefit from lower trucking cost.
Right, this is exactly the neoliberal argument for importing and outsourcing jobs.
A single truck degrades roads thousand times more than a personal vehicle, yet they don't pay the equivalent on taxes because these costs need to be externalized in order to ensure that trucking remains redituable because of how fundamentally and structurally important it is for modern nations
Generally the best offset is just to reduce the amount of truckers needed for last mile delivery and just use railways for most of the travel as trucking again, relies on a high degree of externalities, be them social, economic or environmental to remain revenue positive
Again, trucking will forever exist, because it is important on a fundamental level, but ideally you would use railways as much as possible for logistics transport etc
I also wonder about the road damage issue. I wonder if when truck drivers are controlling fleets of vehicles that follow along, whether the weight can be distributed much better like a train and would therefore not damage the road as much because the unit pressure intensity would be lower.
It's not nostalgia. It's an observation that the middle class is shrinking. There used to be lots of jobs that supported families that are now subsistence labour. "Well, you shoulda been a programmer" is not a satisfactory solution to the problem.
Doesn't that graph non-critically equate cost of living increases with monetary inflation? I other words, it doesn't take into account the fact that many assets (such as housing) have increased in price much more than inflation would suggest, nor does it takes into account changes in basic necessities (one landline vs 3+ mobile internet subscriptions, one new POTS phone every 10 years vs 3+ new cell phones every other year).
Pretty clear that we won't eliminate 500,000 trucking jobs any time soon. What we can do is eliminate the drivers jobs who run long distances. Running up and down I-80 or I-75 is a much simpler problem than negotiating the crowded streets of New York City or Chicago. Someone is still going to have to take the truck from the freeway stop into the city, make the delivery and pickup the next load.
Short term one very promising source of new drivers is parolees. If you've got a felony on your record it's still hard to get a good paying job. There are a couple of charities who train parolees to drive trucks. They've had good success but are limited by funding.
I didn't link any sources, but what I was seeing was ~500k long-haul truck drivers, >2MM heavy/semi truck drivers[0], and >3MM total truck drivers[1].
I think it will be some time before any significant portion of even the long-haul jobs go away, but will be a lot of jobs when they do start to vanish.
But there is no rise of autonomous vehicles. Vehicles equipped with driver-assist features still require drivers. Suggesting that automated lane-keeping and traffic-light detection etc. is putting drivers out of business is like suggesting that autocomplete is putting writers out of business.
> Suggesting that automated lane-keeping and traffic-light detection etc. is putting drivers out of business is like suggesting that autocomplete is putting writers out of business.
Autocomplete paired with autogrammar and sentence prediction.
Say, have you noticed how a lot of "news" sites these days have a lot of articles that seem like they're generated by AI? Have you also noticed how most of the media feels empty and that investigative journalists are vanishing and often even being injured or killed?
> Say, have you noticed how a lot of "news" sites these days have a lot of articles that seem like they're generated by AI? Have you also noticed how most of the media feels empty and that investigative journalists are vanishing and often even being injured or killed?
Literally no to all of these. Not sure where you're looking.
He's right though, there are lots of articles being written by bots even in print these days, not being able to tell the difference between a somewhat bad writer and a bot is what makes them viable. And the tech just keeps getting better every day.
Motor vehicles have always been highly regulated though, they'll probably need drivers onboard at all times whether they are driving or not, for safety. Kind of like train drivers (though that's a much more controlled environment) or aviation (again a much more controlled environment).
The massive investments in autonomous vehicles are maybe a causal factor in the trucker shortage: fewer people want to invest in getting the license if they attach any credence to the widespread claims that the job might not exist in 5 years.
With the rise of autonomous trucking will also come a return to highway robbery. Seems to me the job of trucking will turn to the job of security. There will evolve long term fluctuations in demand as robbery and security vie for dominance.
A truck driven by a person feels very different than a robot.
Not sure that putting people on security quite fixes that, though, as they'd need to be properly kitted up to engage with raiders. That probably looks even worse, though. It's the story of a bunch of plucky underdogs liberating a load of produce from a robotic truck guarded by heavily-armed thugs.
How feasible is it to unload and reload a truck in time, if police can be dispatched almost immediately? You can't take the entire trailer in an era of tiny and cheap gps trackers.
> "shortage" just means "I don't want to pay market rate"
I've read this repeatedly, and it makes sense at face value, but at some point don't some activities just have to be dropped, since there is a finite amount of labor to go around?
edit: upon further thought, there is probably a pool of labor available currently on unemployment benefits that could be activated with sufficiently high wages, but even that is not infinite.
With sufficiently high wages you can get people to change jobs to become truckers.
Problem here is that truckers are not working in vacuum, their wages come from the transport of goods. If the goods have low margins, wages of truckers cannot increase by much.
THe idea that Autonomous trucks could put all of the Truckers in the US out of business overnight is fantasy... but not an insane one, by economics standards. There is significant technological promise - We already have trucks that can line-follow for hundreds of miles without crashing. This represents an amazing amount of progress compared to the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, where the farthest car made it 11KM[1]. We could see just as much progress in the next five years as in the last 15, or we could see none at all - And how much progress we've made is debatable too, because some estimates say 1 crash/1,000 miles, and others 1/1,000,000.
The promise of this technology being on the horizon has led to pressure from the trucking companies to keep their costs down, lest they be replaced. The question in logistics providers minds is not if, but when, autonomous driving will replace human drivers for a significant number of miles driven. This has led to a depression effect where new drivers are not competing, because they're being offered lower wages and they see the writing on the wall too.
There are also several massive propaganda thumbs on the scale, including Government and tech companies, pretending that these things are closer than they are. Nobody is making rational decisions here; The market is truly insane. The workers are bearing the cost, and are choosing to take their labor elsewhere.
Economics is always an equilibrium, but often one still experiencing shocks. The market can and will adjust wages back up - If self-driving does not pan out. But that threat is acting as a buffer to suppress correction from the shocks that the system has experienced.
> The promise of this technology being on the horizon has led to pressure from the trucking companies to keep their costs down, lest they be replaced.
I have a strong suspicion that the pressure from another company willing to haul for a nickel a mile less is 100x a stronger pressure on costs than the future promise of a not-sure-when self-driving technology.
> In addition to the need to point out that "shortage" just means "I don't want to pay market rate"
I'm not very familiar with the trucking industry and I wont question your assertion that the shortage is (at least in part) caused by below-market-rate wages, but I think it's more complex than that.
We're in our second recession in less than two decades. During that time, demand for trucking has skyrocketed. And all the while rising gas prices and impending automation loom over the industry.
As I understand, many truck drivers own their trucks and those don't come cheap. I suspect there are few willing to make that investment considering all the things I just said. I suspect wages are low because the industry is taking advantage of those who already made the investment.
In addition to the need to point out that "shortage" just means "I don't want to pay market rate", a shortage of truck drivers does not negate the concern of automation causing mass unemployment of truckers.
The concern is that the 450,000 truckers will lose their jobs. "We want to have 500,000 truckers who would lose their jobs" doesn't addresses that issue.
To be clear, I'm still very much in favor of automation, but people aren't "getting it backwards" here. These are two different problems.