[wolfspider]

This venture kind of scared me to be honest. Having known a few truck drivers and having a good friend who was permanently disabled by a tractor trailer I know this industry needs to be made safer. I'm not convinced total automation is the solution as well but maybe somewhere in-between is good enough to improve things. Just doing this for pure profit is irresponsible. There is also the issue of if they are going to put any more trucks on the highways and interstates more roads need to be built first. The ratio of big rigs to commuter cars is presently out of control!

[bobwaycott]

> Having known a few truck drivers and having a good friend who was permanently disabled by a tractor trailer I know this industry needs to be made safer.

Having known a few truck drivers myself—including my father—and having a very good friend who was permanently paralyzed by another friend driving a standard car, these things don’t influence each other. The trucking industry is far safer than your average driver[0].

> The ratio of big rigs to commuter cars is presently out of control!

The numbers disagree with you. That ratio is currently about 1:135[1].

[0]: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/large-trucks/fatalityfacts...

[1]: a couple quick searches place big rigs at about 2M in 2017 compared to nearly 270M registered passenger vehicles in 2016.

[wolfspider]

Yes, but I never implied a year by year analysis either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/trucksdotcom/2016/05/23/a-glanc...

I never implied that these were hard facts they were my opinion. What is your opinion? We need more trucks on the road? To me 1:135 is out of control- that's my opinion.

[bobwaycott]

You stated your opinions as if they were facts. You said you know the trucking industry needs to be made safer—that sure sounds like an implied statement of fact, not sharing of opinion. I shared a ton of data that disagrees with what you know—ahem, believe. That should encourage updating your opinions.

Given the facts available on safety records of licensed, commercial truck drivers vs normal drivers—the latter of whom outnumber safer drivers 135:1—it seems sensible to me to form an opinion that the 135 less-safe drivers need to be dealt with before we get too worried about the 1 safer driver. The overwhelming majority of multi-vehicle accidents with big rigs find the passenger car driver to be at fault—we’re talking from 70-90%, based on types of crashes. Non-truck crashes outnumber truck crashes by roughly 3:1 per 100M vehicle miles traveled.[0] This seems to indicate non-truck drivers pose the greatest threat on the roads to public safety.

So sure, form any opinion you like. But maybe be more careful to share them as obvious opinions that aren’t implying they are actually fact-based—by stating you know something is true or declaring the ratio of something is out of control—or someone is likely going to call out those statements as being questionable when compared to the facts of reality. There’s no clear evidentiary basis for arriving at an opinion on a correct ratio of trucks:non-trucks, other than the data we have seems to indicate that fewer passenger cars on the roads is the surest way to increase public safety.

[0]: For a new link summarizing various studies—http://www.trucking.org/ATA%20Docs/News%20and%20Information/...