[hangonhn]

Uh... not sure if that's actually the case. Trains are cheaper and actually faster over a long distance. The optimal way to ship is actually intermodal: ship for between countries/continents, trains for long trips over land, and then trucks for the last leg. They don't really compete with each other as much as they work together, especially since they have a standardized protocol for inter-process communication known as containers. Of course electric automated trucks could change all that.

[pmiller2]

> Trains are cheaper [...] over a long distance.

Right there's your hard cap. Make trains too expensive relative to trucks, and, suddenly, everything goes most of the way by truck.

[ethbro]

> Of course electric automated trucks could change all that.

Unmanned trucks crossing long distances of rural America sounds like a recipe for hijacking loads.

[elsonrodriguez]

Hijacking trucks filled to the brim with sensors sounds like a recipe for jail time.

The logistics of stopping and looting a truck involves too many parties, and ensuring that each party is following enough security protocols to not be identified via face, vehicle, or gait will ensure that only a few small sophisticated heists will ever be successful.

[a3n]

Anecdata: a fellow driver told me the story of a truck stopped at a light in "a bad part of town." Thieves rushed the back of the trailer, cut the lock and opened the door, just in case there was something worth grabbing.

Another, parked overnight with a load of electronics at the southern boarder. He woke up and discovered the trailer had been broken in to. Yet it didn't seem anything was missing. Maybe something "extra" had been placed on the trailer before it crossed in from Mexico?

In our company we're reminded when we'll travel through high theft areas.

If we're pulling a trailer designated as "high value," wherever we are, we're not allowed to pick it up unless we have the fuel and legal hours to go at least 200 miles before we stop.

My vague point is that every security move in history and to come can be defeated, if it's worth it to someone. And it's always with it, to someone.

[BTW, it "feels" unlikely that a judge or jury would convict based on gait analysis.]

[bdhess]

> BTW, it "feels" unlikely that a judge or jury would convict based on gait analysis.

But it does seem plausible that gait analysis could lead to a suspect, who could be convicted (or more likely, plead out) on additional evidence discovered during an investigation.

[yourapostasy]

> ...filled to the brim with sensors...

Has someone actually worked out that tons of sensors will cost far less than people-driven trucks? As it is, fuel is the big cost, followed by driver salary [1]. L5 autonomous driving is not going to come cheap, that gear is going to price as close to 3X driver salary as they can get away with, on the assumption they can run close to around the clock. Whose margin is getting compressed for the additional sensor gear?

This doesn't even touch upon that as soon as L5 is available and if 24x7 L5 operations approved, you suddenly just increased industry transport capacity 3X, leading to a sudden oversupply in certain segments and scenarios, while still requiring a certain baseline to handle peak load demands. That chaos will cause a lot of margin compression, and lots of rosy profit projections from L5 autonomous driving without drivers will turn into a race for finding more customer demand.

I can see some modest sensor gear, but nothing fancy, and not a lot of them. Perhaps high resolution visual and night vision cameras coupled with lots of street camera access, with lots of back-end software processing will deter most theft attempts?

We might ironically get to L5, only to stick lower-paid security guards on a random number of trucks.

[1] https://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-truck...

[elsonrodriguez]

The average truck driver earns about $70k a year. Even assuming that the sensor suite costs as much as an entire Tesla Model S(which in addition to a sensor suite includes an actual car), the system will pay itself back in a year.

Also once automated, the trucks can engage in all sorts of hyper-miling shenanigans since they don't have to worry much about traffic during a significant part of their 24/7 operation, especially on more remote roads. That's additional fuel savings.

[jandrese]

Sensor packages and near-AI compute clusters constantly get cheaper as the technology improves.

Today it doesn't make sense, but in 10-15 years when a full self-driving solution costs maybe $1k? It's a no brainer, especially for long haul trucking.

I'd guess that putting a security guard on a truck will be an exceptional occurrence, probably only used when the truck is hauling an especially valuable cargo or going through a known trouble spot.

[yourapostasy]

> ...but in 10-15 years when a full self-driving solution costs maybe $1k? It's a no brainer, especially for long haul trucking.

I once spoke with a highly-paid driver (used to be a programmer, using the gigs in truck driving to decompress because our industry generally has worse work-life balance than truck driving...chew on that for a bit) about the US logistics industry.

The driver was in high demand because they consistently tested drug-free, carried various kinds of specialized certs, was always on-schedule or always in communication about problems, and fixed many problems on their own. As I remember the explanation, there is some kind of trucking industry-wide database that contains every driver's trucking records, and it shows every ping of their record to everyone. Might have the details wrong, but the gist was every single time a competing trucking company pinged their record, they got a raise to stay without even asking. So they were in a good position to watch from the best of what the trucking industry could offer. Their contention after observing from inside the industry for a number of years is that the bulk of the US logistics industry is the train companies' to lose.

Placing enough sensors along the tracks and looking outward to the sides of tracks to detect conditions requiring trains to slow down way ahead of time, but otherwise clearing trains to run at much higher speeds than they are allowed to now, would go a long ways to fixing many of the train industry's delivery speed. Upgrade the tracks themselves and the rolling stock to boost the speed even more to match trucking's coast-to-coast delivery time, and there isn't much incentive to use trucks for those corridors rail serves.

[ethbro]

Makes sense. Logstics is fundamentally a network problem optimizing for latency and throughput.

Jitter is toxic to both, and road had a huge amount.

Rail networks are at least in control of most of their own variables!

[ethbro]

Given: (1) sensors necessary to autonomously navigate, (2) large stretches of rural America (out west, maybe 100+ miles to the nearest police station), (3) adaptable human adversay, (4) no humans to injure on the vehicle

... I just don't see how you economically protect a vehicle (vs cargo value).

And more sensors simply mean more things to steal. The minimum law enforcement response time along your entire route is the real issue, and there's no way you decrease that short of drastically increasing police staffing.

[jandrese]

These thieves have to steal from a moving vehicle? Sure it's not impossible, but it's more Hollywood heist than something you'd see in real life. It will almost certainly happen a few times, but for practical purposes the amount of stuff stolen before the guys are caught will be less than what it costs to hire tens of thousands of rent-a-cops to sit in the backs of trucks.

Plus, these are thieves we are talking about. Pointing a gun at a human driver and telling them to pull over so they can rob the truck is something that could easily happen today but is extremely rare. The minimum police response time is something that's hard to measure. It might be many minutes 90% of the time, but if you do 10 or 20 of these heists eventually you're going to get unlucky and the cop will happen to be sitting at a speed trap right there are you're busting into the truck.

This is the fundamental problem with crime. You will get away with it most of the time, but when you don't you're fucked. It's a lousy career choice because the upsides are modest relatively speaking, and the downsides are huge. If you're going to be a criminal the trick is to steal enough to retire on and then immediately retire. Knocking over one random truck is not going to do it.

[zjaffee]

There are multiple mile long trains with only 2 people on board at any given time, unmanned trucks won't be a problem as they'd likely travel just travel convoys with a couple people overlooking the fleet.

[pmiller2]

Automated trucks don't necessarily have to be unmanned.

[jandrese]

They do if you are automating them to avoid having to pay human drivers. It's kind of silly to go to all of the effort to automate a truck and then make someone sit on their thumbs behind the wheel for hours on end.

[_wp3r]

If you can reduce legal risk(accidents) by 50x or 100x and extend the road time by 2x or 3x, then paying a security person seems like a doable call. Especially if you can pass some of that premium risk mitigation on to the customer, if load value dictates.

Raw hourly cost may not even be the primary point under the manpower line of reasoning. It is certainly important, but not necessarily the key issue.

[jandrese]

You can't increase road time with a human driver at the wheel, that's a safety issue.

While it's already dubious to hire a driver for an autonomous truck, it's even sillier to pretend that the driver is useful when you're having the truck do the work while the driver sleeps. Extending road time by 3x means running the truck 24 hours a day, and keeping a person awake that long will not improve safety.

[azinman2]

But why? I would think that trains, which aren’t constrained to gasoline and have dedicated tracks, should be able to obtain higher efficiencies compared to trucks going the same long distances?

[dj-wonk]

Think of shipping as an optimization problem where various modes are selected for different parts of the path. You have to run the optimization problem to see what mix makes the most sense -- and don't expect it to necessarily be simple or obvious.

Logistics is complex; you'll also need to factor many things into the optimization: * both fixed and marginal costs of each mode (e.g. maintaining track, monitoring safety, wear and tear on vehicles, varying fuel costs) * constraints (due to technology, personnel, regulations, etc) * fluctuations in demand and shipping objectives * lots more

If you want to focus on only one slice of the problem... Sure, for the exact same route (meaning that a particular track has already been built), one would expect that trains are more efficient. The data shows that; e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

[dwighttk]

you are correct. That's why they don't really compete with each other. You put it on a train for a long distance and then trucks pick it up to spread it out from there.

[dj-wonk]

Sometimes people use "compete" in a casual way that overlooks key economic connections. Competition is a force that is always present, even if it is not currently the "most obvious" factor in play at a given time.

I think any definition of competition must be relative to the sphere of economic activity. So, when it comes to transportation in general, rail and trucks do compete -- by this I mean they offer services with varying prices and characteristics.

Just because rail and trucking have different sweet spots at a particular point in time does not mean that they don't compete. Both (a) think about how and why customers choose them over the other, (b) seek opportunities (for investment or growth) that lead to a competitive edge, and (c) therefore, influence each other.

[dwighttk]

that's what my "really" was meant to convey... "they don't compete with each other" would be contra what you said, "they don't really compete with each other" isn't. A different way of saying it is "Trucking is not competitive with trains at certain distances"