The NYT is pondering the future of truck stops with the growth of autonomous trucking

The New York Times ran a piece about the changes that have taken place for truckers and trucking industry. The cross-cutting line seems to be that when stand-alone trucks change the way they deliver cargo from one place to another, “the support system that serves [truckers] is threatened with extinction “, referring to various beautiful or pathetic truck stops that are set as points in the US highway system. The article says there are 550,000 travelers and touches on a number of other issues they face – complex rules driving, time of punishment, expensive food on the road and stunning difficulties in finding a place to park.That’s where the piece is on the hardest ground.As for autonomous trucking, yes, it will, but as in the case autonomous carsThe mass proliferation of self-driving trucks takes decades to overcome challenges such as geography, weather and human nature.

Sparse and empty shelves in almost all stores make the current global situation an ideal catalyst for the development of self-driving trucks. And in the south there are already large unmanned vehicles that run in the south, where long, mostly straight sections of the highway alleviate the problem for tractors as well as for cars. But truckers don’t make money on the highway, they make money by transporting loads from the highway from the highway to the warehouse without killing cars and infrastructure on roads designed to accommodate much smaller vehicles. (It’s a perfect world; it doesn’t always work out that way.) That’s why it will take so long for the industry to replace truck drivers with driverless trucks.

A self-driving car in need of backup or drag and drop, you can do it almost anywhere. The 73-foot-long, 8.5-foot-wide tractor-trailer options are infinitely smaller, and the penalty for mistakes is wonderfully higher, so drivers plan a lot to avoid accidents. Just avoiding other drivers not focused on the road is hard enough in the car. Every driver on the road spends an excessive amount of his shift, taking care not to kill a lot of car drivers who don’t realize that a loaded setup takes about 600 feet to stop at 65 mph.

Self-driving SUVs are coming again, and the sooner the better. They can help alleviate the shortage of somewhere around 60,000 OTR drivers facing the industry, and help replenish those shelves. I don’t think the support system – The pilot, Loves, T / A Travel Centers and the like – also go anywhere. Truck stops have long found out what their size, width and offerings are cheap gas appeal to car drivers. And self-driving trucks still need fuel, how and to whom to pump.

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