If there were a decent moment-to-moment shot of somebody dying because I was coding tired (rather than a future chance with a barrier of code reviews), it would be totally reasonable to put a really sharp barrier on reducing that risk.
Which is completely unregulated with anything like the same strictness.
I can only speak to the day trip side, not long-haul multi-day freight. But based on annectdotes, I would say there's (on average) at least one incident per month per driver where the truck has to be driven off the road to avoid a collision with physics-ignorant non-trucking traffic.
A friend of a friend was involved in an older lady's death after she pulled out right in front of him (as in, "even the brakes can't slow a truck down that fast" close). Of course he survived in the larger vehicle, but now he has that on his conscience.
I don't dispute that freight trucks are dangerous vehicles. But generally speaking, their drivers are far more experienced than you or I - they should be, they do it every day.
11% is not nothing, but it's also not the 89% chunk.
Long stretches of boredom punctuated by split-second reaction moments also describes my driving... and I can do that in anything 5 tons or under without any sort of regulation (except a passed driver's license test some number of years ago).
Their freedom is restricted because given the choice of pissing off the boss and putting people at risk, drivers and companies often choose the later.
My brother almost got hit by a semi at a weigh station when it took too long too stop -- because only one brake was functioning. He stopped a Chinatown bus venting exhaust into the cabin, also brakes were on fire. Another time they caught a guy who drove straight through from San Diego to Syracuse on amphetemine.
The regulations are there to protect the driving public. Violators are actively policed, and companies who break the rules get shut down.
To your specific points, the company and drivers' interests usually aren't in lockstep.
Unfortunately, the company usually has the power. Correct me if I'm wrong on some of the details here.
But when a driver's in another city and picks up a trailer that's been overloaded, or one with bad tires or faulty brakes, if they choose to pull it then they're the one that gets nailed with the DOT ticket. Correct?
I know some trucking companies have reimbursement policies, but that seems like a really perverse incentive structure. Why not find out who the driver is contracted to for the load & fine the hell out of them? It's their trailer after all!
My problem isn't that there's regulation. It's that some pieces (like the above, and the absolute cutoff times for logbooks) seems like it was designed by someone who wasn't overly burdened with imagination, empathy, or an inkling of game theory.
(And on the driver-vs-company fines, I'm basing my guess on most of them accruing against the driver by the fact that trucking companies generally seem to be pushing drivers to make the shady choices)
The driver shares responsibility. If a trailer is overloaded and has bald tires and brakes, he shouldn't pick it up. The driver has a strong incentive to tow the line as his CDL is his livelihood, and serious violations can affect that. (In addition to his life.)
The problem is that the carrier may or may not care and most drivers have little leverage. My uncle was a teamster driver. If he showed up to pick up a load and it was overloaded or unsafe, he'd go to the dock master, tell him to get the overload off the trailer and refuse to pick up. If you work for JimBob Trucking from Alabama, you may be on your own.
As for the inflexibility -- you need to be inflexible sometimes. You don't need game theory to state that trucks must have brakes, or that drivers must sleep. The fact is that a human's performance of occupational tasks diminishes as you stay awake. If someone is up for 17 hours, they will perform as if they are drunk.
Agreed that drivers have responsibility for a load they pick up, but my understanding is that with the new eLog systems there's less opportunity for "flex time". So if you arrive at a yard and need to get a container swapped to a new trailer or have them pull a different trailer then you're still on the clock. Which gets dicey when the yard knows this and says "Sure, we'll get you a new trailer. It'll just take a couple hours. We're really busy right now..."
The ideal would be the unionized situation you outlined, where there's a strong, independent driver's advocate to mediate disputes.
And agreed that there's a hard cliff where no one should be allowed to drive. But if it's 11 hours in the seat max, then what if you sat in traffic at a port for 5 of those? Is that driver as tired as someone doing 11 hours of interstate miles?
Paper logs afforded both drivers and regulators a judge-like discretion that I think lubricated the wheels with reasonableness while still dissuading repeated patterns of risky behavior.
eLog (assuming they fix all the loopholes in the terribly implemented first gen systems) doesn't provide that flexibility.
Which, in general, is a problem I think we're going to have to deal with more and more. You can't take partially enforced laws that worked, implement technical measures to absolutely enforce them, and expect everything to be the same as it was before. (E.g. if police departments started sueing for Google Maps tracking data and handing out tickets whenever a speed limit was exceeded)
Here's a link: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-on-sleep-deprivation-20... There's a lot of public military research as well, but without the pretty charts.
The regulation exists because of the unacceptable collision rate that truckers were having on public roads. Citizens compel the government to act when their relatives die due to a few irresponsible truckers who fall asleep behind the wheel.
The truckers in your family are probably responsible and know their limits. Brand new truckers ---or those who don't have the leverage to push back to an employer who expects them to drive dangerously long hours--- might not be responsible.
Only these do not solve the issue. The issue is that working longer shifts puts people's lives in danger. You could legislate in some worker protections for the driver, making it more likely these things do not happen. But they wouldn't make the laws any less necessary.
(1) It's immutable, and squeezes them between their dispatchers (who schedule them for 11 hour drives) and remaining legal. If you're running a day load (far better quality of life), then if you hit traffic you're spending the night on the road in your truck, parked wherever you happened to hit the time limit. There's no individual flexibility in terms of "I'll drive less tomorrow to make up for it."
(2) Removal of individual agency. Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. Doesn't matter you were on a roll. Doesn't matter that the past 4 hours were lightweight commenting and code formatting. Doesn't matter you were in the middle of writing a solution that finally occurred to you. Just is. Oh, and here's a $500 DOT ticket for trying to jot down some code notes to yourself to salvage your work.
I hear and agree that some people feel entitled to bill counter to market. But IMHO the combination of a per-mile-rate, dispatcher-driven scheduling, and absolute regulation is pretty sadistic to truckers.
There's a lot more friendly ways the legislation could have been written: work hour cap per week, different classes of CDL / experience levels mean different caps, etc.