Robot Trucks

I know a little bit about long distance trucks and the men (I know there are many women drivers - I just have never met one) who drive them. As I hitchhike across parts of Canada, truckers have kindly offered me a seat in their trucks for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres.  They have told me their life stories, offered to buy me a meal and more often than not offered me place to sleep in their top bunk.

I was therefore pleased to see in the December issue of The Walrus, an article about truckers and the future of the industry ( robot trucks). It is an interesting article from the perspective of what may be happening in the next decade or two in terms of how goods get transported between cities in Canada - more importantly for me, it gave a small glimpse of what life is like for truckers.

In my experience for the most part, truckers are an unusual group of men. For some of them, they are gone for weeks at a time. For many of them, their weeks are comprised of a fixed rotation of drive, eat and sleep. All too frequently, they spend their day off in some truck stop amongst a hundred other drivers, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their families. On more than one occasion a trucker has told me that he is meeting a friend at the next truck stop – someone who every week or ten days he meets for a coffee at some truck stop or another. In all likelihood, that might be his only human face to face contact of any significance for that week. I suspect that many truckers are lonely much of the time.  Truck driving is a hard job. It is hard on the body and the temptation to eat poor food and to exercise little is overwhelming.  

In my experience truck drivers are a fairly conservative lot. They adapt slowly to change and are frequently fierce critics of those who do. For example some sort of automatic transmissions have been around for large diesel vehicles for years (think buses), but until recently most truck drivers have, at best, been disparaging about drivers who use them. Those who do use the new transmission love them - especially when driving in the cities. There are certainly a lot more of them on the road than there were ten years ago. Some technological changes are happening without the truckers' consent. Big trucks in Canada are limited by law, in how fast they can go. Usually it is just a few kilometres over the speed limit. On so many of the major highways in Canada, this regulation means that the drivers can make less money (especially if they get paid by the kilometre), it is harder work (a lot more shifting through hilly country) and for the most part is not needed. When cars, are going 20-30 kilometre per hour faster than the truck they are zooming past, putting a limit of truck speed seems more than a bit silly.

In spite of some of our semi romantic version of truckers, in part engendered by such old movies as “Smoky and the Bandit”, where everyone is on the CB and they all have interesting nick names, more and more truckers are controlled not just by federal regulations but by electronic devices that allow the company to know exactly where they are and when their allotted driving hours for that day have been used up. Truck drivers are no long those lone wolves, those mavericks, the last of the cowboys and Don Quixote all rolled up into one.  So many of the newer drivers no longer see their profession as a noble one, one that was of value to the community.  Now they are just someone doing a job. They, like so many other Canadians, just feel over-worked, over-regulated and underappreciated.

I find it a bit scary and more than a little sad that at some point in the future, some hitchhiker will be standing on the side of the road and the trucks passing by him/her will have no driver. Part of that is I am less re-assured than others that a computer can always make the right decisions, that one can store enough possibilities in an electronic brain to make a quick, life affecting decision; but I am also sad that a way of life will be changed, in fact destroyed, because someone has found a way to be more efficient - to make more money with fewer people involved.

Robot trucks may serve the commercial needs of the companies, those stores and manufactures who survive using the "just in time" model (means that one does not have to build large warehouses to store items when trucks arrive every day with fresh deliveries), but that does not mean that we should openly embrace driverless trucks.

And in the future - who will pick up that hitchhiker?