Comment by hnthrow0287345
1 day ago
>Most assume the truck driver is being inconsiderate.
You could probably add a whole section of specifically learning to drive a car with trucks on the road to driver education programs and it would do wonders for traffic.
>Anti-idle ordinances exist in several US states and EU regulation is moving in this direction.
Yep, grab a sleeping bag or take your clothes off and use evaporation cooling on yourself. The good news is that car/van camping stuff can apply to trucking as well and that is fairly popular these days.
Another option is simply having places to sleep outside of the truck that are powered by solar/wind and don't cost anything to truckers, but that's only viable when we actually care about reducing emissions over profit.
>Every kilogram you add to the vehicle is a kilogram you can’t carry as freight.
You can save a bunch of weight by not having the sleeper cab if you can readily stop somewhere for a safe place to sleep. There's quite a bit of frontier savings you can do by externalizing costs of transporting stuff to other industries (aforementioned free hotel rooms) and getting tax payers to pay for it, which makes a ton of sense here since trucks are transporting all of the food we eat.
> Yep, grab a sleeping bag or take your clothes off and use evaporation cooling on yourself.
Talking about driver education, refrigerated trucks never get to turn off the engine until they unload the cargo. So it's not always for comfort.
> if you can readily stop somewhere for a safe place to sleep
That's the missing infrastructure. Drivers pull over to sleep when they hit their daily driving limit and in Europe most of the places to pull over are plain old parking lots maybe with some services like a gas station. Motels are relatively uncommon. I think losing some of the driving day and paying for a motel more than make up for the benefit of a lighter cab.
Talking about driver education, refrigerated trucks never get to turn off the engine until they unload the cargo.
The refrigeration unit often runs on a separate unit powered by its own engine, not the engine powering the truck. Don’t get excited just yet, as those engines do not run clean. They do use less fuel than the truck’s engine, though.