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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

This is what the article should have been:

> Maximum length of a truck with a semi-trailer in Europe is 18.75 meters. Some countries have some exceptions, but generally that is the rule. In order to use the maximum of this length for the cargo the tractor unit has to be as short as possible. The best way to achieve that is to mount the cabin over the engine.

That's it. Headline with a question and that one paragraph. This article to me is an example of why articles on the modern web are bad. All the rest is there to keep you on the page longer and get better SEO.

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>> Similar requirements in US have been revoked back in 1986 and trucks now can be much longer.

Why did they do that? Ugh. I'd much rather have the shorter and safer trucks around than the current US designs.

>> In Europe Semi-trucks are limited to 90 km/h

55 saves lives.

>> Cities in US have wide streets and interstate highways are very straight and wide.

#notallcities Too bad Boston doesn't have the authority to regulate truck designs allowed in the city. Or maybe they do and just aren't doing it because of the economic impact of requiring transshipping from highway semis to local delivery trucks outside the city. I wish they would anyway.

> 55 saves lives.

No, it doesn't. It was a pointless law that was seldom enforced and blatantly ignored. It really only served as yet another reason for authorities to pull someone over due to profiling. Traffic is much safer if you have everyone traveling at or near the same speed, rather than having a wide differential on the road. It's also why US interstates have minimum speeds. US highways would be safer if the speed limits were set to something that actually makes sense for the road. I gather from your comment you're east coast centric. There are humongous parts of the US after you get west of the Appalachians where 75-85 MPH speed limits are reasonable and would be safe on interstates.

Safety is much more than a catchy slogan.

> seldom enforced

I think that depends on where you lived and drove. In New Jersey it was heavily enforced for a couple of decades.

The US is lagging behind other countries in lowering deaths. https://data.oecd.org/transport/road-accidents.htm

I think you are both right. In Europe 55 (90 km/h) saves lifes, with some exceptions. Highways are rarely wide and straight, and they are packed with traffic. I cannot imagine a truck happily cruising at 120 km/h here.

Also we pay higher gas prices, no way a truck is profitable cruising at 120 km/h.

> 55 saves lives.

Actually that's not true. [1]

  In 1995 the Republican Congress repealed the 55-mile-per-hour federal speed
  limit law. At the time, the highway safety lobby and consumer advocacy
  groups made apocalyptic predictions about 6,400 increased deaths and a million
  additional injuries if posted speed limits were raised. Ralph Nader even said
  that “history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of
  human life.”

  But almost all measures of highway safety show improvement, not more deaths
  and injuries since 1995. Despite the fact that 33 states raised their speed
  limits immediately after the repeal of the mandatory federal speed limit,
  the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported last October that 
  “the traffic death rate dropped to a record low level in 1997.” Moreover, the
  average fatality rate even fell in the states that raised their speed limits.

  Higher speed limits have not caused one million more auto injuries. In fact,
  in 1997 there were 66,000 fewer road injuries than in 1995, the year before
  the speed limits were raised. The injury rate per 100 million vehicle miles
  traveled fell to its lowest level ever recorded in 1997. If the injury rate
  on the roads had been as high in 1997 as it had been in 1995, approximately
  17,000 more Americans would have been injured on the roads.

[1] https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/speed-doesnt-kill-repea...

But how much of that is due to safer automobiles?

How has the accident rate been affected?

The effects were measured right before and after the speed limits were change, and cars did not magically get a lot safer at that exact same time. Thus, automobile safety seems to be an irrelevant variable in the quoted study.

If cars, on average, last 20 years, 10% of cars get replaced in two years time. That can be significant.

I also would think cars that get replaced are driven a lot more kilometers per year, so chances are a lot over 10% of all kilometers driven were in newer cars.

⇒ I’m not convinced increasing the speed limit didn’t make roads less safe.

Reading https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa346.pdf, fatality rate dropped from about 1.7 to about 1.6. That’s about 6%.

Eyeballing figure 1 in https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/43314/E..., I see a drop that could be of similar size in the EU, too.

⇒ I’m not convinced increasing the speed limits made the roads less safe, either.

In general, highways are about the safest roads, anyways, so you probably would have to look at safety only on those roads with higher speeds to be able to answer the question whether safety went up/down/nowhere.

There's a two year difference between measurements, as described in the quoted part of the above comment. Cars didn't change that much in those two years*, nor did everyone go out and buy new cars.

* Airbags were already mandated in the U. S. at that point, and though I oddly can't find a reference, I believe anti-lock brakes were mandatory at that point, too.

Reading through this, it doesn't sound like ABS was required in 2009: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/....

Another source says it's been required (federally) as of 2013: https://knowhow.napaonline.com/what-does-abs-mean-on-a-car/.

Man, I could have sworn ABS became mandated standard sometime in the 90s. Thanks for going to the trouble to find references.

How many are attributable to widespread airbag installment. Introduced in the 80s, common by the 90s, mandatory by 98.

I searched a little and saw many references to 15,000 reduced deaths in the 20 years from 1980 to 2000 due to air bags.

It's been long known (yet unpopular to report) that speed variance is what is dangerous, not speed.

Basically the difference between the "common sense speed" for a road and the posted speed limit correlates to accident rate.

I skimmed through the analysis.

Figure 1 is pretty funny, given it's x-axis of 1.5 to 1.7 it on first glance seems to show a 50% drop in the deaths per 100M vehicle miles traveled in between 1996 and 1997 (1.7 to 1.6). That is even though they do show the exact numbers (1.69 and 1.64). But let's blame that on the word processors of the time (1999).

The difference in deaths per 100M miles of vehicle travel between 1995 and 1997 of all States that Raised Speed Limits is -5.6%, while it's -6.3% for the states which kept the old one.

They might be safer for someone who sneaks into a blind spot while the truck is stopped, but there's no reason that can't be solved with sensors and cameras. The longer style is probably safer for the driver in any case though.

> Too bad Boston doesn't have the authority

Boston most definitely bans trucks on certain roads. That’s their authority shining through.

Enforcement is practically automatic on Starrow Drive.

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2021/08/19/boston-sto...

55 saves lives.

I'm not sure that it it does based on accident statistics, and probably the best thing they could do to increase road safety is to remove the truck speed limit in my state, either let everyone go 70mph or everyone go 60mph, but don't intentionally increase interactions between cars and trucks by giving them different speed limits.

One thing 55mph does do is help with gas mileage. I drive a hybrid and get around 48 mpg at 55mph and 41 mpg at 70mph. This is a relatively aerodynamic sedan, I'd imagine that the difference is even greater for trucks and big SUV's.

As far as big SUVs go, I drive an '04 Ford Expedition (parents gave it to me years ago when they no longer needed the child transporter and it's stupid easy to keep running).

If I drive 55 mph, I get 20 mpg on the highway. If I "drive with the traffic" in CA, I can get as low as 14-15 mpg.

In my limited experience with LA traffic, "drive with the traffic" means stop-and-go traffic :-) In stop-and-go, I usually get around 52 mpg. Which is why I got the hybrid in the first place, to commute in rush hour traffic, but I bought it just before the pandemic and work-from-home, so never really used it to commute.

Oh, stop and go traffic is real, real bad for me (10-12 mpg). I was talking about matching speed with the person in front of you on the highway. That number doesn't necessarily correspond with the speed limit.

I might have gone to a hybrid or an electric car already if it wasn't for the fact that I lived next to my office and walked to work. Then the pandemic happened and I rarely go anywhere :(

Felt real weird having an apartment right next to your office but working from home because it was closed. Ended up just getting rid of it and moving in with my parents because living alone while not being able to see anyone was not doing kind things to my mental state.

The 55 mph speed limit was enacted as a way to improve fuel economy and reduce the reliance on foreign oil in the 70s. It had nothing to do with safety.

NYC bans truck+trailer lengths over 55’ long, which bans all 53’ trailers.

Unfortunately the city doesn’t do a good job enforcing this requirement, so we have a few dozen people die each year due to trucks that don’t fit on the street hitting a pedestrian or bicyclist.

> I'd much rather have the shorter and safer trucks around than the current US designs.

My grandmother's best friend, when I was a child, was killed by a truck running over her while she was in a crosswalk (legally crossing the street). The light turned green while she was in front of the truck and he ran her over. They are so tall and set back so far, many of them can't see a person walking right in front of it.

I sure made folks mad with the "55 saves lives" throwaway line.

I'm hoping the need to extend EV range brings US highway speeds down to something reasonable, but I'm not optimistic.

It's not likely that Europe would move to traditional cab trucks if they relaxed the length rules since they still have to deal with the tighter road and parking conditions of European infrastructure

European cabs are traditional.

At least in Europe

Depends on what drives the requirements. The cabin over engine design is probably a bigger PITA to service. If that adds $, people would move away from it.

The other thing to consider is driving distance and how it drives design. I would imagine the count of trucks that need sleeper compartments is much higher in the United States, and adopting a design that keeps parts more consistent for sleeper cabin and non-sleeper models probably has manufacturing benefits.

>The cabin over engine design is probably a bigger PITA to service

not really, the whole cabin lifts up: https://i.imgur.com/pqXW1YH.jpg

Where's the engine? That level of access looks absolutely abysmal and a huge pain for the maintenance technician, compared to this:

https://www.dreamstime.com/brown-big-rig-semi-truck-open-hoo...

Given the regulation prevents this counterfactual from being tested at all, this is really just speculation.

In the US, there's a trailer length limit and a limit for the entire consist.[1] Those are separate limits, and the difference between the two allows for a rather large tractor. That's something truck drivers lobbied for. If the limit for the entire length is the main constraint, there's economic pressure to have as much trailer length and as little cab space as possible.

[1] https://dot.ca.gov/programs/traffic-operations/legal-truck-a...

Whilst there is some SEO repetition in the article, there's also a lot more information in there than your "summary", including some of the pros and cons of each and actual descriptions of the different designs.

Pros/Cons don't directly answer the question though. That's just pontificating on the subject to add fluff.

So why is that rule there? The article describes the cultural and geographic reasons why the eruopean design is feasible and preferred in the EU, but makes less sense in the US.

Let me tell you about how my great grandmother traveled from Germany in the 1930s in a mail carrier to bring this cookie recipe to the new world.

Agree. Reading the whole article was painful. Especially the US trucks that reach "137km/h". Clearly a direct conversion from mph, but it doesn't read great.

I guess you didn't read the rest. The fact that European drivers also don't care about living quarters was another big reason. Additionally, regardless of whether there's a legal length requirement in the EU I would assume drivers would still choose the cab over engine design due to maneuverability in tight urban settings (also mentioned in the article).

I quite liked the other information provided. You suggesting that an article should contain less information seems quite silly. You know what you could do? Don't read the rest and you won't have an issue....

They could have put the answer to the question in the title at the top and follow with sections on pros / cons, history, etc. But that would lower reader numbers.

Anything about if the difference would remain if the regulation wasn't in place is just speculation. It's like saying, if C wasn't a hard limit for travel speed, would we have space ships that travel faster than light?

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