If you missed this post to Phil Madsen’s Learning Something New Every Day blog, from earlier in the month, give it a gander soon as you can. It’s a must-read for the quality of analysis it gives to the expediting owner-operator’s first experience with software that can, with an operator’s permission, track his cell phone in lieu of utilizing an expensive on-board load tracker.
Madsen — rightly, in this case, we think — refused to cooperate, but that’s not the end of it. Here’s the somewhat forbidding conclusion:
Name any truck or truck-communications technology today — from air-conditioning to cell phones to lane departure systems to the internet. For many of them you can describe how they are reducing operating margins for owner-operators, increasing the costs of operating a truck, and reducing the need for and value of professional owner-operators.
Truck driving is a job such that the smarter a truck becomes (technology), the less skilled, responsible and compensated a driver has to be.
