Ice Road Truckers TV Show Review

Here, finally may be a form of transportation where the drivers are more exposed to the weather and to accidents than motorcyclists are. I had a chance to watch one of these shows the other night at my mother's house (I don't get the History Channel, and I also don't get why this is on the History Channel). My first thought was that these were not actually "Ice Roads". In Canada, a paved or gravel road covered with ice is an "icy road". To be an ice road, there must be nothing but ice, with water underneath. But then I started thinking about the types of roads where we have a layer of gravel or pavement over permafrost, with a layer of ice over that. Kind of like an "Ice sandwich road". But none of this quibbling really matters. The real issue is the driving, and the fact that people understand that their lives depend on their ability and their attention to the job.

There are many good previews and short segments on Youtube, but also a few spoofs that should not be mistaken for the real show. In the episode I watched, the road was the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. There is a similar road in Canada I always get confused with, called the Dempster Highway.

During the show, an oversized load was being transported accompanied by two "pusher" trucks. Going up the steep hills, the two pusher trucks get behind the load and with nothing more than bumper to bumper contact, help the big load up the hill, at what appears to be a fairly high speed. I would guess about 80 kph. Typically in steep mountain areas, without pushers, trucks may slow down to first gear to get up steep hills, and crawl up the hill at walking speed. It was not explained in this episode why the two pusher trucks were being used, as it looked like they were not carrying a payload, and trucking companies are not used to wasting money like that. There was one other use for the pusher trucks, and it was coming down the hills. One pusher truck would get in front of the load carrying truck, and help it slow down coming down the hill. I'm not even sure it's legal on most public roads. But it certainly makes for great entertainment, for anyone who has an interest in roads and driving.

[Update Oct 28, 2010: I was speaking to a truck driver on this subject and apparently the pushers are needed because even with chains, the wheels will lose traction when you gear down to climb the grade, with an oversized load like that.]

At a few times during the show, the producers inserted animated clips to illustrate the dangers of these operations. For example, how a truck may tip over if the load shifts or what could happen when the load falls off. The animations were fairly realistic, and each time my mother saw a truck go off the road or crash, she gasped. I had to tell her "It's just an animation". She would reply,"But I'm surprised nobody got killed anyway." ""Mom, an animation is a cartoon drawing like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", but this is just more realistic."

I kind of suspect the dangers are somewhat dramatised. Because if you wanted to, you could certainly make a TV show of a normal commuter's drive to work in Toronto, and make it seem like death is just around every corner. But it is a fact that there is a much higher death rate among these truckers than among normal commuters. Probably about the same as the rate for motorcycles. And it is good to see people at least paying attention to their driving instead of sending text messages.

One of the clips on Youtube is about a truck driver hitting a moose. Just to help keep you car drivers more alert, note that although the driver was not injured, the truck had to be towed away. Those moose can get big.

Apparently, the first season was actually done on ice roads. But the trucking companies were not very impressed with the overall attitude of the show, and made so many new safety rules that the producers moved the show somewhere else, and that's when they started getting away from the "Ice Roads", but still kept the same name as most people don't know the difference between northern mountain roads and ice roads. The next season they will be going to the Himalaya Passes, which could make the Dalton Highway look as safe as the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Doris Wiedemann and Sjaak Lucassen, have recently done the Dalton Highway in winter, on two wheel motorcycles. (I need to specify two wheels because sidecars and trikes might have made the trip much less intense). They were Germans, if that helps explain anything.
http://www.bmwmoa.org/news/ride_stories/arctic_circle_beckons_for_doris_wiedemann

Picture: It's a picture I took myself, in February 2007 on the road to Labrador. It was an icy road, but not an "ice road"..

Why Does Toyota Make Big Honkin SUV's and Pickup Trucks?

For a company that claims to be green, Toyota makes a lot of large SUV's and pickup trucks. What could be more natural than making these honking big luxury all wheel drive vehicles if it makes money? Well, it's not that simple.

The only place in the world where these large gas-wasting vehicles sell well is the USA, and that is because of low gasoline prices, which are kept low by the political danger of imposing taxes on fuel in America. And even in America, as we have seen, the price of gas sometimes rises to the point that vehicle sales decline. (especially the gas-hogs)

Toyota started off in the sixties sending fuel efficient cars to the USA because that's what they made for their home customers, and that's what they understood. Not only that, but since 1963 there has been an import duty on light trucks coming to the USA of 25%. It is called the "Chicken tax" as this import tax is applied to potato starch, dextrin, brandy, and light trucks in retaliation for a European import tax on American chickens. OK, sorry that this is getting complicated but really so many things we consider natural came about through unnatural and complicated legislation.

Anyway, Toyota continued to make cars for the US, content to ignore the truck market. Then the US congress began to pass laws requiring increasingly strict standards for fuel economy, crash safety, and clean burning engines. Toyota complied, and set their engineers to work conforming to these regulations. Meanwhile, Detroit began to exploit a loophole they had at their disposal, by getting light trucks exempted from all these laws. Once again, Toyota more or less ignored the unfairness of this, and continued to build fuel efficient cars. The American car makers, on the other hand started pushing the definitions of what exactly was a light truck. Eventually, Detroit managed to include all minivans as light trucks and even started making pickup trucks with no bed at the back, calling them SUV's. Toyota still had no response, but things were getting worse. When gasoline prices declined in the nineties, sales of SUV's, pickup trucks and minivans increased to the point that cars became an endangered species in the USA (literally!). And finally, I guess the thing that pushed Toyota over the edge was the proposed CAFE standards.

Although CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) did not pass, it threatened Toyota's existence in the US market. The law proposed a percentage improvement in fuel economy on each corporation, over time, starting with their existing fuel economy average. The problem was that if Toyota was starting with mostly fuel efficient cars, it would have to compete against American makers who were starting with wasteful vehicles. It is hard to increase the fuel economy of a Corolla, but easy to do if you are starting with fuel wasting American style vehicles.

As a result of (or sometimes anticipating) all these pressures, Toyota decided to enter the truck market in the USA, so that they would be on an equal footing with the Detroit companies in case CAFE ever became law. To do so, they set up truck factories in the USA, because the chicken tax of 25% would have made them uncompetitive to import from Japan. And now we have the Toyota Tundra and the Toyota Sequoia, and several other big honking things you would not expect to find many years ago in a Toyota showroom.

Last year, both GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy. They were relying too heavily on their big truck sales for profits, and when fuel prices went up along with job losses, many people stopped buying the trucks and SUV's. Toyota fared better and became the world's biggest automaker because of their superior line of cars.

But now Toyota is facing billions of dollars in lawsuits in the USA because of the not yet proven "runaway acceleration" syndrome.

So it's not always as simple as you might think.

Picture: Photoshop was not used in this picture. I did not reduce the size of the person in the drivers seat. The Sequoia is just a very big vehicle, at least for a Toyota.

Republicans in the Office (Of Counter Terrorism)

An interesting case has just come up in the murky world of intelligence gathering. It once again brings up the topic of how best to get important information, by torture or not by torture?

The pro-torture crowd uses this simple situation to make their case. An atomic bomb is about to go off in 10 minutes in New York. You have the bomber in custody, and he doesn't want to talk. Do you torture him and get the answers you need, or wimp out and let the building blow up (and most of the rest of the city?) A simple situation with a simple answer.

This situation is actually the easy part of the process of intelligence gathering. You have the bad guy in custody. You know he knows something that you need to know. You have a way to verify quickly whether or not his answer is correct. At that point you really would have to fumble the ball badly to not get the information you need, like for example if you threatened him with a loaded gun, it prematurely went off and killed him.  So let's stop using this mythical situation to rationalize torture.

A part of intelligence gathering that has importance in real life, is having ordinary people voluntarily come forward with important information. I know this is too passive to have any appeal to the bulked-up-on-steroids types among us, but in the overall security picture, this part of the intelligence gathering is usually 60 percent of the effort. In this type of operation, you must be seen as the "good guys" by at least some of the local people, and you must have the infrastructure in place to sort through the incoming data. Notice here that passive intelligence is actually somewhat in conflict with torture intelligence.

Now for the most difficult part of the process, the one that breaks down most often, and is the greatest threat to our security. Once the raw data is obtained by one department, how and when does it get passed to another department within the system? That is where the usual office politics and personality conflicts get in the way of people doing their job, day in and day out to the best of their abilities. To learn more about how office bickering can reduce effectiveness, you will need to go to "Dilbert". I know it's a cartoon, but it is a cartoon ironically based on "tips" sent in by people on the ground who deal with this stuff every day in a real office.

The situation I started off with in this blog post is the underwear bomber. Nobody needed to be tortured to save that plane. The very fact that an internationally well liked African-American was president, and had signed a bill renouncing torture, made it possible that the bomber's own father would come forward with the tip that his son was going to try something. All that was necessary to stop him was that the various paper shufflers in government offices should be able to promptly deliver this information to the right inbasket. You would think that since this problem was identified as part of the cause of 9/11, something could have been done about it by now.

But sadly, most of the public discourse is still all about whether or not to torture. If not torture, then even stupider things such as whether to declare war on Yemen. The debate is not about people in the bureaucracy doing their jobs. And what might help is to at least have somebody in charge of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Obama's appointee has been blocked for months now. By petty political bickering, of course. The head of Customs and Border Protection agency also remains vacant, but no one has been chosen yet, so I'm not sure if you can blame that on political bickering. That won't even begin until someone is chosen.

Another issue about these appointees and why so may jobs are unfilled (125 senior political appointments remain open and 96 nominations await Congressional confirmation). Would you want to take a job that apparently the entire country thinks is so irrelevant that the job is empty for up to a year, and yet if any attack ever succeeded, the person holding that job would be the first to be pilloried? Now that is classical office politics.

Picture: My words on the cartoon.

A Perspective on Fuel Economy

Let's compare fuel economy in methods of transportation. In these measurements, the lower numbers are for less fuel.















First comparison in kJ per Km., as we are not always using gasoline as fuel.

• Walking 330 kJ per km (the fuel is food, in case you were wondering)
• Bicycling 120 kJ per km
• Toyota Prius 1600 kJ per km (Calculated from 5.1 L/100 km at 32,000 kJ per Litre)

Second comparison, switching to L/100 Km., but I included a Toyota Prius in both comparisons for a benchmark.

• Toyota Prius 5.1 L/100 Km (55 mpg US)
• Jet Aircraft 4.8 L/100 km (this is per passenger)
• Ocean Liner Ship 16.9 L/100 km (per passenger)
• Diesel Electric train 1.2 L/100 km (per passenger) (I got this from another site, as wikipedia was unclear about the units and passengers, also seemed unrealistic at 12 mpg for the whole train?)

Note that for two people to go across the country, the Prius would be more efficient than flying. But with only one person in the car and a full airplane, it is close to a tie. Again, if the aircraft is half empty, the Prius wins.

In this website Matti proves he can run his car for a year with less fuel than to fly two people from Toronto to Acapulco and back on a winter vacation. Part of the secret is that he has a VW Golf with only 12,000 km in one year. In this case it is appropriate to say YMMV.

The Interstate Highway Sytem, Wonder of the World?

I have always been a great admirer of the interstate highway system in the USA. I would go so far as to say it is one of the wonders of the modern world, and one day in the future, long after we have run out of oil, it will be admired by people from who travel to the USA (in oxcarts) just to walk along sections of this system, in awe of what primitive peoples had accomplished.

This system of roads was built mostly after World War 2, and it is the biggest public works project in the history of the world. President Eisenhower introduced the bill and it was passed in 1956, called the "Federal Aid Highway Act". There was not much debate on this bill, at least not by today's norms. For example, almost nobody complained about the debt load that the government was taking on. Also, very few people were made aware ahead of time that the government was going to decide exactly where the roads went, and that many towns would die as a result of being bypassed by the opening of the new roads. No one understood that there would be what you could even call a "Death Panel" that would make decisions about which towns would be served, and which would not. And there was literally no debate about whether illegal aliens would be able to drive their cars on this road system undetected. Also, many trucks would be scrapped if they did not conform to the standard height and length determined by the federal bureaucrats. But more than that, it was never once mentioned that Hitler had basically invented the idea of a national highways system, called the Autobahn, and Eisenhower was so impressed with it as he travelled through Germany, that he decided that the USA should build it's own.

Why did no-one ever question the Federal Highway Act before it was passed? Why did nobody threaten to filibuster it? Why did nobody call it socialism? Well for one thing, the big carmakers were lobbying for it. Lots of people were going to get jobs from it, even though those were Government jobs, not private sector. And even though the jobs were just temporary, until the roads were completed.

Looking back on the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways" as it was officially named, nobody, even today, ever comments on it negatively. And yet it has led to a huge increase in oil consumption, to the point that the USA is no longer self sufficient in oil. It led to the dismantling of some of the national railway system, which is a far more fuel efficient way to transport goods long distances. And thousands of people have died in traffic accidents on it.

But what I like about it is that it allows me to travel great distances by car or motorcycle, assured of being able to find gas stations, restaurants and motels along the way. In fact the only real complaints I hear about it are that it prevents people from seeing the "real" America as they travel around. Which is actually similar to the argument if you take the plane from NY to LA. Of course it's true, but if you really want to see America, just get off the road. Any time, any where.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_highway_system

Footnote for Canada. Yay for us! Canada has a smaller freeway system than the USA, but it is busier. Specifically on the 401 through Toronto, the average daily traffic flow is 425,000 (measured in 2004). While the busiest on the Interstate System in the USA is 390,000 vehicles per day: I-405 in Los Angeles, California, (estimated in 2006) Highway 401 has 12-20 lanes through Pickering to Mississauga and this is thought to be the world's longest continuous stretch of highway having 12 or more lanes.

In contrast to the US system, this particular Canadian highway is actually an obstacle to traffic movement, and it is amazing to me that people keep using it in spite of the frequent slowdowns, even at 3:00 AM.

http://www.urbanplanet.org/forums/topic/11058-Torontos-401-Busiest-Freeway-North/


Picture: Me and the BMW on Interstate 10 New Mexico. Returning from my trip to Baja Mexico. I know I should not be fiddling with my camera while driving, but I had slowed down to 100 kph, to take a picture of the two bikes ahead of me.