Thoughtful, well written article thanks to Thomas Beckett and published in The National Motorists Association newsletter #690 April 3, 2022. You can help support the NMA by joining at the links provided:I read with interest the NMA Weekly E-Newsletter #685 on allowing 18-year-olds to drive in interstate commerce.
I come to this discussion with some experience, having been both a driver and a fleet manager for JB Hunt. In addition to that experience, I also have some insight into Greer Woodruff's approach, having worked under him (we didn't know each other, aside from an occasional hello, or a short discussion at a safety meeting) in both roles.
For what it's worth, I have driven over two million miles since 1975, including 770,000 accident-free miles with JB Hunt and another 175,000 on the mean streets of the Triple Cities (that's the Binghamton, NY area) for Broome County Transit, as well as several other driving jobs, and my own personal miles, which are considerable. I still hold a Class A commercial license with a passenger endorsement.
One of my roles as a fleet manager was to take newly hired drivers out of orientation and put them in trucks, then run them for about ten days till they got acclimated to our way of doing things and hand them off to a permanent fleet manager. By the time I was doing that, we had not hired an out-of-school driver in ten years, and everyone I worked within that program had at least a year's experience, a few with much more than that.
For the most part, I agree with the conditions of the apprenticeship program. I'm not a big fan of in-cab cameras or speed limiters (governors) set no faster than 65 MPH in a world where 75 MPH speed limits are typical. I think trucks should be able to run with the flow of traffic at whatever speed. Governing them at 75 will keep them moving at a speed similar to surrounding traffic and will still limit how fast they can go; it's not necessary to run triple-digit speeds. Sending out a much slower vehicle into interstate traffic only asks for trouble, if not for the slow truck, then surely for the other drivers who have to maneuver around it.
Not allowing double trailers (and triples in some western states and on the Ohio Turnpike and Indiana Toll Road) also makes sense. Those trucks are much more unstable than a single trailer of any length, especially triples. I talked to a Consolidated Freightways driver on the Indiana Toll Road one night about 25 years ago, and we got on how the trailers behave, especially in poor conditions. His comment was, "I never really know what that last trailer is doing." This was a guy who'd been driving them for 30 years.
While I can see the theory behind in-cab cameras, I'm not sure watching someone the whole time he's in the truck is advisable. Maybe they can be set up to operate only while the truck is in motion, but a full-time camera is a non-starter. After all, these guys live in their trucks, literally. Who would have a camera in his home that watched him 24/7, allowing his boss access?
Yeah, I know everyone is sharing on social media ad nauseam, but some prefer to have our private moments.
For better or worse, the transport industry seems to have embraced the idea of cameras in operating cabs. In many cases, railroad locomotives are now equipped with them, as are quite a few buses. Companies will want to know that their drivers are not on their phones, eating/drinking while driving, etc. It's probably an inevitability, even if this proposal is not ultimately implemented. It will likely become an essential tool in collision investigations.
Having an experienced driver on board is not unprecedented. When I started with JB Hunt in 1995 (at the age of 36), I attended a mandatory four-week program at the National Tractor Trailer School in Syracuse, NY. Then I spent four weeks with a driver-trainer, a more experienced driver who observed me and got me up to speed on JB Hunt practices and procedures. He also monitored my logs for accuracy and if they comported with DOT regulations. This was standard practice at the time, as JB Hunt was expanding rapidly and hiring new drivers at a furious pace. Today, this is less of a factor, as electronic logging largely eliminates mistakes, and makes falsification almost impossible.
When I started trucking, JB Hunt had around 8,000 road trucks in the fleet and was taking people from all walks of life to fill driver seats. But when starting out, the driving experience level was low--no better than an 18-year-old when it came to driving a truck. My driving school class had guys (the field is overwhelmingly male, even today) who had been school bus drivers, factory workers, and food service workers. Most of the people I went to school with were older, in their 30s and 40s. We had quite a few veterans, too. My trainer was a veteran who spent 24 years in the Air Force.
The point about 18-year-olds not having any driving education is well taken. As it is, driver's ed in high school seems to be a lost practice. When I was in high school in the 1970s, every school I knew had a program with a dedicated teacher or someone outside the school teaching on contract.
I went to driver's ed at a Catholic high school in Manhattan--New York, not Kansas--and learned to drive in a 1975 Pontiac station wagon. It was good training for almost everything I'd ever encounter in my driving life. Years later, when my kids came of age, their high school, Union Endicott in upstate NY, did not offer driver ed.
If you wanted to get driving instruction, you had to go to driving school. I get that it's an expensive program and has some serious liability issues, but overall, the risk to the larger driving public would be much better served if high schools had driver's ed programs. At least these kids would be going out onto the roadways with some basic skills, and it would be a more level playing field since everyone would have a similar baseline skillset.
A certain temperament and mentality are essential for driving a big rig. Being away from home for extended periods is an adjustment, especially for those with a family. You have to get used to living in an 8x8 foot box for a couple of weeks at a time. The hours are often long and often odd. You'll deal with rain, snow, sleet, hail, the gloom of night--sometimes all of those in 24 hours, and some at the same time. You'll go more miles in a year than most people drive in ten: more miles in ten years (if you last that long) than most people will drive in a lifetime.
I recall once driving down I-65 in northern Indiana one night, 15 degrees and freezing fog, thinking, if I had any sense, I'd be in a warm bed somewhere, and the only reason I'm out here is because someone is paying me to do this, and I have a 0600 delivery in Louisville.
It's a life that's not for everyone, and most are not cut out to do it. The dollars can be good, but the time spent to earn them is long and often lonely. Those factors make retention a challenge.
Anyone who will enter into the Safe Driver Apprenticeship Pilot Program should be required to go to driving school for tractor-trailers before going over the road. Presumably, they will have met any minimum hiring and DOT qualifications before going on the road with a supervising driver. JB Hunt required us to pass the state road test and have our Class A licenses before being officially hired.
OOIDA's Todd Spencer has a point about retention. There were 18 in my driving school class when I came on as a driver. Two dropped out when they heard they'd have to complete a drug screen successfully; 11 completed the course and passed their road test. A year later, I only knew of three that were left.
This was not uncommon. I recall talking to the class coordinator one day, who said that the average new driver coming through school lasts 117 days. Many guys get out on the road and quickly realize it's not all 70 MPH with the window down, the radio up, the wind in your hair, and all is right with the world.
There is the reality of being away from home most of the time, as well as the long hours sitting--and it's not so much hurry up and wait, as it is waiting, and hurry up to get to the next place. I think Greer Woodruff hits the nail on the head. There's a lot of wasted time, which is entirely unproductive, in the business.
Woodruff states that the trucking industry could add a lot of capacity if detention time were reduced and by using drop and hook pick-ups and deliveries. That much is true, but there also would need to be other changes to minimize driver detention, most of which would have to be taken by the customer, which is mainly out of the carrier's control.
Some customers are not too bad about this; some are horrible. I used to hate going to Owens Corning in Kansas City, Kansas, or Budweiser almost anywhere since you were usually in for a whole working day on their dock to get loaded. On the receiving side, grocery warehouses are notorious time-wasters, and it's not uncommon to spend four or five hours at one, especially if there's a detailed breakdown of the load. A load of spice, for example, can have several hundred items and break down into as many pallets. It's a nightmare.
Drop and hook is ideal for the driver, as long as there is an empty trailer at the receiver. Usually, it's not a situation where you drop a load and immediately pick up another load, though there are places where that happens. A trucker can be in and out in 30 minutes if all goes according to plan with a drop-and-hook customer.
At JB Hunt, we had a lot of them--companies such as Wal-Mart, Target, Kohl's, Procter & Gamble, and a wide variety of others. The issue is often at the receiver end of the trip. Grocery warehouses, as a rule, don't have trailer pools, so it's a live unload; likewise, we also did some store deliveries for Home Depot, which are live unloads as well. They were usually pretty good, as long as they had enough people to pallet jack the freight into the building. And, as I said, the drop and hook only works if there is an empty trailer at the receiver. If not, you can waste an awful lot of time looking for one.
We were encouraged to report customers if it took too long to unload (anything over two hours). We'd start charging them detention time after four hours. This plays directly into Woodruff's theory that if drivers could actually drive 8-3/4 hours a day instead of the average 6-1/2, it would reduce the need for additional trucks and drivers. The drivers would also earn more, which would be a big boost to retention.
On detention: One of the significant changes that affected detention was the change to the 14-hour rule about 15 years ago. Before that change in hours of service, you could sit on a dock all day and not lose any driving time. With the 14-hour rule, if you started at 0600, you could not turn a wheel after 2000 hours, regardless of whether you'd been driving all day or sitting on a customer's dock. Many of our trucks would outlaw on customer docks this way when that 14-hour rule was first implemented. It took a couple of years, but finally, many customers got the idea and sped up their warehouses. Most loads can be loaded or unloaded in less than two hours with no trouble, and should be. But detention still wastes a lot of driver time and reduces productivity.
Driver unloads should be outlawed, period. Customers should be handling and segregating their freight. This is a waste of driver on-duty time, especially since drivers often do not get paid for doing this. Almost all road drivers are paid by the mile, and the ones that do get paid for unloading don't get nearly enough to justify the time spent. Also, the driver could run the risk of an injury rendering him unable to drive again till medically cleared.
I'm not sure letting 18-year-olds drive interstate is entirely a bad idea. Suppose an 18-year-old is allowed to drive from Chicago to Springfield, 200 miles, but not to Hammond, Indiana, just across the state line, 20 miles from the Chicago Loop. I figure if a kid can drive in the city of Chicago, anything else will be easy.
What has to happen is good training in the first place and an excellent safety culture after that.
At JB Hunt, we were relentless about highway safety, not just in training our drivers, but in getting a safety mindset ingrained in them for themselves and the motorists around them. We had our guys do quarterly safety meetings, in-class at a terminal; we did monthly briefings that were seasonally related: about school buses in August, RVer's in June, winter driving hazards in November, etc.
We also had them send us a daily safety message--and we'd hound them about it if they didn't. It was all geared to the drivers having the importance of safe operation first thing on their minds when they went out every day. Even 18-year-olds will get the point if it's repeated often. As my New-York-City-teacher grandparents used to say, repetitio martare studiorum est: repetition is the mother of study. Do something over and over, you learn it well, and it becomes a habit. Another of their favorites: practice makes permanent. That should be self-explanatory.
Supply chain issues are not going away soon. As the pandemic relents, the Russians are putting pressure on the world economy from an entirely different angle, and there will be disruptions. We need to get everyone in the game. Properly trained and managed younger drivers should be able to fill that need.
Link to National Motorists Association.
