United States - Haulage

A shortage of lorry drivers is getting worse

IN 1970s films like “Duel” and “Smokey and the Bandit”, truckers are outlaws. If that was ever close to the truth, it is now a highway’s length from it. Consider a requirement, enforced since April, that lorries must be fitted with an electronic logging device (ELD) to track speed, location and driving times. Drivers who are just a few dozen miles from home must now often pull over and wait, sometimes for ten hours, before continuing.

Or consider the video cameras that some logging devices aim at drivers. These send alerts to headquarters if a driver’s head or eye movements suggest that he is distracted or otherwise driving unsafely. Not surprisingly, many truckers associate ELDs with “a whole lot of real, real frustrations”, says Todd Spencer of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association in Missouri.

As truckers’ gripes grow, though, so do their wages. The past year has seen pay increases of nearly 10%, not counting the hiring bonuses of $5,000-10,000 that have become common. Partly as a result, moving goods along American roads has become much more expensive. In the 12 months to June, the cost of contracts for road freight rose by 18%. For the roughly one-third of freight that is booked on the short-term “spot” market, costs went up by 28% over the same period, according to DAT Solutions, an Oregon firm that matches loads to carriers.

The American Trucking Associations (ATA), the industry’s largest trade group, reckons America needs nearly 51,000 more drivers of big rigs. The average American lorry driver is 55 years old. Younger people are seldom keen on a job that tightly restricts smartphone use, not to mention time at home. The young may also fear that autonomous vehicles (“robot drivers”, as truckers contemptuously call them) will steal their jobs eventually. Rob Hatchett, vice-president of recruiting at Covenant Transport Services in Tennessee, wishes that talk of self-driving trucks would “go away” until the technology is ready.

The ATA is lobbying Congress to pass a bill, introduced in March, that would lower the minimum age for interstate trucking to 18 from 21. And more shippers are setting up hubs where trailers are swapped, which keeps drivers closer to home and therefore happier. But until any such efforts make a big dent in the driver shortage, wages and freight costs are likely to continue rising.

Oddly, consumers may not have noticed the escalating cost of trucking. They should thank Amazon, says Craig Decker of Wolfe Capital Markets & Advisory in New York. The online giant’s shipping costs in America rose from $11.5bn in 2015 to $21.7bn last year. But rather than pass the expense along to shoppers, Amazon has subsidised shipping with revenue from its cloud-computing operations. Amazon’s competitors have responded by trimming their margins. As far as the average American is concerned, the road is smooth.