The Internet doesn’t carry goods, only more and more orders for them. Self-driving trucks are a long way off. In the meantime, somebody has to haul freight and make deliveries. So the U.S. economy needs more people like Branden Miller. But they’re getting hard to come by.
Miller, 30, is a long-haul trucker, the co-owner of an Arizona-based business that runs three trucks through Werner Enterprises. He says he hauls “anything that will fit in the back of a dry van.” His cargoes range from motors to toiletries to, in one case, a single envelope. He got into trucking five years ago for the classic reasons: “It’s a decent-paying job that allows you a lot of freedom to see the country.”
But the work definitely has its downsides. Miller sees his wife and two young children only three or four days a month—something he hopes will change as the business grows so he can hire other people to do the driving. If, that is, he can find and keep them.
Recently a driver Miller had trained as a student and then hired full time quit after working just a couple of months. The guy took a local pickup-and-delivery job with a company that used to require three to five years of experience before even considering a new driver. Nowadays they can’t be so picky.
The U.S. trucking industry is short about 50,000 drivers, estimates Bob Costello, chief economist for the American Trucking Associations.
The strong economy means more stuff to haul, even as increasing numbers of truckers retire. The average age of over-the-road truckers is 49, compared with 42 for the U.S. workforce as a whole. Forecasts of massive job losses from autonomous trucks don’t help. Few people want to join a dying profession. With unemployment low, there are other options.
In response, pay is up. The median salary for drivers who haul a variety of goods nationally is about $53,000. That’s a $7,000 increase since the previous survey five years ago, or about $4,000 when corrected for inflation. For drivers who work for private fleets serving individual companies, such as PepsiCo Inc. or Walmart Inc., median pay is $86,000, up from $73,000.
But a shortfall remains. Recent regulatory changes exacerbate the problem. So does an increasing shortage of places to park.
Even if it’s just for their 30-minute breaks, big-rig drivers need somewhere safe to stop their trucks. The more trucks on the road, the harder it is to find. “There’s a lot of parking out in the rural areas, but that’s not where I’m delivering to,” says Miller. “I might be delivering to Kansas City, where there’s no parking, so now I have to stop my day early where there is parking.” That means lower earnings.
Miller uses an app called Trucker Path, which lets drivers report how much parking is available at more than 8,000 locations with 270,000 parking spaces.
These tech solutions may save drivers time searching for parking, but they don’t add any spaces. That requires land, preferably with services attached.
Rest areas are, to put it bluntly, terrible places to make anything more than the briefest stop. They don’t sell meals, fuel or anything else besides vending machine fare. They don’t offer electricity that can run a truck’s heat or air conditioning overnight, forcing drivers to keep their engines going. They don’t have showers. The restrooms are sanitary at best.
They stay lousy because truck-stop operators, fast-food chains and gas stations don’t want the competition. At their behest, federal law forbids commercializing interstate rest areas.
More and better parking would mean more productive hours, lower fuel costs, less air pollution and greater take-home pay. To attract people to a grueling and essential job, allowing more oases would be a good start.