With the driver shortage continuing to climb to the top of motor carrier concerns, ATRI has released a new report that highlights a challenging future for the trucking industry based on demographic data and a dramatic shift in the age of the industry’s driver workforce.
ATRI’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data found that the trucking industry is disproportionately dependent on employees 45 years of age or older, many of whom will retire in the next 10-20 years. Complicating this is a sharp decrease over the past 20 years in the number of younger drivers that make up the industry, particularly those under 35.
Distribution of Employees 20 Years of Age and Older
One of the challenges highlighted by the study is the lack of vocational education offering for high school students to introduce them to a career in trucking. Based on data from the U.S. Department of Education, less than 30 percent of high schools nationwide offer any type of trade and industry transportation vocational courses. Further exacerbating the issue is the gap between high school graduation and CDL eligibility.
The results of this research prompted ATRI’s Research Advisory Committee (RAC) to rank two companion studies on younger driver issues as part of its 2015 top research priorities list. The first, Getting Younger Drivers in the Driver’s Seat, will focus on increasing the trucking industry’s vocational presence and examine the potential for a Graduated Commercial Driver’s License (GCDL).
The second, Younger Driver Assessment Tool, is designed to develop a screening tool to assess younger drivers that possess the cognitive decision-making attributes of mature, safe drivers. Once the tool is developed and validated, it then could be used to identify a pool of younger drivers for a GCDL pilot test involving commercial drivers 18-20 years old.
While finding ways to safely bring younger drivers into the industry is one potential solution to the growing driver shortage, the industry must also address a number of other challenges that make it difficult to retain the current driver population and recruit additional new entrant drivers.
Visit ATRI at www.atri-online.org.
ATRI is the trucking industry’s 501 (c) (3) not-for profit research organization. The Institute’s primary mission is to conduct transportation research with an emphasis on the trucking industry’s essential role in a safe, efficient, and viable transportation system.
The International Registration Plan and IFTA require a carrier operating under those programs to keep mileage records that can be audited for the carrier’s compliance. Those records have to show where a carrier’s vehicles went — that is, routes and miles traveled — sufficient for an auditor to determine the accuracy of what the carrier reported on its IRP application for registration and its IFTA fuel use tax returns.
IRP adopted language that specifically requires its member jurisdictions to permit such electronic records – if they are adequate – to serve for purposes of audit. Next year IFTA has done likewise. Until now, IFTA may allow records if they are deemed accurate and adequate.
Your GPS records must be accurate – exactly measuring the distance in a state or province as well as the boundary crossing.
You must maintain records up to 5 years – IFTA and IRP have record retention guidelines that exceed log requirements.
Nov 16, 2015 Larry Kahaner Fleet Owner
When Matthew Thiese and his team set out to learn why truck drivers crash, they looked at about 25 different variables including age, gender, weight, experience, heart disease, feeling tense, low back pain as well as alcohol and tobacco use. After recruiting drivers at truck stops, truck shows and on line – and ultimately including 797 in their analysis – three factors consistently stood out: pulse pressure, feeling physically exhausted after work and cell phone use.
While cell phone use makes intuitive sense as a crash factor, because of the obvious distraction, the other two factors – pulse pressure and feeling physically exhausted after work – are baffling, says Thiese, Assistant Professor at the University of Utah’s Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. His work was supported by the federal government.
“In terms of looking at crash risk, I was surprised that feeling physically exhausted after work was related to being involved in a crash,” he says, “but then I was also surprised at how many drivers had uncontrolled hypertension or uncontrolled high cholesterol, so those two were both surprising to me, too – more so the hypertension.” He notes that many drivers who said they were on medication, about 100 of the participants, still had high blood pressure. “I was surprised by that. I would’ve thought there would be more people who had it under control especially because they need certification every two years to drive. There are no outward signs of high blood pressure and some medications have side effects which affects compliance. I absolutely understand that, but it was still surprising.”
The study, funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, part of The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had a specific goal of looking at doing a large study of truck drivers to describe their health. “There’s really not much out there looking at it,” Thiese says. “To my knowledge this is the largest study that’s ever address all of these different factors. Our objective was to look at these data and how they associate with crashes.”
In future studies, Thiese wants to learn why pulse pressure and feeling physically exhausted correlated so high with crashes. “We know that these medical conditions occurred before the crash, so it’s more suggestive of causation. We’re working on a grant to actually perform a longitudinal study, where we enroll drivers and actually follow them through time, so that we can really get a handle on that strength of relationship between the predictive elements of a medical factor and having a subsequent crash.”
[Note: Pulse pressure is different than blood pressure which reads the diastolic and systolic pressures like 120/80. Pulse pressure is the difference between the two and represents the force that the heart generates each time it contracts. A high pulse pressure is believed to be a predictor of cardiovascular disease.]
What can drivers take away from the study?
“I want drivers to consider that there is not one risk factor for being involved in a crash. There are a lot of different factors, which also gives drivers many opportunities to try and reduce their own crash risk. There’s been a lot of focus on sleep apnea. There’s increasing focus on diet and exercise, and for some drivers, positive changes are feasible. There are other things that they can do, but for some drivers, it’s just really hard to eat healthy, or they don’t for one reason or another.”
He concludes: “Being physically exhausted after work, your pulse pressure, not talking on a cell phone – these are three very different things that, in theory, if you’re able to address, you should be able to reduce your crash risk.”
The study was published in the October, 2015 issue of Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine.
