The Coming Capacity Crunch Driver shortage, wages and Washington could hinder trucking’s growth
By Steve Brawner Contributing Writer
Despite a looming crunch on fleet
capacity leading to higher rates coupled with an expanding driver shortage, the motor carrier industry should expect things to get worse before it gets better. Those are the views shared by two
prominent transportation economists: Chief Economist Bob Costello with the American Trucking Associations, and Noël Perry, a partner with FTR Associates, a leading transportation data collector and forecaster. Perry, who is based in Harrisburg, Penn., also owns a research company, Transportation Economics. First, the bad news. The two
economists say carriers’ short-term 36
profits will be lessened by a tightening driver labor pool and higher driver pay. Carriers need to hire more drivers at the same time that drivers are becoming harder to find. Part of the reason this is happen-
ing is the improving economy is offer- ing potential truck drivers other career choices. The recovering construction sector added about 200,000 employees to its payrolls over the last year, Costello said, and those jobs don’t require a commercial driver’s license or specialty training, don’t require employees to be 21 and don’t require employees to spend nights away from home. To compete with that, driver pay
will have to increase. In fact, 70 per- cent of fleets surveyed by the American Trucking Associations said they had increased or were planning to increase
driver pay in 2013. “So pay is going up, but it’s going to go up even more as they try to recruit and retain more drivers,” Costello said. Compounding the problem are
new hours-of-service regulations that Perry said will require carriers to hire an additional 60,000 to 70,000 driv- ers. Making up that ground will require some time. Meanwhile, there are 26 regulatory issues – the biggest one being speed limiter requirements – that remain to be settled. He expects the pace of regulatory change to slow in the first half of 2014 but quicken at the end of the year through early 2015. Meanwhile, the carrier industry is
operating with almost 6 percent fewer trucks than it did in December 2007, and as of late November, the total num- ber of trucks on the road was only half
ARKANSAS TRUCKING REPORT | Issue 6 2013
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