What is a shuttle driver in the trucking industry?

A shuttle driver is like a yard goat with a longer leash. Short, routine loads to move equipment or repetitive loads between two points.

Let's say on one end of town they have a customer that does a lot of shipping with Pyle so they need empties, but their suppliers use different carriers so they don't have as many Pyle trailers as they need. In other places in town they have customers who have empty trailers, but they don't ship with Pyle or don't ship as much freight as they have trailers for. The shuttle driver moves the equipment to where it's needed.

I once drove for a bakery. The shuttle drivers there would transport the bread from the bakery to the warehouse three miles down the road all day long. Sometimes they would, "bank" bread by driving it to a refrigerated warehouse at a different location. When the bakery was shut down for maintenance or holidays they would transport the frozen bread to the regular warehouse.

 

A lot of your food service drivers get trailers shuttles to them from the warehouse.

 

I did shuttle driving for Sysco. Basically moving loaded trailers from the Distribution center to a couple drop yards for the delivery drivers then bringing empties back. The drop yards were between 45min and 1.5 hrs away from the DC. Having the drivers start from the drop yards meant they had enough hours to do their deliveries.

It wasn't hard work (not as easy as OTR) even with building and breaking down doubles, but it was quite fast paced as the drivers had specific start times and the trailers had to be located before the start of their shifts.

 

Can sometimes be an " out and back". Drive 5 hours to a Meet Point..... Swap trailers and you both head back to your origin point.

 

Shuttle usually means short loads to the same place all day back and forth. P&G around me does a shuttle 10 miles from the plant to the DC. Always looking for drivers.

 

In food service shuttle drivers don’t usually make as much as delivery drivers but when you put you’re time in that’s where you want to be no more throwing cases. I’ll take 80k all day over 100 and up for throwing cases. I run around 600 miles a night doing dc trailer exchanges most shuttle drivers are just doing doubles to drop yards. But like I said that’s a earned position I don’t usually see to many openings for food service shuttle/transit drivers.

 

The Sysco DC I worked out of hired me off the street to do shuttles. It seems they couldn't keep drivers in that position.

Maybe paying less than $50K per year had something to do with it. I got laid off last year due to Covid and on more than one occasion they have called asking me to come back. The answer is always no. Now if they paid $80k as mentioned above...

 

That’s insane less then 50k! Is this dc located in the middle of nowhere or something. I would think Sysco would pay y’all better then that that’s shameful. Guess that’s why they hire guys off the street. You would think they would want their most experienced older drivers to be able to go into that role and have those guys be able to look forward to stop throwing cases eventually. Sysco can afford to pay better then that!!!