Too many truckers these days. How can it be a viable career?

Because.

 

All y'all gonna be replaced by self driving trucks anyway.

 

A lot of kids don’t work. Times have gotten easy thanks to the hard work of older generations. Once you start working and making enough to owe taxes at the end of the year, suddenly keeping your money starts making sense.

 

Not all boomers... Just saying.

 

Open borders baby, open borders. It sucks out here.

 

Someone has to put the chains on, put the nozzles in the tanks, and open the doors to get the freight off and on, the ex driver will only be a slave to a machine and will be responsible to take over when things go wrong so that someone is to be blamed, can not blame a machine you know.

 

Truck driver is the most common occupation in the US by a large margin:
Map: The Most Common* Job In Every State

In the late 1980 we shipped all of this countries manufacturing overseas. So what is left for jobs is trucking this Chinesium crap to market. And the OP is right there is an excess of drivers not a shortage like the mega trucking companies claim.

With the excess of drivers, workers, and deregulation in the late 1970's truck driver wages have been declining and will likely continue in the future.

 

I am not driving yet but have worked in IT for 10 years and have been following technology progression. You’ve got at least 10 more years of driving left. You/might spend some of that time just riding along but not driving. There will be an interim period we’re people won’t totally trust the driverless technology and people/public will insist there be a driver onboard available to take over if equipment fails.

After that, then we can all take to repairing them.

 

*We used data from the Census Bureau, which has two catch-all categories: "managers not elsewhere classified" and "salespersons not elsewhere classified." Because those categories are broad and vague to the point of meaninglessness, we excluded them from our map.

The prominence of truck drivers is partly due to the way the government categorizes jobs. It lumps together all truck drivers and delivery people, creating a very large category.

It's like lumping together the farmer who grows the food, that factory workers that process it, the fry guy at McDonalds and the check out girl at the grocery store as food suppliers.

 

####ty weather cost of living