Has anyone ever seen evidence of the driver shortage?

Except for that 6-foot-tall gorgeous blonde I saw at the Petro in Lebec. She was way too hot to be a trucker, but she was in the parts/accesories section of the store.

 

I'm making 25 hr driving a twin screw bobtail tank. With no chains needed.

 

Good thread! Originally getting into the industry a few years ago, I was told there are 2 million cmv drivers on the road. Not too long ago I read a new study that states 8 million. If the companies continue dropping pay/hire bonuses/refusing to recognize the 34 hour reset, it's painfully obvious that the crap training schools have achieved their agendas.

 

What, no sears catalog type bols to keep you busier than 15 mins? Lol

 

And you're in Boston, I'll stick with chains

 

More and more drivers are entering this field so I would have to say there's no driver shortage but professional drivers are declining.

 

This is very true but increasing is misinformation and assumptions. The driver's shortage myth was created to keep the revolving door going - not to allow foreign labor to enter the market, that's plain dumb.

The problem with the upper midsize fleets (or carriers) and the mega carriers is that we are treated as a commodity and nothing else. SO how does one use a commodity? They consume it, and drivers are consumed and thrown away.

The reason why we have the CSA, the CDL program and all of it is because the US DOT has to deal with this abuse of people being hired who can't drive in the first place, put in charge of a truck that ends up into an accident. IT isn't the early 70's where we didn't have a huge amount of traffic as we do now so now risks go up a lot. So the response was to change how we were licensed, how the driving records were kept and how the bad drivers could be effectively removed.

So these fleets created this revolving door situation where a driver gets hired to replace one that was canned because he wasn't trained right and got into trouble. They couldn't keep the door moving fast enough so they created this myth that we have a drivers shortage and need more drivers feeding the system as a whole.

As I pointed out in another thread, they are tightening up the training requirements and a few of you think that this is a bad thing created by the megas but it is a very good thing because it may slow down that revolving door which we need.

 

Try the search box here been cussed and discussed plenty of times already