Front Line: Solutions Needed for Truck Driver Shortage

No one would dispute the importance of the trucking industry in the U.S. supply chain. Truck drivers transport more than 70 percent of the nation’s goods across the country. However, the industry has been hamstrung by a shortage of long-haul truckers. The American Trucking Associations (ATA) esti-mates that the industry will need to hire nearly 1.2 million new drivers over the next decade to re-place truckers leaving due to retirement or other reasons.

Increasing pay and other incentives have helped the industry attract new drivers, says Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, but there are not enough new drivers entering the industry each year to make a significant difference in the shortage — especially in the long-haul, for-hire truckload sector, the part of the industry most acutely impacted by the shortage.

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