FMCSA Tackles Driver Retention Time

Nobody becomes a trucker to sit around and twiddle their thumbs while they wait for other people to get moving, so why is detention time so widespread amongst the trucking industry? That is a question the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is hoping to tackle by first conducting a study.

Details

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act instructs the FMCSA to study driver compensation, and with detention time often taking up 30% or more of a trucker’s time on average in some cases, it is not surprising that they would want to tackle that issue in order to increase industry retention.

At the Mid-America Trucking Show this year, FMCSA statistician says that what they want to do is “to look at ways to address potentially unsafe working conditions for the industry or unfair working conditions in the industry.” With the FMCSA estimating over $1.1 billion in lost wages every year due to this idle time, it certainly fits the latter.

With that in mind, the FMCSA is conducting a hypothetical study on the effects of various solutions, including requiring pay for drivers when idling. The study, which is set to conclude in July 2024, has been met with praise from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, who says the current business model of pay-per-mile forces business inefficiencies onto the drivers’ wallets.

Questions being asked in the study include:

• Where detention time is more abundant (port terminals or other facilities?.
• What is the correlation between detention time and safety violations?
• What are potential mitigation strategies to reduce detention time?

Conclusion

With detention time being a top concern for the person in the driver’s seat, it is important for both the trucking industry and the nationwide supply chain as a whole to tackle this problem as soon as possible. If the FMCSA’s numbers for lost wages are true and set at $25 per hour, that means truckers are losing 44,000,000 hours. If we assume an average of 50 miles per hour, that leads to 2.2 billion lost miles of delivery, which is further than the distance from Earth to Uranus. Needless to say, even a slight downtick in detention time would work wonders for the trucking industry and the entire American economy.

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