Big government is ruining trucking

With Christmas right around the corner, the supply chain crisis, and what or whom to blame for it, is a hot topic this season.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal recently published a pair of articles about a purported nationwide shortage of truck drivers causing delivery delays. According to Business Insider, however, the reports of a driver shortage are “overblown.” Time, too, rebutted the claims with a column declaring that “The Truck Driver Shortage Doesn’t Exist.”

(My theory is that all the sane truck drivers in America abandoned their rigs and ran for the hills the moment they heard Joe Biden say he “used to drive an 18-wheeler.” Egads!)

What, then, are we to believe? Why, the truck drivers themselves, of course! So off to Sapp Bros. Truck Stop in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, I go.

“They say there’s a shortage, then how come I can’t find a place to park?!” a weathered, twenty-four-year veteran truck driver with soft eyes and a grizzled beard named Jack exclaims to me over his plate of chicken-fried steak. “Trucks are lined up right there on the fog line [outside a rest stop], an inch from my mirrors.”

With this, he mimics a jerky, swerving motion that causes me to jump back in my booth.

“If you could change one thing about the trucking industry,” I ask Jack, “what would it be?”

“They won’t leave the logbooks alone,” he says. “Ever since they mandated ELDs, this industry got stupid.”

ELDs are “electronic logging devices.” Since 2017, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has mandated that most commercial drivers have ELDs hardwired to their engines to track their hours of service. That means truckers have a fourteen-hour window in which they can drive eleven hours, and they are required to be off-duty for at least ten consecutive hours.

“The ELDs make things a lot more difficult,” Ron, who drove trucks for fifteen years before going to work first in the strip mines and now for an oil company, tells me. “You’re only allowed to drive eleven hours a day. How many people are only awake eleven hours a day? I work [my current job] twelve, fourteen-hour days sometimes. You tell a truck driver he can’t work more than eleven, then make him take a half-hour break, there’s ten-and-a-half hours a day you’re drivin’. And you’re not allowed to log more than X miles in so many hours, so you’re kinda screwed there, too. You can’t average seventy miles an hour. I don’t stop. When I was driving, I went all day.”

Truck driving is not for the faint of heart. The job is a tough one that often requires drivers to be away from their homes and loved ones for extended periods. Still, statistics show that attracting truck drivers isn’t a problem, but retaining them is.

“According to a survey by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), the ELD mandate is the biggest concern in the trucking industry,” reports CDLjobs.com. “The biggest concern surrounding ELDs is that they may force a decrease in driving hours and thus hurt productivity. It could also lead to discomfort for drivers.”

The truckers I spoke to explained how the mandate cuts both ways by limiting drivers’ output and making them drive when they don’t want to.

“It forces you to drive, because your electronic log starts,” says Jack. “If you want to stop, you can’t. If you run into a friend and want to visit over a cup of coffee for a couple hours while you wait for rush hour to die down, you can’t.”

On the other hand, Ron says, “You used to have an 8-2 split [eight hours of driving, two hours of rest]. Now they don’t let you do that. There’s a mandated thirty-four-hour reset period. You lose thirty-four hours a week that you could be drivin’, because you’re allowed seventy hours in eight days. If you hit that, you have to stop for thirty-four hours and reset your clock. I got stuck in New Mexico for seventy-two hours sitting at a truck stop one time. I was driving teams [taking turns driving with another trucker], and we both ran out of hours.”

As a team driver, Ron used to leave Pennsylvania on a Saturday and make it to California and back by the following Sunday, taking four-hour breaks with his driving partner. Under the new regulations, it takes five days just to get to California, then drivers are required to take a break and reset their clocks once they get there.

“You can do it faster than that, if they’d leave ya alone,” Ron says. “An hour a day makes a big difference when you’re tryin’ to get somewhere. And if you don’t stay out, you don’t make any money…”

This article was originally published by The Spectator. Read the full piece here.