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Comment by ericbrow | Hacker News Reader

I know a few truck drivers. They're not getting paid any more than in past years. Trucking companies may have increased demand, truckers are still getting paid trucker's wages. Enough to get by on at the cost of having to work 12+ hour days.

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Truck driver earnings today are roughly the same, in nominal dollars, as they were in 1975. So over the past 40 years they've taken a 70% pay cut.

They are getting squeezed so tightly a lot of them don't even make minimum wage.

They have seen a serious pay cut since the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, however 70% is a big exaggeration. That would imply the typical trucker was earning the equivalent of $135,000 per year in 1975 based on today's BLS numbers. And if it were accurate, I'm not sure how anyone could think that would be sustainable across a field flooded with 1.7 million drivers. With the pay decrease, there are dramatically more drivers today than in 1975 after adjusting for population growth. It's now providing a lot more jobs at a lower pay. The reason wages dropped was due to increased competition and deregulation, the value of their services declined. The reason wages were so high before was due to artificial labor scarcity and price controls via a cartel system (which Jimmy Carter fixed when he signed the MCA bill), ie it was fake.

Business Insider covered this extensively, they found the typical trucker has seen a 21% pay cut since 1980 in real terms -

"Business Insider compared freight wages, adjusted for inflation, from the BLS 1980 area wage survey and location-specific wage estimates from the BLS' Occupational Employment Statistics. For the five cities in which comparable data existed in both surveys, wages decreased by 21%, on average."

https://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-shortage-eld-mandat...

https://www.businessinsider.com/truck-driver-salary-decrease...

While a 135k sounds great, now consider they have to pay for their fuel, they are independent contractors generally. Then taxes on top of that. when truck drivers attempted to get a loan at a previous employer the conversation of "but I make a 100k a year" happened several times. No you really make 50k.

I used a 'typical' driver earning $75,000/year in 1975. $75,000 today, after expenses, is considered well-payed. New drivers earn $20,000 to $30,000/year.

According to the BLS CPI inflation calculator[1], $75,000 in 1975 would be equivalent to $362,000 today.

Business Insider has, shall we say, a very Capital-oriented view of the trucking industry, constantly shilling for low driver pay. Drivers who read it are always amazed that they never seem to mention that there would be way more drivers than needed if they could earn what they used to.

[1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=75000&year1=19...

Long haul trucking should go away, in favor of long haul rail. The reason the former can compete with rail is because of heavy government subsidy in the form of free highways.

Trucking causes most of the damage to highways (fatigue damage), and the environmental costs of trucks are huge (fuel, rubber dust, brake dust) compared to rail.

The US already moves over 40% of its total hauled tonnage by rail, more than twice that of the next largest economic entity, the EU, which is pushing about 20%. Long haul trucking isn't just competitive because the "subsidy" of not being banned from the federal interstate highway system. Pretty much all the freight that can be economically shipped by rail already is. Rail is inflexible and requires substantial investment in fixed infrastructure to add terminals. Intermodal facilities frequently add so much difficulty at both ends that it's often simpler and faster just have one truck drive 300 miles than to run a trailer 100 miles, piggyback by rail 200 miles, then another truck run the trailer from the intermodal terminal 100 miles to the destination. Charging trucks a toll to use the interstate or whatever isn't going to make rails magically appear over steep mountainous areas in the western US, or bridges for parallel tracks materialize over all the rivers and streams in the midwest/south, or new rights of way appear through the densely populated northeast. It's not like government sugar tariffs and corn subsidies combining to perversely make corn syrup cheaper than sugar. Rail and truck transport fill different niches and are both necessary to a functioning transport network.

No one is expecting magic, but if we priced in the externalities of trucking (mainly increased fuel taxes or tolls for road damage) that would help shift cargo transportation mix a little more towards rail.

I drive I5 regularly. It's flat all the way from Canada to San Diego. The train tracks run parallel to it.

It's also jammed with semis.

There's a lot of low hanging fruit in transitioning to rail.

Not everything is simply going north south on that axis

It doesn't have to remove every truck from I5 to be a huge win, either. Like I said, I5 is packed with trucks 24/7.

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