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Comment by dntrkv | Hacker News Reader

There are 3.6M truck drivers in the US, and this number has only been increasing. The shortage has nothing to do with self-driving trucks. The problem is it’s a dangerous, high-stress, and comparatively, low pay job. It has only gotten worse with all of the additional regulations in the past 5-10 years. Not saying I disagree with all the regulations, but the implementation needs work. Truckers are constantly on edge nowadays.

Anyways, if they wanna solve the shortage, pay them more. Simple as that.

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One group I worked with they were yelling they did not have enough drivers. But we sent someone over and watched how they ran their op for a few weeks. The real issue was they had one guy who would only come in at 6:30AM sharp. The entire org had somehow worked itself around that one hard requirement. He was also the guy who signed off on shipments. So lines of trucks would sit waiting empty because no one could leave until it was signed off. They thought they needed more drivers because shipments were low. Just to keep up and more loaders to load the items. Drivers would show at 9 and would not even roll out until 1. When the real solution was to hire 2 more people to sign off on orders and put them on different shifts. Throwing more money at the problem would never fix it. They just did not have enough space for that many drivers to show up at the same time.

They had designed their whole shipping system around max capacity at a particular time. They started adding more shipping capacity to cover it. When they really needed to shift when the work was happening. Once they fixed that they actually found they had overstaffed on drivers. They quickly found those guys more work as they were putting off orders because of capacity.

The new rules are brutal on that sort of fix.

That's a Goldratt Theory of Constraints kind of solution right there.

very much so. A lot of LTL and shipping companies should re-evaluate how and when they load things. The rules changed fairly recently and those will create all sorts of spots like that. So the old routes and loadtimes probably no longer make sense. Where 1 guy coming in at a particular time was fine but now with the way shifts are going to be you may need 2 and shift the pickup time out by x hours. That sort of thing. The rule changes also constrained the actual number of hours drivers can do (so there is an increased demand for drive time). When I started with this stuff 20+ years ago it was 5x5 shifts were common and legal. But now you will have to make sure you give people their weekends and core sleep times and about a dozen countdown clocks per driver. Getting that scheduling right will be quite the linear algebra optimization problem.

It’s not the regulations causing problems - it’s the price pressure seeking lower and lower standards. The rest of the drivers on the road don’t want to share it with a truck driver on two hours of sleep, steering 15 tons of truck and cargo.

Nor do they want to be around vehicles that have skipped their brake maintenance because they pushing operational hours to the edge.

Agreed 100%. The problem is the regulations have increased the difficulty and stress of the job while the pay has steadily decreased. That’s why my solution is to pay more, not remove the regulations.

Though there is plenty of room for improvement in the regulations. They need to provide some leeway for drivers that have been stuck in traffic for hours and can’t complete a load that’s just a couple miles away.

Also, you have no idea how many truckers work around these regulations and go through insane hoops just so they can fudge the numbers. When you see that happening en masse, your regulations probably need some tuning.

In the EU the transport regulations are doubled by workplace security, capped maximum work hours and minimum wage regulations. So far socialism has somehow worked fine in this sector. Still, 70% of the trucking market is served by East Europeans and Westen companies have registered fleets in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria and are using staff from these markets specifically. It's not only because of staffing pressure, but also heavy regulation in the West.

I agree the solution is to pay more - that would also reduce the level effort being expended to bypass regulations by independent drivers. The problem is the independent drivers are squeezed between the logistics companies and the regulations. They need to form a union to get both better pay and better implemented regulations - but that’s difficult the way the market for their services has been evolved to break them down into individual contractors.

They can't just double salaries and still expect to have customers.

At some point, companies will simply not purchase the goods if they can't truck it economically or will look for alternatives.

If there wasn't a shortage then sure they might lose money by paying drivers more, but the supposed shortage of labor hurts more (it leads to business that they don't do at all)

What are the low-cost alternatives to trucking?

Rail freight is cheaper than trucking in general

You still have to provide last mile delivery, loading and unloading operations thus it takes more time. Plus adjust the logistics chain. If you have big warehouses built for trucked goods, tough luck.

Too bad the rail industry doesn't care to compete in general. Trucks run when you want them to. Rail means you need to rearrange your shipping to fit them.

There are exceptions, but when it doesn't take much digging to discover rail doesn't care to get more of this business even though they could with a bit of customer service.

Maybe comparing the bill from a trucking company against the bill from the rail; How much does it cost to get that freight from the train station to my delivery location, though?

Is it really so different? Trains offload at depots; similarly trucks don't take every piece of cargo on board directly from A to B.

> At some point, companies will simply not purchase the goods if they can't truck it economically or will look for alternatives.

I don't know why you were downvoted. Maybe people assumed a political position, but AFAICT you're just stating facts.

If trucking in its current form becomes unsustainable then it'll evolve into leaner alternatives, or we'll simply pay more / consume less. Nothing wrong with that.

I think it’s more the “assume a perfect spherical cow” style of argument. It’s true that people will stop buying if the shipping price hits some incredibly high level but it’s a complex system where driver pay is just a small part. The most likely outcomes are things like raising their own prices, becoming more economical in their use or packaging, shifting the delivery times & intervals, etc. — things which happen all of the time without reaching such dramatic levels. The data I’ve seen has the cost of fuel being right behind compensation in cost and that fluctuates all the time without people halting purchases.

Some customers won’t buy but the driver’s pay is only one part of the total cost and most businesses aren’t running on margins that tight for very long. If shipping prices drift up, they’ll adjust their usage or raise their own prices rather than voluntarily go out of business.

True, but isn't that the while point of the supply-demand curve? Not enough drivers to cover the work means that prices should go up, and some marginal customers will go away, until the whole thing balances.

It's odd the way people understand that increased prices will lower demand, but not see that demand will also drive prices.

That just means there is no shortage.

Truck transportation is a bidding market. I think this is exactly what's going on, up to the point customers have private fleets that are losing people.

Re: pay, here's a comment of mine from another thread on this topic. You need to take into consideration that there are two sides to this market -- the supply side and demand side:

There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.

It’s very essential, but it is independently transactional - I.e. very not sticky.

It’s the same reason that buying a drink is independently transactional and competitive vs buying health insurance is very non competitive and very sticky.

> There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.

Why should truck drivers subsidize these companies, then?

A company should not be in business if it isn't sustainable without screwing the workers.

Why this is so poorly understood by people is beyond.

Small businesses always complain about how they can’t afford to pay more. But if you need to pay less than a minimum wage to make your business viable then… it’s not viable.

Well..if there were laws to enforce a higher minimum wage, all of your competitors would have to do it too and the price of products across your industry would rise.

The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.

Over the years we’re in the same boat and the cycle begins again with a new minimum wage - that’s ok.

> The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.

that is a myth. Only people on the bottom can afford to spend more. For the rest of us we don't get a raise.

With higher wages prices need to go up for the same profit. Supply and demand may or may not allow prices to go up. Some marginal products go off the market. Some prices go up. People adjust to buying less things because they can't afford them. Slowly inflation catches up and wages are back to "too low" - this is a bad thing.

> Well..if there were laws to enforce a higher minimum wage…

So why don't you argue to make the minimum wage $10 million a year? Then everyone is rich. Hell, I wonder why the Sudan hasn't thought of that.

There is surely an upper-bound on the minimum wage in an economy? What if you are already at it?

> What if you are already at it?

What if people _think_ we're at it because they don't factor in food stamps, Medicaid, etc.

If the minimum was a _livable_ wage, maybe we could get more people off of so called "entitlements".

You're basically saying that both demand is exceeding supply (=shortage) and that demand is weak enough that supply increases aren't worth it. That's not a shortage. That's just a price equilibrium i.e. business as usual.

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