The American Trucking Industry Wants You and your Family Dead
Watering down standards is not just for College Admissions.
Back in June, the folks over at Palladium Magazine put out quite an excellent deep dive looking into a problem everyone with eyes can see - that the quality and service of nearly everything in our society is slowly slipping, that things aren’t quite the way they once were.
The piece in question, titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis takes a long and hard look at what is causing the degradation to so many systems which keep our material reality functioning, and is very much worth your time to read.
The basic premise of the essay is that due to the lowering of standards across the board, oftentimes at the behest of social movements informed by the poison of identity politics, critical systems and infrastructure are no longer functioning at the highest levels, and that this problem is getting worse, and not being corrected.
The opening passage ties together many events that news and information junkies such as myself and many readers of this Substack were most likely aware of -
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
Anyone who pays any attention to the trucking media, or the regular media when they decide to run a story on this week’s horrific and deadly crash involving a Big Rig, will understand the relation here.
Tragic crash on I-85 in Anderson County results in the deaths of two individuals after a collision with a disabled truck.
I-75 in Sumter County reopened after deadly dump truck crash.
Truck driver watching TikTok at time of deadly crash.
7 people in passenger van died after being struck by semi-truck on I-5
Driver killed after semi-truck smashes into train in rural Missouri
Truck driver perishes after crashing off Will Rogers Turnpike into parking lot, striking 2 semis and a pickup
Many regular readers of this Substack will have some idea about how the driver shortage narrative myth propagated by the likes of The American Trucking Association is a primary factor behind the real problem, which is retaining drivers in an industry that, broadly speaking, doesn’t pay enough relative to the demands and skill required of the job, nor properly recognize performance and service from the drivers who have stuck with it for many years.
When constantly churning through new people and failing to retain experienced truckers, it only follows that a great many drivers on the road are inexperienced, oftentimes grossly so. I have referenced this study many times which shows that inexperience is a major factor in truck collisions, and a study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration drew similar conclusions.
And this is before we even consider the utter corruption within certain states DMV, and the hundreds of CDLs they issue without even testing the drivers.
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Given the obvious fact that inexperienced drivers often cause, or are more likely to find themselves involved in highway collisions or other driving related major incidents, you would think our benighted leaders and noble bureaucrats would be doing everything possible to increase barriers to entry, maybe make licensing regimes more stringent so as to weed out poor drivers, and be forcing trucking companies to do something about their massive retentions problems, such that we would have more competent and safer drivers on the road.
You, as always, would be incorrect.
From the great industry reporter John Gallagher over at FreightWaves comes news of the opposite -
The training departments of three large truckload companies want to be exempted from federal rules for entry-level driver training because they claim it is causing them to be short of both instructors and drivers.
Drivers of the three companies — Heartland Express (NASDAQ: HTLD), Contract Freighters Inc. (CFI) and Millis Transfer (acquired by Heartland Express in 2019) — receive training from Millis Training Institute (MTI), the training division of Millis Transfer.
MTI, on behalf of the three companies, has asked the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for an exemption from regulations requiring that a behind-the-wheel (BTW) training instructor have at least two years’ experience driving a commercial motor vehicle or two years’ experience as a BTW instructor.
“MTI has had CDL training since 1991 and has always required our ‘OTR’ [over the road] trainers to have one year minimum experience in order to train our students,” wrote MTI Training Director William Griffin in the companies’ exemption application. “We have an extensive ‘safety evaluation’ process and only those that pass our evaluation process will be allowed to train. We have been extremely successful with this policy.
Well, I guess if you want a kid who just turned three years old, and has only just completed potty training herself, but still needs mom or dad to wipe her rear end, to be the trainer for the one year old younger sibling in the art of shitting on the can, that’s one way to do it.
You can read the whole thing here.
MTI “Training” ‘Director’ William Griffin is both heavily invested in the driver shortage narrative, and the art of Orwellian Double Speak; he knocks it out of the park with this sentence -
“If we are denied this exemption, we are all in agreement that our schools would suffer, hence reducing the growth of our companies and therefore reducing the number of safe drivers that we could potentially put on the road with a career in trucking and reducing the shortage of truck drivers.”
Well, yes, it is true that your schools would suffer in being denied this exemption, and that is a good thing. You should suffer, and, in fact, it is my contention that your school shouldn’t even exist, at least in its present form.
”reducing the number of safe drivers”
There is no way in hell a ‘truck driver’ with only one year of experience should be responsible for training a new driver candidate, full stop. One year of experience is nothing - in (somewhat) civilized countries like Australia or New Zealand, you must have one year of experience with their equivalent of a CDL-B before you can even begin to learn to drive an 18 wheeler. Somehow all of the freight Down Under gets delivered, and their economies continue to function. Hmmm. Oh, and their drivers are also mostly paid by the hour, and on average, earn more than American truckers. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
In my own personal experience, I didn’t train anyone until I had already been on the road for 7 years, and when my boss at the time asked me to train someone, I expressed some concern that riding with me for a few weeks wouldn’t be enough time for the trainee to learn everything they needed to know to even just get started.
Perhaps this approach is overly cautious, maybe it was some modesty on my part, but either way, the current regime of CDL Mills throwing kids into the deep end without water wings is nothing but a highly dangerous method of subsidizing cheap freight.
The driver shortage narrative is pure bunkum - our economy has spent 40 years slowly but surely adapting to lower and lower trucking rates, which are only possible because many sectors of the industry ‘churn and burn’ through people, with this churn being the primary model of turning a profit at very large fleets. In a country that claims to be ‘free market capitalist’, and trucking being largely populated by BoomerCons who claim to be anti-government intervention, it is a curious thing indeed that wide swathes of the industry having 100%+ turnover rates being subsidized by state funded training programs goes unquestioned. Maybe my leftist friends are correct - externalizing the costs of training onto the taxpayer, and then distributing the costs across society in increased insurance premiums and human suffering which flow from collisions, is a feature of our current mode of ‘capitalism’, and not a bug.
Some information on the number of CDLs circulating in society, care of the folks at CDL - Drivers Unlimited -
There are nearly 9 million licensed commercial drivers in America - and with only 3 and change million jobs requiring a CDL, there is no shortage, no requirement for taxpayers to subsidize training more, no reason for Biden to throw 18 year olds into the OTR Meat Grinder, and no reason to poach more of them from other countries.
Maybe next time you and your family are out on a road trip, taking in all of the beauty that America has to offer, have a look around at some of the trucks you are sharing the road with. Before you leave, you should familiarize yourself with the companies who have such high churn, and rely on trainers who barely have any experience themselves, and then ask yourself - do I need to get off the road before having to trust a system which has come to terms with results like this, passes those costs onto society, and could possibly kill me and my kids?
Will America survive the competence crisis? It seems like our trucking industry needs to ask itself this question, and then the public has to ask itself what reforms are needed before this critical part of our supply chains, the very blood which courses through the veins of our material economy, succumbs to this man made competence leukemia.