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America has a truck driver shortage

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#91

Post by gh02t »

dragontamer wrote: post #25
adrianN wrote: post #9

Becoming a truck driver currently doesn't seem a wise choice when self-driving trucks are on the horizon.

First, I disagree with that opinion politically. But that's not the main issue I have with the mindset. There are a HUGE number of business opportunities in the "short-term" 5 to 10 year market. About 15 years ago, when 3d-printing was "about to take off", I know of some entrepreneurs who started a 3d-printer / 3d-CNC Mill sharing service. It was an old-school service. Telephone based, door-to-door, handshakes kinda…

> and even today, there's no consumer-grade 3d printer you can buy that gives you the quality or speed of the ones at public universities.

Ehhhh, this is not really true. All (decent) printers operate at similar speeds and qualities these days, the main difference is that cheaper printers require a bit more fiddling and may not be as reliable if you're planning on running it constantly. A $4000 Ultimaker really doesn't perform any better than a $800 i3 Mk3, which in turn is only a bit better than a $400 CR-10.

There are industrial ($100K+) range printers by companies like Stratasys that are really a different class of machine that are dramatically more capable, but universities aren't really operating those and only laboratories with a specific use case buy them. Most universities are running the same sort of printers that consumers are buying, e.g. the one I attended had a fleet of Lulzbots. The appeal of services like you describe is that you don't have to operate the device yourself at all, nor do you need to make an initial investment if you only want one thing printed. Most people don't really have a need for a 3D printer nearly often enough to justify investing even $3-400 nor do they want to learn how to use one, hence there is a nice niche serving their infrequent needs.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#92

Post by [deleted] »

skookumchuck wrote: post #73
toomuchtodo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an enormous existing market for this. It's called intermodal transport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_transport

Given the interstates are clogged with long haul trucks, it obviously isn't nearly enormous enough.

[deleted]

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#93

Post by Applejinx »

5DFractalTetris wrote: post #55
maxxxxx wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example CEO salaries have been increasing rapidly for several decades. Are they so much better now than 40 or more years ago?

Their business intelligence practice has gotten so much faster that they're probably planning 100 years out.

To people following the way market whims have affected corporate planning, this is an extremely humorous hypothesis.

No, I don't think that they are.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#94

Post by mi100hael »

gaius wrote: post #52
dkasper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you pay truckers more at some point it doesn’t make economic sense to hire them. Some jobs are cost centers others are profit centers is one way of looking at it. Another factor is industries like trucking have very little differentiation so it’s a race to the bottom.

The goods being in location A rather than location B is the value add . Logistics is a profit centre, not a cost.

Of course the actual act of shipping the goods is a profit center. But payroll is a cost center in every industry I'm aware of. You can't just 10x your shipping costs in order to pay your truckers 10x the salary and expect to remain in business.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#95

Post by mistrial9 »

omg this is a massive con job - there are lines of trucks with non-english speaking drivers, waiting for twenty or thirty hours without accomodations, every week at the second busiest port in the western United States, right now. A glance shows signs for "contractors" and abundant evidence of labor abuse left and right. Who is being fooled by this story ?

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#96

Post by opencl »

chrisseaton wrote: post #64
lotsofpulp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make sense, you don’t need “infinite” amount of money. Pay a driver $200k a year. Or give them an 8 hour workday, and week off week on schedules so they can see their family. There’s many solutions, all of them involve incentivizing people to become drivers. If people want their Amazon orders so bad, they’ll end up paying. And if they don’t, then they have to re-prioritize what they want.

I wouldn't re-train as a truck driver for $200k a year? Would you? And you can't just say 'there's lots of people for whom $200k would be a lot of money' because there's a lot of people who whom $50k is a lot of money and those jobs aren't filled either. Short of literally offering a million dollars a year, it's got to be more complicated than how much you offer.

$200k is more than 97% of Americans make so I think it would fill the jobs pretty quickly. Getting a CDL only takes a couple of months, that would be way better ROI than most college degrees.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#97

Post by perl4ever »

Apart from not having a CDL at this time, there is a simple reason why no amount of money is going to make me get a truck driving job. Driving jobs I see advertised require an accident free record, and I had a fender bender a couple years ago (even though it was the other driver at fault). I have no tickets, suspensions, or anything else, but the accident automatically disqualifies you.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#98

Post by fred_is_fred »

corodra wrote: post #88

At a rough point in my life, I was a truck driver for CR England and Knight Transportation for a few days short of 7 months. You don’t start at 80,000 a year. That’s such a lie. You make about 600 a week to start, roughly, depending if you get enough miles. You don’t get the good routes, staying in well populated areas like the i5 corridor, at first. You stay in the middle of no where Arizona, North Dakota, etc. You…

Interesting what you said about I-5 vs middle of nowhere. As someone who has to drive from Denver to south east Texas a few times per year for family stuff, I'd almost always rather deal with an empty great plains highway than traffic on I-5. There are downsides, mainly food and hotel choices of course.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#99

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #71
rgbrenner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is 120k the right number? Have you taken some implicit biases of your own, and decided that's the worth of farm work? The correct price of farm labor is whatever it costs to obtain it. There is no cap. It's whatever it costs to persuade people to move from their comfy office to the farm.

At a certain point, the marginal value of a dollar to anyone isn't worth the work it would take to make that dollar. That value is different for different people based on the opportunity but it does add up in aggregate. If someone can choose to make $30K a year and adjust thier lifestyle accordingly instead of making $90K a year doing a job that they don't want to do, many people will choose the former. I would go so…

[deleted]

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#100

Post by lopmotr »

ams6110 wrote: post #45
yasp wrote: post #2

I am so sick of this perpetual fallacy about labor shortages. If you can't find enough workers it means you need to raise the price you're offering. (But yasp the article cited one particular firm has already increased prices 15% this year.) Doesn't matter. There is a certain price at which the market will clear. If the market isn't clearing it's because the price being offered is too low. Keep trying.

Conversely, maybe there really isn't a shortage, and trucking companies want to get more drivers so that they can pay less. So they push a narrative of being able to make 80 to $100,000, but don't disclose that it's only a tiny fraction of experienced or specially qualified drivers who actually earn that much

There's never a shortage. Shortage just means somebody wants to pay less than they're having to. Even if half the truck drivers vanished, there still wouldn't be a shortage. The price would simply go up and some people who would have shipped things by truck would produce those things closer to their destination or otherwise not need a truck afterall.
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