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Truck Driver Shortage
March 19, 2008

Photo - Mack Trucks

DRIVER SHORTAGE 

You have seen the match book covers, magazine ads, and the ads on TV for truck driving schools. Everything in the USA moves by truck. Even the things that move by railroad finish their trip by truck. The NBC Evening News reported a story this week that seems to be in all the media, about how bad the driver shortage is and how it is slowing down improvements in the economy. Cargo waits while trucks sit idle because there are not enough drivers to fill the seats. If the job paid more, would people want it? If there were some way to improve the life style, would people want the job of long haul trucker? So far, the trucking companies have not been able to attract the numbers of people they need. 

Estimates are that the USA is about 54,000 drivers short of what the nation needs and by 2014 - just 6 years from now, the nation will be 111,000 drivers short of what is needed to keep the economy moving. A full page color ad in a Traverse City newspaper offers truck drivers a $10,000 New Hire Performance Bonus (and is having trouble finding drivers). One trucking company I talked to on the phone says that they have about 121% turn over in a year and that a driver cost the company $100,000 per year in pay and benefits. The trucks need to run as close to 24/7 as possible so many trucks have two drivers. The drivers that trucking companies have try to make up for the drivers that are missing by driving more hours than is safe. A rollover accident, where a semi just lays down on its side costs the trucking company an even $1,000,000 when all the fines, repairs, etc when totaled - every time it happens. Fiery crashes cost the trucking companies even more.


Photo - Mack Nav all-in-one display

"Finding drivers will grow more difficult in coming years, the ATA predicts, as adverse demographic trends limit the size of the pool of workers that traditionally fill truck driving jobs. For example, one-fifth of all heavy-duty truck drivers are aged 55 or older. Replacements must be found for nearly all of these because only a small fraction of heavy-duty truck drivers work past age 65. The ability to replace these drivers will be further constrained by insufficient growth of new entrants into the labor force, which is expected to decelerate after 2007 from a 1.4% annual pace to only 0.5% growth in 2014. More importantly, the number of men aged 35 to 54, which make up the primary driver demographic, will be flat or declining over the next 10 years."
-- http://www.logisticstoday.com  

This sounds like a situation that a handful of automation and control engineers working outside of normal channels could fix. If you would like to do something about this national problem contact me here at the AIM workshop and we will see what we can do about it.   I am sure the other readers will want to know what we come up with.

WOOD FUEL 

The age of the cheap foreign oil that trucks were designed to run on is over. Prices are up and are not expected to ever come down again. The world demand for oil has reduced the United States’ influence on prices. We are now just another customer of oil countries that hate us. Today I got a call from a person who is doing something about this situation on his own. He has operated a wood gasifier for some time now on his pickup truck - this allows him to fuel his ordinary gasoline engine with wood gas. 

Traverse City is a heavily wooded area and most of the locals use wood heat to some degree. The cheap, readily available fuel appeals to the outdoorsy type of people who settle here. It requires a great deal of healthy outdoor exercise to heat with wood and that appeals to some people. Running complex manual gasifier and trying to drive at the same time is not a good combination. The call today was to see if I knew of anyone who could build the circuit boards and automate the controls on his gasifier. I checked with Gene Crocker, one of the AIM volunteers, and he said the he would be glad to do it. More information about wood gas is available on the net http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas  


GO ROBOTS !

Paul F. Grayson - Chief Engineer
AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL MAGIC, LLC
Racing to build technology that saves soldier's lives.
390 4-Mile Rd. S.
Traverse City, MI 49686-8411
(231) 946-0187, (231) 883-4463 Cell
pgrayson@aimagic.org  
http://aimagic.org
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/robotcluboftraversecitymi/  
http://www.controleng.com/blog/1180000318.html  

Posted by Paul Grayson on March 19, 2008 | Comments (2)