In the midst of a global supply chain crisis, MIT's Dr. David Correll and his colleagues have been researching why in the world long-haul truckers only average 6.5 to 7 hours of driving per day. Dr. Correll, research scientist and lecturer, focuses his studies on the working experience of the American long-haul trucker through the MIT FreightLab Driver Initiative.
"We're facing it, and we can't figure it out,” he said. “We look a lot at ELD data. We see drivers getting around six and a half to seven hours driving a day on average. So there's a lot of hours left on the table. ... And we see that, yet we read the news and the news says, 'Oh, there's a big truck driver shortage! There's a big truck driver shortage!' I don't understand how something can be both scarce and underutilized at the same time. If we're so short on drivers, why aren't drivers getting all the miles they want?”
Earlier this year, two other working truckers and I were invited to weigh in on this as part of a panel hosted by the podcast "MIT Supply Chain Frontiers" -- you can hear the results above. Correll and his team analyzed ELD data to uncover the (perhaps) puzzling trend.
I was joined by Desiree Wood, well-known to regular readers as the president of Real Women in Trucking, and the 2016 Goodyear Highway Hero finalist Mark Cavanagh of U.S. Express.
Cavanagh speculated that, for one, drivers may be unschooled on the finer points of the hours of service and not "getting the knowledge of how to use their hours correctly."
