Are you your trucker’s keeper?

A truck driver who goes by the handle Long-Haul Paul once told me that the worst thing about driving a truck is that “the job can make a liar of you when you didn’t want to lie.” He explained to me that, like all of us, truck drivers have places to go and promises to keep between delivering their loads. The truck driver might promise to his daughter to be home in one week’s time for her birthday. But then, as Paul put it to me, “some knucklehead has got two pallets of cheddar that you’re waiting on, and he’s still in Kenosha…” “You make promises,” Paul explained, “and for whatever reasons there’s a systemic failure that prevents you from keeping your promise. That’s hard.” 

At the MIT FreightLab, we recently launched the Driver Initiative to look at utilization and quality of life of America’s truck drivers. We’ve interviewed dozens of truck drivers like Long Haul Paul, gone on ride-alongs with drivers as they made their appointed rounds, and systematically reviewed the electronic working logs of approximately 4,000 truck drivers from multiple companies over the years 2016 to 2020. What strikes us first? How much of American truck drivers’ valuable driver time appears to be squandered every day by delays during pickup and delivery at shipper facilities.

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“You could be there for six, eight, ten hours. I was at one customer for as many as 18 hours,” a 22-year veteran of the industry named Mark told me. Another driver named Desiree confirmed the problem to me from her own experience too: “Recently, in one week, I had two places I went that kept me 10 hours. I have unloaded freight. I have loaded freight. I've loaded these trailers. I know how long it takes. It doesn't take 10 hours.”

Our own research suggests that shippers themselves are not blind to this problem. To get another perspective on this issue, the FreightLab convened a small group of logistics and shipping managers to learn about the shippers’ perspective on driver detention. First, we surveyed the group regarding the detention experiences that they have observed at their own shipping and receiving facilities. Those results are shown below in Figure 1. The shippers corroborated what the drivers were telling us: Long delays can, and do, happen regularly. In Figure 1, we’ve fit normal distribution curves to the time estimates provided by the shippers we surveyed. In other words, the curves show the roughly estimated probability of a pickup or delivery taking a certain amount of time based on the information we received from the focus group. “Live loads” (pickups or deliveries where the truck driver must wait on the premises for the truck or trailer to be unpacked or packed) are by far the worst offenders, with an average detention duration of 2 to 2.5 hours, (the top peak of the orange and black curves). Drop-and-hook style loads (pickups or deliveries where the driver can drop off or pick up the trailer in the yard and leave) are much faster and are typically completed in 30 to 45 minutes (the peaks of the red and blue curves). Notice the distribution around the mean for “live load destination;” unlike the distribution curve for drop and hook deliveries, the curve for live loads are much longer and flatter, meaning that the time is far less predictable. Among the shipper networks we surveyed, live load destination appointments are almost equally likely to last two, three, or four hours! Can any system be truly optimized with that kind of variability? Like all of us, every driver has somewhere to be next—be it a personal or professional obligation. Every “trucker’s keeper” (such as a shipper, retailer, third-party logistics provider, or distributor) that passes along their own problems or inefficiencies to the driver also passes them along to the driver’s family and the driver’s other customers too. 

The top right-hand chart in Figure 1 shows the longest delay that the shippers recalled seeing recently in their own network with each circle representing one respondent’s answer. By the shippers’ own estimates, live load destination deliveries have lasted at the maximum 10, 20, and even 30 hours.  Although our focus group for this survey was relatively small, representative estimates corroborate the horror stories the drivers shared. America’s valuable and scarce truck driver resource is far from optimized in today’s supply chains.

The consequences of lost time

An astute reader might ask, “How can this be?” Headlines abound in the United States—and other countries too—that there is a massive shortage of truck drivers. That is, that there are too few truck drivers working to carry the loads generated by our modern economy. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t the drivers that we do have be working all-out to cover all that demand for freight transportation? 

This wasn’t what we found when we peered into truck drivers’ electronic work logs. Figure 2 summarizes the electronic work logs of approximately 4,000 long-haul truck drivers collected intermittently over four years into “box-and-whisker” plots. Within the colored boxes are the middle 50% of all observations of driving hours per calendar day, organized by the days of the week. Within the whiskers extending up and down from those boxes are the highest 25% of daily driving hours and the lowest 25%, respectively. Sets A1 and A2 are from one mid-sized trucking company and represent 2,216 drivers. Set B is from one very large national carrier and represents 1,530 drivers. All in all, Figure 2 summarizes approximately 310,000 actual truck driver work days. In dashed lines across the top of Figure 2 is the federally set driving maximum for freight-carrying truck drivers of 11 hours per day. 

As my students and I at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics analyzed this data, we found that long-haul truck drivers across these companies and across four years, all drove on average about 6.5 to 7 hours per calendar day. Truck drivers in the United States are legally allowed to drive for 11 hours per day. This unfortunately implies that 4 to 4.5 hours of driving time, or roughly 35% of America’s daily trucking capacity is left on the table every day. Even in a time of perceived shortage. 

The first consequence then of lengthy and unpredictable delays at shipping and receiving appears to be severe underutilization of the valuable driver resource. Where do the 4 to 4.5 missing hours of daily freight carrying capacity go every day? It appears that, at least some of the time, that valuable capacity currently withers away at shippers’ own facilities as truck drivers wait for hours on end to be called up for loading and unloading. Another way then of seeing the challenge of the perceived driver shortage is not as a problem of headcount, but rather as a chronic crisis of underutilization.

What is to be done?

This problem is not unsolvable. Supply chains are, after all, run by and for human beings. And we human beings are remarkable in our consistent ability to solve the problems that we are effectively incented to solve. Shippers should know that incentives to improve their throughput times are coming. Concurrent with our research efforts, entrepreneurial solutions have emerged in this space. Information aggregators like Dock 411 and True Load Time collect truck driver experiences and wait times at different shipping locations across the United States. Some digital freight brokerages have also been offering truck drivers the opportunity to rate the shippers that they service—similar to Uber drivers’ ratings of customers. Presumably, shippers whose ratings lag in these aggregated systems will face lower tender acceptance and higher rates from carriers. It is also possible that the federal government could get involved in codifying such incentives too. As I recently testified before Congress in October 2022, the government could award supply chain health letter grades to American shipping facilities, similar to the board of health sanitation letter grades that are posted outside restaurants. Lower letter grades might deter carriers away from substandard performers, and thereby apply effective market pressure for shippers to make improvements. 

Luckily for shippers, our data suggests that such improvements are within reach. In fact, they already happen every day. Across multiple data sets representing many thousands of delivered loads, we’ve observed a curious but consistent result. The time that a truck is made to wait for loading and unloading is consistently predicted by its time of arrival and is inversely related to the number of trucks arriving at the same time. Put differently, it’s the exact opposite problem that you or I might experience trying to get a drink at a busy bar. In freight appointments, when everyone wants a dock door, everyone gets a dock door. This tends to happen in the mornings. Later arrivals, particularly those after typical “first shift” work hours at the distribution center or warehouse represent the long trail of trucks that are more often made to wait for extended periods of time. The problem then is not a hardware problem. It’s a software problem. Our existing facilities can go faster. We see it every day. But we only staff and manage to do such quick loading and unloading during the most convenient arrival times. For shippers, this means that adjusting staffing and warehouse policy to accommodate later arrivals—including those that come after the scheduled appointment time—could go a long way towards fixing the problem of driver detention and chronic underutilization. 

Dignity matters

But it's the human factor of this problem that troubles me the most and actually keeps me up at night. Have you ever been in an airport when a flight delay is announced? In these cases, the business travelers and vacationers are usually given a new boarding time and allowed to wait in the comfort of the terminal with full access to restaurants, shops, and professionally cleaned bathrooms for a few brief hours until they are re-planed. During the delays that truck drivers in the U.S. endure, even basic human necessities are not always available. During those 6-, 8-, or even 10-hour freight delays that plague modern American supply chains, the truck drivers don’t even know when they might get called up. They are too often expected to sit idly in their trucks, lying in wait for extended periods to pounce when called upon for an available door. Sadly, drivers also report that many shippers expect them to endure these long waits without even access to a bathroom. Said one driver, “We're there for hours on end, but they expect us to use a bottle in the truck or a bucket or a Porta John that hasn't been cleaned in two weeks. … The health department should be notified.”

As I’ve researched this topic, I’ve been saddened to discover how often in contemporary American supply chains we mistreat our drivers in this way. By one driver’s estimate, 40% of the facilities he visits regularly detain drivers for extended periods of time and/or do not offer basic bathroom amenities to the truck drivers who service them. Of course, I want American supply chains to be as time-efficient and cost-competitive as they can be. And I hope that our research lab’s work will play a role in helping to achieve these goals. But I think we should also hold ourselves to a more fundamental and humanist standard too: Upholding the basic conditions of human decency and dignity for all the many people who make supply chains function, truck drivers included.