Buttigieg advocates for increased driver pay, truck parking

July 31, 2024

Mark Schremmer

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg advocated for competitive pay for truck drivers and investment in truck parking during a recent interview about the nation’s supply chain.

Although large fleets have consistently claimed that there is a driver shortage, Buttigieg turned the attention to these companies’ inability to retain drivers. At large fleets, driver turnover rates are often 90% or higher. Improving driver retention would be beneficial to the supply chain and to safety, as statistics show that experienced truck drivers are the safest drivers.

“We continue to see a real need for retention in the trucking sector,” Buttigieg said during a nearly 40-minute interview with Industry Dive on Wednesday, July 24. “I think that brings stability, but to do that, we’ve got to support drivers. We have to support drivers with competitive pay, with compensation structures that don’t leave them holding the bag when there are delays or disruptions that aren’t their fault.”

In recent years, the Department of Transportation has emphasized the need for recruiting women to the trucking industry. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included a provision to create a Women of Trucking Advisory Board. Buttigieg said the board has informed the DOT of steps to retain female drivers and all drivers.

“That has really helped us think about prioritizing efforts to support and retain drivers,” he added. “There have been periods where the gap that America has and what America needs is less than the number of people who left the career entirely that same year … We can’t let it just be a leaky bucket. Yes, we have to recruit. But we also need to retain. The best way to retain is by making sure this remains a great, welcoming job for everybody.”

Infrastructure and truck parking

Buttigieg said a trucker once reminded him that “infrastructure is our workplace.”

“That’s what we think about when we’re investing in truck parking,” Buttigieg said. “That’s not just a convenience thing. That’s a safety thing. We have to support this sector with good infrastructure, good quality of life, good compensation, and we’re continuing to emphasize all of those as part of the president’s Trucking Action Plan.”

The need for truck parking across the nation is well known. But establishing federal funding specifically targeted for truck parking has been a difficult hurdle to overcome.

Without a specific fund dedicated to truck parking, Buttigieg said the DOT has encouraged such states as South Dakota, Wyoming, Florida and Tennessee to use discretionary funding to tackle the problem.

“There is not a truck parking fund per se, but that has been an eligible use for programs … through the president’s infrastructure package,” Buttigieg said. “We’ve been able to add hundreds of truck parking spaces in recent rounds. But I also want to make sure that our state partners are thinking about this. Remember, the bulk of the funding that flows through our department is formula funding that goes to the states. And they decide how to use it. We want to remind them that truck parking projects are often projects that qualify. They have a lot of competition from different ideas on what to do with that funding, but we’ve certainly never regretted investing our discretionary funding at DOT on truck parking. We certainly encourage our counterparts at the state DOTs to do the same thing.”

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been touted as a way to improve the trucking industry.

Buttigeig said that the technology should be looked at with a combination of hope and caution.

“There’s a lot of promise in these technologies,” he said. “There are also lots of hazards to them, as there are with any technology. We shouldn’t be afraid of that. We shouldn’t use that as an excuse to hold on to the technologies that we felt served us well in the 20th century … But it also means that just because something sounds or looks cool, that we shouldn’t create it without some skepticism or at least inquiry into what it means.”

In May, the DOT published a notice seeking information regarding the opportunities and challenges regarding artificial intelligence in transportation. Those comments are due Thursday, Aug. 1. To submit a comment, go to Regulations.gov and enter Docket No. DOT-OST-2024-0049. LL