Buttigieg to speak at 2022 Transportation Research Board meetings

The Transportation Research Board’s annual meetings will feature U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as the keynote speaker.

The 101st annual meetings are planned for Jan. 9-13 in Washington, D.C., and Buttigieg is scheduled to speak from 1:30-3 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Jan. 12. Buttigieg will provide opening remarks and then participate in a “fireside chat” with members of the Transportation Research Board’s executive committee.

TRB’s annual meeting covers all transportation modes with sessions and workshops addressing topics of interest to policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers and representatives of government, industry, and academic institutions. This year’s theme will be “Innovating an Equitable, Resilient, Sustainable and Safe Transportation System.”

Past meetings have focused on such topics as automation.

A schedule for the 2022 meetings can be found here.

Supply chain issues

A focus of the U.S. Department of Transportation since Buttigieg took control early in 2021 has been to fix issues within the supply chain and to improve driver retention.

Over the summer, Buttigieg participated in a driver retention roundtable discussion and said that the industry needs make keeping good drivers a priority rather than just searching for new recruits.

“It strikes me that another way to think of it is something of a leaky bucket, and that no matter how many people we pour into the industry for a moment, it’s not going to do us much good unless the jobs are reliable enough, secure enough and stable enough that people want to remain within the industry,” Buttigieg said. “And, hopefully, also stay with an individual employer long enough … to see some of the safety gains that we know correlate not only with time behind the wheel … but with time in a given organization.”

Buttigieg was named to President Biden’s supply chain task force and played a role in the creation of the White House plan to strengthen the trucking workforce.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s message to Buttigieg and the Biden administration has been that the profession of truck driver can be made a more attractive long-term career by improving compensation, creating more truck parking, and easing unnecessary regulations.

In November, OOIDA asked Buttigieg to use $1 billion in discretionary funds for the creation of truck parking. LL