The Federal Motor Safety Administration (FMCSA) recently opened a new website to help 18- to 20-year-olds who possess the US military equivalent of a commercial driver’s license find and apply for jobs with interstate trucking companies.
During an initial pilot program, which is slated to run for up to three years, the safety records of these drivers will be compared to the records of a control group of drivers to determine if a one- to three-year difference in drivers’ ages is a critical safety factor.
“Currently, drivers under 21 are not permitted to take part in interstate commerce,” said John Kearney, CEO of Advanced Training Systems (ATS), which designs and manufactures virtual simulators for driver training. “I firmly believe that the results of this study will demonstrate that 18- to 20-year-olds—properly trained—are mature enough to be skilled and safe commercial truck drivers.”
Kearney is not alone in this opinion. There is a page in FMCSA’s website on which approved trucking companies are permitted to advertise job openings under the Under 21 Military Drivers Pilot Program. As of early February, nearly two dozen interstate trucking companies with headquarters ranging from Oregon to Massachusetts had posted openings on the site. Meanwhile, Kearney notes, the US motor freight industry continues to have some 60,000 drivers fewer than it would need to be fully staffed, a total widely expected to double by the end of this decade.
Given these numbers and given that nearly two-thirds of American high school graduates do not go to college, but begin their working careers at about age 18, a logical source of future truck drivers would be high-school vocational education programs. One rapidly growing such initiative is the Truck Driving Program offered by Patterson High School in Patterson CA. Backed by the support of national and local trucking fleets and the school’s superintendent, and aided by government grants, Patterson’s program uses the combination of a textbook and ATS driving simulators to lay the groundwork for enrollment in a standard commercial driver’s license training program.
There are, notes Kearney, over 24,000 public high schools in the United States producing an estimated 3.3 million graduates each year, of whom about 2 million will bypass college and go directly into the workforce. Given that the average base salary for a truck driver in the US is nearly $60,000, it seems likely that programs like Patterson’s could go a long way toward alleviating the driver shortage.
“They can and they will,” Kearney maintained. “One of the keys to driver safety is simulation, which solves a classic training dilemma: How do you safely prepare trainees to deal with dangerous situations? Patterson High is the first high school in the country to adopt this technology, and they have really raised the bar for training. They’re pushing right now for all the high schools in their county to create this kind of program, and if that succeeds, they’ll move on to the state level.
“This is what the trucking industry needs; if we can get to them before they’ve maybe taken a different path, and train them properly, we’ll be well on our way to providing the new generation of drivers we so badly need.”