ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

While it is true that even the best dedicated-carrier fleets have been late at one time or another, most quality fleets deliver high-quality performance over time. The quality of the service is generally not the key reason that severs ties between buyers and sellers. For this text, we’ll just focus on three drivers for change.

Expectations this year are for the U.S. economy to grow moderately, fuel prices to stay at historic lows and truck capacity to remain tight for a healthy rate environment. However, growing faster than the competition will require more than opportunities.

If you had an extra $2 million to spend on your fleet, what would you do with it? I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that most fleet owners would earmark the cash for capital expenditures or personnel development.

While the above titled retention activity at first makes as much sense as trying to melt the sun, its logic is based on the following facts:

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration finally released the long-awaited electronic logging device mandate’s final rule in December. The rule states that motor carriers without a current solution in place now have until December 2017 to implement ELDs for any vehicle or combination of vehicles with an actual weight and/or Gross Vehicle Weight Rating of 10,001 pounds or more. The rule is meant to improve compliance with hours-of-service safety rules.

In 1994, Congress wrote a bill authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. In addition to keeping our skies safe, that bill laid down an important principle for our industry: that the federal government — not individual states — should write rules for interstate trucking.

The people who constitute the trucking industry are among the best examples of the American work ethic — they come to work every day focused on being a driver for the North American economy. Meeting them has been one of the great joys I’ve experienced while traveling across the United States.

Since May 2014 and the introduction of the new medical examiner system, more than 150,000 drivers have left the transportation industry due to medical ineligibility.

The trucking industry is searching for ways to alleviate what has become a national epidemic that apparently is growing — the driver shortage. But this problem may not be solved without tackling the enormous elephant in the room, which is costly for drivers and fleets: driver downtime and detention.