2020 has not been an easy year to be a trucker. Besides having been a tumultuous election year complete with civil unrest in the streets, coronavirus seemingly changed the way the normal world operates. It’s getting harder and harder to go into a public building and “not wear a mask.” Life is generally harder for everyone and more and more people feel depressed about the state of the world. Ugh.
What are some of the specific truck driving concerns lately?
At the moment things like hours of service and delays at customer facilities concern truckers, but there are also plenty more problems plaguing the industry.
Insurance costs per mile have increased a whopping 18.3 percent over the last five years. Smaller fleets are paying per mile insurance premium costs at three times the rate of larger fleets. Insurance costs have skyrocketed and that’s not good.
What about issues of compliance, safety and accountability? There have been challenges with data quality, peer group assignments and the Crash Preventability Program.
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, many states closed rest areas– as if truck parking wasn’t hard to find before, now it’s even worse! All trucks need to be parked somewhere sometime, right? But what do you do when there’s no place to park? This issue infuriates many truckers. You know it’s bad when you can’t find a place to eat or a place to go to the bathroom.
Driver pay and benefits continue to be a major concern for truckers. There’s a shortage of drivers. Why is that? Truckers tend to think it’s because the pay doesn’t match the work– in other words, drivers need to be better paid, with more benefits. Carriers could do a better job at driver retention efforts.
Want to know the biggest concern for the trucking industry in 2020? It’s the issue of the on-going driver shortage. It’s been the major concern for four years now, but what’s being done? Ask most truckers and they’d tell you, “Not enough.”
Without truckers, people won’t get the products they need to live a normal life. Without truckers, the economy collapses. It will be interesting to see how 2021 goes– and hopefully it’s better than 2020, because 2020 has been the pits.
Whether you’re a truck driver looking for work or you’re a trucking company in need of a reliable driver, the experts at Platinum Drivers are here to help.