There’s been a lot of talk floating around about how to get potential truck drivers through the door. From laid off oil workers, to women and veterans, these days it seems like almost anyone is up for grabs.
With no real answers in sight, it appears the Feds may be about to take some unilateral action. A new senate bill might see drivers as young as 18-years-old driving 80,000-pound trucks across state lines.
Although the proposal has been backed by the trucking industry, safety advocates are opposed. If the bill winds up passing both houses of Congress, expect to see a major change and a temporary salve for the ongoing employment crisis.
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What’s In The Bill?
The bill requires the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to develop a six-year pilot program for allowing 18-year-olds to drive big rigs and busses nationwide.
The legislation is tailored to allow states to enter into agreements with each other under the program, with the FMCSA supervising the process. The plan is to use the graduated licensing method.
Graduated licensing allows younger drivers to work their way towards full licensure. They begin with restrictions on what they can do. After they meet milestones and gain experience, they get their full unrestricted CDL.
Surprisingly, this isn’t a new idea. It last came up in 2002, when the Bush administration was studying graduated licensing for commercial truck drivers.
It was scuttled at the time because the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported that there was “unequivocal scientific evidence of a markedly elevated crash risk among people younger than 21 who drive large trucks.” They went on to say that there was no basis to believe that graduated licensing would mitigate the risk.
Those Against
According to Jackie Gillan, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, the industry “should be considering how to limit teen truck drivers, rather than expanding them into such a dangerous program.”
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Many states already permit 18-year-olds to get behind the wheel of big trucks, but federal rules prevent them from crossing state lines. According to Gillan, in those states, younger drivers are four- to six-times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than their 21-year-old counterparts.
“Look at the figures,” she went on to say. “Now we’re saying let’s take a really bad idea and expand it? Who else other than the trucking industry could get by with that logic?
Those For
Considering there could be more than 250,000 unfilled trucking jobs by 2017, the trucking industry sees this measure as a quick and easy way to expand the pool of eligible operators. Reducing the driving age essentially lowers recruiting costs and expands the pipeline.
Considering contract costs have increased somewhere in between 4 to 5 percent this year, fleets are looking to pass cost of attracting and retaining drivers on down the line.
The logic behind this new bill banks on the fact that commercial drivers already work under strict licensing standards, more so than passenger cars – of which 18-year-olds can drive. The hope is that the program will give people just out of high school an opportunity in an industry that needs them.
According to American Trucking Associations (ATA) spokesman Sean McNally, since 48 states already allow younger truck drivers, letting them expand nationally “makes sense.”
ATA Chairman Bill Graves put it in real-world terms. “Right now a young adult could drive a truck from El Paso, Texas to Dallas – a distance of more than 600 miles – but couldn’t cross the street to deliver that same load from Texarkana, Texas to Texarkana, Arkansas.”
If the Senate bill were to fail, Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Edward Markey of Massachusetts plan to try a different tactic. When the six-year highway bill comes up for debate in the senate, their plan is to get the provision blocking interstate teen driving removed.
This is sure to be a divisive issue. Letting 18-year-olds drive big rigs brings out stark arguments between both sides. What happens now is anybody’s guess.