On Our Own

Traditionally, I use this Top 100 issue to talk about the state of our industry and peer into the closest crystal ball I can find. Well, I can offer an opinion or three about various aspects of trucking in 2007, but there’s no way I’m looking very far ahead. At least not with any degree of confidence, and I’m certainly not alone in this cautious approach. In any case, have you seen a prediction you’re ready to trust lately?

So where are we? And if it’s not a good place, what do we need?

The broad truck transportation situation is not exactly dire, but the challenges sure are big. Some of them are beyond our control, like the price of fuel, of course. Topsy-turvy as always, so anything can happen and there’s precious little you can do to prepare.

The value of our buck is not doing nice things to our central-Canada industrial core or to our share of cross-border traffic — southbound freight is getting hard to find and American carriers are starting to eat our northbound lunch. Is the loonie going to drop any time soon? I don’t think so.

Also beyond our control is the American regulatory regime and a bunch of border issues. The FAST program is a mess, with almost no shipper buy-in at all except in the automotive world. And it’s ruthless in excluding some drivers with truly minor blemishes in the distant past on their record. I know one veteran owner-operator who’s about to lose it all because he can’t make anybody see just how utterly minor his single blemish was and thus clear the way for a FAST card.

The newish U.S. hours-of-service regime is another factor in our inability to be as productive as we can be. Our own HOS rules are more or less in place now, and they offer a bit more flexibility than the Americans allow.

But, for reasons I’ll never be able to fathom, the two are not perfectly harmonized. Why ever not? Regardless, the issue here is productivity, and the downside is substantial — a 5 percent drop in the best case, maybe more like 10 percent or even higher in some situations. Again, I know owner-ops who have big trouble here, including one who now does two rounds a week instead of the three he used to manage. And many others who blame a heartless dispatch desk for leaving them stranded in odd places when — quite predictably — they run out of hours.

And what did we gain? Almost nothing, as far as I can see, except one further roadblock in our efforts to attract and especially to retain drivers and owner-operators. Which is pretty much all we’ll ‘gain’ if we actually let a speed-limiter rule happen. I continue to oppose this one passionately.

Rules will never make us successful. And excessive rules will only get in our way.

So then there’s the driver shortage. I’ve always had problems defining this one, and have sometimes said the real shortage is in jobs worth having.

That’s not necessarily my perception — while it may be tough in a lot of ways, the truck driver job is an honorable one that can bring both satisfaction and a decent pay packet, but that’s not how young folks see it. And that’s not how every carrier constructs it. So there’s also, I often say, a shortage of the management skills required to retain the drivers we do have.

And why do we keep focusing on drivers alone when the technician shortage may be just as severe? Not to mention a shortage of sales people and rate clerks and you name it.

These shortages, drivers included, are actually not completely in the out-of-our-hands category. We can’t defeat demographic realities — we’re simply not adding enough young people to the mix across the board because the baby-making slowed down over the last few decades — so we’re left with the challenge of competing for live bodies with other industries. Which means in turn that we have to make ourselves more attractive.

Or more productive with the people we have. Thankfully, there are some renewed efforts to expand our use of long combination vehicles, but getting government buy-in is tough. We have to keep trying.

The single thing that interests me most these days, having more to do with efficiency than productivity, is the hybrid powertrain. It will come on strong in the next few years because the technology is developing fast. We could be enjoying the benefits much sooner if the federal and provincial governments would apply some imagination and some funding to get the commercialization process in gear. But as always, they don’t see and they don’t decide and they don’t lead. And I hold out no hope that this will change.

As always, we’re on our own.