Did you have a chance to attend our recent webinar, “ATRI’s TOP 10 Trucking Industry Issues”? We received more questions than we had time to answer in the allotted time, so our guest presenter, Rebecca Brewster, President and COO of the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), answered them below in this Q&A-style blog post.
If you couldn’t join the live webinar, don’t worry – you can watch it on-demand anytime!
Question: What is the best way to show support for ATRI?
Answer: The best ways to show support for ATRI are through contributions and participation in our research. We rely on charitable contributions to support the research we do on the industry’s behalf. Giving is easy and can be done online at www.TruckingResearch.org. The other critical way to support ATRI is to participate in our research - take our surveys, provide data, and push ATRI’s surveys and data requests out to your drivers, colleagues, and professional network.
Question: What can the industry do to remedy the truck parking deficiency?
Answer: Every time you meet with your state’s Congressional delegation, make sure they understand how critical of an issue this is for our industry. Be an advocate for the industry with your state Department of Transportation, so they understand how critical it is to keep rest areas open—and available—for professional drivers to get their rest.
Question: What's the risk of eliminating the O/O classification from trucking?
Answer: In ATRI’s December 2021 study examining the role of owner-operators/independent contractors in the supply chain, 73 percent of OO/IC said reclassification would result in significant decreases in their job satisfaction. And, 68.3 percent said they would experience significant decreases to their annual income if reclassified to a company driver.
Question: Do cameras help reduce risk of nuclear verdicts?
Answer: Video from cameras can provide evidence that the professional driver was doing what they were supposed to do and that the other driver was at fault.
Question: Have you done any research as to why we lose so many drivers within the first 6 months after obtaining their license?
Answer: Not specifically, but ATRI published a study in 2008 that looked at the safety impacts of driver training. One of the challenges in that research was that so many of the new entrant drivers in the dataset had left the industry within the first 90 days. We have a new study underway to update that study and, in addition to looking at safety impacts of training, it will also look at the impact of training on driver retention.
