In September there were 72,400 truck transportation jobs in Ohio, according to the Ohio Bureau of Labor Market Information.
Job want ad postings for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers were the second most common, after registered nurses, for Dayton region counties on Ohio’s jobs website for the month ending Sept. 13. There were 1,784 ads for drivers in the west region, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Chief among the inefficiencies in the supply chain cited by industry leaders: Truck drivers sometimes find themselves waiting for hours, not only to accept new freight but to drop those shipments off — what the industry calls “detention times.”
President Joe Biden recently announced a plan to have the Port of Los Angeles operate 24 hours a day, a directive meant to relieve the wait time for the dozens of container ships waiting offshore. And big shipping companies such as UPS and FedEx said they, too, will expand working hours.
But that’s one end of the problem, trucking advocates say. Time spent waiting at destinations is another issue.
“The problem is, the warehouses don’t run 24/7,” said Thomas Balzer, president and chief executive of the Ohio Trucking Association. “So you can take a container and put it on the truck at 3 a.m. But what are you going to do with it? They (warehouses, distribution centers, factories) run normal business hours. They could be closed.”
“The problems are more complex than just the ports,” he said.
Credit: JIM NOELKER
An inefficiency ‘going back decades’
Nick Bartlett, owner of Spears Transfer & Expediting in Vandalia, has two sides to his business. On the expediting side, a customer is waiting for a shipment before the driver arrives. There’s not a lot of waiting time for the driver in that instance, he said.
On the truck-load and container side, Bartlett sees a different situation.
“I’ve got guys who go in to a container port and wait seven to nine hours on one container,” he said. “A lot of those are with coastal requirements. Some of them are at railheads, but not often. It’s mostly the coastal requirements.”
On the day Balzer spoke with the Dayton Daily News, more than 80 ships were waiting to unload at the Port of Los Angeles.
“It can take six to eight hours to get a container, one container, out of that port,” he said. “So that’s terribly inefficient when drivers are waiting that long.”
Kevin Burch, vice president of governmental affairs and sales for Martin Transportation Systems, said he sees a “gigantic slow-down of America’s goods.”
“We’ve had detention issues for 20-plus years,”…
Read More: Truck drivers find themselves ‘detained’ as supply chain problems mount