That may be the solution,by making strict procedures for licensing,in comparison to the so called system that is in place now. We can go on for hours about who and what proper training was provided to many of the drievrs that are on the road,and the owners that allow them to run with 80,000 + lbs of dynamite. There is a reason why that is allowed to happen! and in no time the culture will swallow up the industry,and trust me, when that day comes, we will circle back to the regulations needing to be implimented.
There are many reasons outside of just $$$ that would need to be tabled...that is just the cap on the latte.
Once again just my opinion.
Have to agree with you on the training perspective ... the 125 hour MELT program does not a truck driver make !!!
Really, it's the barest minimum to get a license. Government expects carriers to top up the training. Well, carriers who are desperate for drivers to run trucks that simply turn wheels to generate cash flow are not going to top up training.
For me, I put them through 170 hours of school, plus it takes about another 6 to 8 weeks of mentoring to get a driver to a place where I am comfortable putting him/her in a truck by themselves. That is pure, unrecoverable, cost.
Jim is right though ... enforcement of existing laws and safety regulations would go a long way towards thinning out the herd.
Being as there is not a lot of freight out there, I have time to relay a couple stories this morning that you all may enjoy.
1) About 6 or 7 years ago now, the good people from Fanshawe College came by and asked if there was anything they could do in the Simcoe campus that would benefit us/trucking. Fortunately they alerted me with a phone call to set up an appointment as it gave me some time to think about it. When they got here I relayed this; The transportation industry needs drivers. We can't use them until they are 21 years old. They get out of high school when they are 18 years old. That's 3 years we need to keep young people interested in the industry. If any of you have kids you know full well that if they "take a year off" and get a job before going to college, they never go to college. The same principal applies where drivers are concerned. I suggested to Fanshawe that they create a minimum 2 year, and preferably 3 year, college course that would go a long way towards making young people road-ready, and set them up to be successful owner-operators. They could teach them things like math, basic accounting, financing, economics, healthy living, basic mechanics, English/French/Spanish/Hindi, and numerous other subjects in addition to actual driver training. The course could be sponsored by industry to reduce student cost. At the end of the day (3 years down the road) we would have capable young drivers in the industry that would actually know how to run, at a minimum, a successful owner-operator business, and at maximum, their own company. A win-win for everyone. The people I met with liked the idea. The people at Fanshawe London did not. And ... here we are today !!!
2) My CVOR has a 27% violation rate. Have a guess at who gets picked for an MTO audit. Go ahead ... guess !!! Ya, me !!!!
This was a virtual audit. It took me roughly 7 hours over 4 days to get all of the information to the auditor who audited roughly 70% of my fleet. It took the auditor 3 1/2 weeks to complete his findings and present them. Unsurprisingly to both myself and the auditor we passed with an 87% score, and no tickets. That's an excellent carrier score my friends
... provided I get my violation rate below 15%.
What triggered the audit was during COVID we hit a 64% violation rate. Why was that you might ask? A lot of our lanes run between Toronto and the Niagara gateway. During COVID scale inspectors would write you up if they found something (anything) wrong, but would not write a clean inspection report if they did not find anything wrong. Now a violation rate is the bad inspections as a percentage of good inspections. What happens when you don't get any good inspections ... your violation rate goes through the roof. It's odd that north of the Niagara River we were one of the worst carriers in existence and south of the Niagara River, we are superstars. To be fair the auditor knew this going in.
Even the auditor was in disbelief that he was having to conduct this audit.
My point is, while this auditor is busy auditing my fleet, which we both knew going in did not need to be audited, he is not auditing the scrap fleets that are out there that do need to be audited. Frankly, a waste of precious resources. It takes a year just to train a roadside/scale inspector. I have no idea how long it takes to train an auditor, but it has to be at least another year, and more likely two or three years after a significant tenure as an inspector. That's our government for you. Lots of good ideas, exceptionally poor execution.
