We have a long-haul problem and Hirschbach proved it

The American trucking industry has been telling itself a story for thirty years. The story goes like this: we are running out of truck drivers. The shelves will go empty. The supply chain will collapse. We need to lower the age to drive interstate. We need heavier trucks. We need immigration reform. We need autonomous vehicles.

That story isn’t true and the announcement last week that Hirschbach Motor Lines, a major refrigerated carrier based in Iowa, signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to deploy 500 Aurora Driver-equipped autonomous trucks starting in 2027 tells you almost everything you need to know about which part of the story, if any of it, is actually real.

There isn’t a driver shortage. There is a long-haul problem. There is a skilled driver problem. Those are completely different things, and the industry has spent decades conflating them for reasons that aren’t always in the public interest.

In October 2024, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a landmark study commissioned by FMCSA and mandated by Congress in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The title was clinical, “Pay and Working Conditions in the Long-Distance Truck and Bus Industries”, but the conclusion was anything but.

The study concluded that the truckload sector’s long-asserted driver shortage cannot be supported. Labor economists maintain that when demand for workers in an occupation increases, the normal response is to increase wages.

Based on average wages from 2006 to 2024, the study found trends not indicative of the wage premium one would expect for long-distance employees if they were truly working in an occupation experiencing a chronic labor shortage. If drivers were actually scarce, their wages would have risen dramatically and consistently. They didn’t. The market corrected.

It always does. Operating authority for motor carriers grew by 45% from July 2019 to August 2023, while truckload demand was only up about 11% during the same period. The current difficult conditions in trucking are a result of too much capacity chasing too little freight. So why does the shortage narrative persist?

The American Trucking Associations has been criticized for using the driver shortage narrative to push agendas such as heavier trucks, younger drivers, and other regulatory changes.

Despite repeated public challenges to defend their data, the ATA declined to participate in a debate even when FreightWaves offered to donate $50,000 to a charity of their choice. That tells you something. Here is the real number. The average annualized turnover rate from Q3 of 1996 through Q1 of 2023 was 92.

7% for large truckload carriers (those with $30 million or more in annual revenue) and 77. 6% for small truckload carriers. Nearly a hundred percent annual turnover. Not at one company. Across the entire large-fleet sector, consistently, for nearly thirty years. That is not a shortage.

That is an industry that has consciously or unconsciously decided that replacing drivers is cheaper than keeping them. In the 1990s, J. B. Hunt experimented with increasing driver pay by 35%, resulting in reduced turnover and accident rates.

The practice was abandoned, revealing an industry preference for replacing drivers rather than addressing underlying retention issues. The contrast with other segments is stark. LTL carriers reported an average turnover rate of just 11. 8% from Q4 2000 through Q1 2022.

For private fleets, the National Private Truck Council reported annualized turnover rates of only 15% from 2005 through 2022. The difference between a 92% turnover rate and a 15% turnover rate isn’t the drivers. It’s the job. The driver persona has changed fundamentally in the last decade in ways that the industry’s workforce models have been slow to absorb.

I was that old driver persona. Before ELDs, before electronic logging, before any of it, I was running LA to Atlanta, stopping only for fuel and a few hours of sleep, swapping trailers on the dock, then turning right back around to the Central Valley before the sun came up again.

When I ran seafood for Shackelford Seafood out of Virginia, hitting Miami, then Hunts Point in New York, or the Boston Fish Pier the next day, there were runs when I genuinely never slept. It was a toothpick-soaking, mile-chasing, dollar-hunting survivor’s mindset.

Shackelford had so many hours of service violations that we had to start uploading our paper logs directly to the FMCSA. You measured your worth by how far you ran and how fast you turned. Broke didn’t mean what it means now. Hustle didn’t mean what it means now. Running didn’t mean what it means now.

That driver wasn’t just willing to be gone for weeks; this was and is a source of pride. We were killers. We, like many blue-collar old-school real workers, wore the exhaustion like a badge. ELDs and HOS reform hamstrung that world, and rightfully so; those logs were fiction, and those schedules were dangerous. Nights I’d be awakened