Many of you may have seen or heard about the recent controversial report by Dan Rather on the existence of low quality CDL training schools for entry level truck drivers, see http://www.blip.tv/file/2759448. Rather says he took a lot of heat for the negative portrayal of truck training. The American Trucking Associations (ATA) considered the report "very unfair" and the testimony of Desiree Wood about her CDL training school experience to be "slander". In the interest of fairness, Rather offered the ATA 20 minutes to present their views and he invited representatives of the top twelve trucking associations and companies to participate in a panel discussion to be broadcast in the next show in the series. The ATA declined and only two of the twelve trucking groups accepted, Werner enterprises and the Owner Operated Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), see http://blip.tv/file/2840596. The panel also included Michael Belzer, a former trucker who is now a professor of Economics.

My impressions, after listening carefully to that panel discussion, are that the root causes of the commonly perceived poor level of training for entry level truck drivers fall under two main headings, structure and expectations. Both are highly complex and inter-related issues and I am sympathetic with industry representatives who did not chose to try to explain this complexity to the general public.

Regarding structure, Belzer the economist said it most succinctly. Training is a structural problem. He stated that prior to deregulation in the 1970s, trucking companies invested relatively more time and effort in apprenticeship programs for their truck drivers. After deregulation, economic competition became the critical factor. One should keep in mind that academics tend to explain the world through their own specialized lenses and that while economic competition certainly plays a role in most human activities, it may not always play the most critical role. For example, people have been know to stubbornly defy rules and regulations, even those that confer economic advantages.

The second set of reasons for the poor level of truck driver training can be organized under the heading expectations. When Dan Rather noted that government regulation is often seen as the cause and not the solution to the problems of the trucking industry, Tod Spenser, executive VP of OOIDA, gave an unequivocal response that is worth quoting in full. Spenser stated:

"It's sheer idiocy, lunacy to think that you can take someone off the street and turn him loose in 40-ton vehicles and they can navigate on our congested highways with every kind of non-professional driver in every kind of traffic situation in every kind of weather and do it safely without a lot of training, a lot of professionalism and a lot of support from the industry that they work in."

There it is in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen. The structure and expectations around driver training would seem to be below everyone's standards.

So, how does the trucking industry seriously expect to produce competent professional drivers without comprehensive training?

Of course, for every answer to that question there lies another question. As daunting as this task may appear, I believe there exists proven training methods that can produce competent drivers. These methods, coupled with the latest technologies (i.e. driving simulators), can achieve virtually every stated goal in that report, and do it in an affordable manner. This certainly bodes well for the future of driver training and stands in stark contrast to the summary Dan Rather gave on his show where he stated that "virtually none" of the requirements exist today. This may be the case nationally, but not with a small group of forward thinking companies, and not within certain regional pockets throughout North America, where drivers are being taught using these very advances in driver training methodology. I for one am optimistic about the future of driver training in the trucking industry.