In a trucking environment suppressed at least partially by too many drivers scrambling to haul not enough freight, Monday at the 2025 American Trucking Associations' Management Conference & Exhibition in San Diego, ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello contended that a driver shortage remains: one of quality, not quantity.
"What we have in the United States is a quality problem around drivers, much more so than an absolute number," he said during his economic update Monday. "It's the quality of the labor. Drug and alcohol testing. Accidents. That is what an ATA is talking about when we talk about this issue."
Most of the industry is waiting for trucking capacity to work its way out of the market, as Costello noted that is the only viable path to rate improvement in the near-term. While that is indeed underway – Costello said more than 39,000 interstate carriers and 49,800 drivers have left the industry from 2022 highs – it has been slower and taken far longer than anyone, including Costello, ever imagined.
"We're not out there advocating for massive amounts of new drivers in this industry. We're not doing that, but we're talking about enforcing the rules so that everybody's safe on the roads," Costello added. "And if you can't abide by those rules, you shouldn't be on the roads."
ATA in 2021 estimated the industry was short upward of 80,000 drivers and was trending toward a shortfall of 160,000 drivers by 2030. ATA President and CEO Chris Spear, citing ATA's 2022 Driver Shortage Update, told Congressional leaders this July that "over the next decade, trucking companies will need to hire roughly 1.2 million new drivers to keep pace with growing freight demand and an aging workforce."
In his address at his organization's conference Monday, Spear noted there's never been a lack of people with CDLs. "What we lack," he said, "is the number of qualified drivers who meet our high standards of professionalism and safety."
Driver Shortage ranked as the No. 1 overall issue in the American Transportation Research Institute's annual Top Industry Issues report for five straight years from 2017-2021 before falling to No. 2 in 2022, No. 4 in 2023, and No. 9 in 2024.
Driver Shortage fell out of the overall top 10 in this year's report for the first time in the survey’s 21-year history, settling in at No. 12. Motor carriers still rank the need to find and retain qualified drivers as their Nos. 5 and 6 concerns, respectively.
"I just told you we had way too much supply for the amount of demand," Costello said of his presentation. "Riddle me this: if fleets still have no problem finding qualified drivers, then why the heck did you continue to increase pay during one of the worst freight recessions we've ever seen? You're nice. You're not that nice."
In its Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, the American Transportation Research Institute found that driver wages jumped 2.4% last year.
A study commissioned by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) looking into the impacts on safety and driver retention of various methods of truck driver compensation called into question last year a long-held belief among motor carriers that the trucking industry is plagued with a persistent driver shortage.
Conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), the study concluded that the truckload sector's long-asserted "persistent shortages of drivers" simply can't be supported. ATA challenged the findings, noting that the study’s authors ignored certain aspects of the trucking industry.
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