Appendix A

Long-Distance Truck Driver Interviews

Early in the study, the committee determined that it was important to pursue a qualitative research component as part of the data-gathering process. Specifically, the committee to hear directly from long-distance truck drivers in a manner that would minimize their inconvenience by interviewing them in the field. An aim of the interviews was to learn about the experiences, perceptions, and opinions of long-distance truck drivers regarding their pay and working conditions and how they may influence their attitudes and behaviors related to driving and employment in the long-distance trucking industry.

In the fall of 2023, the study committee engaged the services of Steve Viscelli of the University of Pennsylvania to conduct interviews of truck drivers at designated truck stops on Interstate highways with large amounts of long-distance truck traffic. Viscelli, a sociologist, has significant experience interviewing truck drivers.¹ He was asked to design and execute a series of truck stop interviews, intended as convenience sample of drivers who could offer helpful insights but not designed to be representative of the full population of long-distance truck drivers. He was also asked to summarize the responses, and that summary is presented here after describing the interview methodology.

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¹ The interviewer also has experience as a long-haul truck driver, having driven for a large motor carrier as part of his research for his book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream (University of California Press, 2016).

METHODOLOGY

The interviews were conducted during September and October 2023 at two truck stops: one in Effingham, Ohio, and the other in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.² Respondents were first asked to consent to being interviewed and were assured that personally identifying information would not be collected or reported. Because the committee determined that the field interviews would focus on company drivers, respondents were first screened to exclude those that were not employed by a for-hire, long-haul motor carrier. The interviewer also sought to balance the group by level of driving experience. Qualifying drivers were given a $75 gift card for participating in the interview.

The questionnaire used to conduct the interviews, which is provided at the end of this appendix, includes key questions designed to elicit information consistent with the study charge; for example, what factors affect truckers’ driving behavior and what would make them decide to leave their employer or the industry altogether. Additional questions on non-wage compensation, including for both driving and non-driving time, were also part of the questionnaire.

With assistance from the National Association of Truckstop Owners, two truck stops gave the interview team permission to conduct these interviews on site. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Institutional Review Board approved the interview questionnaire and design, which included a waiver of written signed consent to protect the anonymity of the respondents.

DATA ON INTERVIEWED DRIVERS

A total of 54 drivers (49 male and 5 female) were screened, and 45 were found to be eligible to participate based on their responses. The median occupational tenure of the sample was 5 years (drivers in the sample had a range of experience from 3 months to as many as 38 years). Roughly half of the interviewees reported being married with just under two-thirds reporting having children. The median age of the drivers in the sample was 38 years old.

Reflecting a growing trend, about a third of the drivers reported being recent immigrants (non-native English speakers) primarily from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. This posed some challenges in communicating with them. Drivers in the group lived in 17 states, as well as in Mexico and Canada.

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² A set of five pilot interviews were also done at a truck stop near I-90 in Fultonville, New York, in September to test both the integrity of the questionnaire and the methodology.

The drivers’ occupational characteristics can be summarized as follows:

• Trailer types driven by eligible drivers included a mix of dry van (60%), reefer (30%), and flatbed (10%).
• Just over one-third of the drivers reported being paid for at least one form of nondriving activity including detention, breakdowns, and layovers (see Chapter 3 for examples of the major forms of benefits payments). The drivers in the group who earned nondriving pay reported that it was both infrequent and insignificant.
• The median per-mile pay rate reported was 58.5 cents per mile (cpm), with a range of 29 to 78 cpm. Typical weekly pay averaged $1,400. Some (typically less experienced) drivers earned as little as $400 weekly and others as much as $1,800 weekly.
• The typical driver in the sample worked for a small carrier (fewer than 100 employees), and most (70%) had been with their employer for one year or less.
• Drivers reported an average of roughly 20 hours per week of nondriving time.
• Time spent on the road away from home ranged from as few as two days to as much as a month for a single respondent.
• Just three of the eligible drivers responded yes when asked if they have been involved in a federally reportable crash. All these drivers had considerable truck driving experience but had been working for their current employers for fewer than 5 years each.³

SUMMARY OF RESPONSES

In general, the drivers interviewed accepted pay-per-mile compensation as a “fact of life”—inherent in the way they must earn a living. Very few drivers cited this compensation method as a major reason for crashes occurring in long-distance for-hire trucking (only three drivers said that they had been involved in a reportable crash). Instead, factors such as hours-of-service regulations implementation and fatigue (conditions which are inter-related, as discussed in this report), were cited more often. Poor driving habits by operators of passenger vehicles and excessive cell phone usage by other truck drivers were the other safety risk factors cited most frequently. However, those comments are not presented here because they are not directly relevant to this study’s charge. The more experienced drivers also cited the prevalence of inexperienced truck drivers in the industry. The lack of parking spaces was also cited as a safety concern.

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³ The interviewer explained to some drivers that minor accidents not involving a police presence or tow-away vehicle did not qualify.

Almost two-thirds of participating drivers indicated that they planned to remain in the long-haul trucking industry, compared to about half who said that they planned to stay with their current carrier. Most of the drivers who wanted to leave their employer cited either a need for better wages or a desire to work for a local delivery carrier. Most drivers did not state a reason for planning to leave the industry, but the few that did, cited the need to spend more time at home (one driver planned to remain in the industry but wanted to be a dispatcher). Some of the more experienced drivers offered thoughts on the causes of high turnover in the industry.

Following are selected excerpts from the driver interview transcripts, categorized by topic related to this study’s charge. They are direct quotations and largely unedited to retain the authenticity of the drivers’ comments. The identities of participants and company names have been masked to protect confidentiality.

Compensation and Safe Driving

Driver #4

“Well, if you’re hourly you can focus on safety first. If you’re paid by the mile, your natural instinct is to focus on how much how quickly you can get it done. Because that’s when you make your money over safety.”

Driver #11

“The big problem is that people are chasing the dollar. The truck don’t make no money unless the wheels are turning. So if they get hung up they gotta run to try to catch it up and then they put people’s lives in danger. Not only theirs but somebody else’s.”

Driver #18

“Too much trying to hustle to get miles, you know, you’re chasing miles, you know and you got to consider traffic all get running together. I think that’s one big cause of an accident, the following distance, you know just you’re chasing miles, you know this hurry up and wait [nonsense], hurry up and be on time hurry up hurry up, we both know only [a] late load is a dead load.”

Driver #25

“A big portion of it is we’re not incentivized to be safe [when] paid per mile. So the faster you go, the better you are off money wise … somebody that runs 3,000 miles shouldn’t get paid the same as somebody that runs 2, but you know, you’re also lying if you say it doesn’t incentivize people to drive in bad conditions, speed and roadwork.”

Driver #44

“Companies [say] we’re gonna pay you … mileage pay, we’re going to make it worth your while, you know, the industry standard 65 cents a mile. And that sounds great to a new first-time driver who’s like, oh, yeah, I really, you know, and then we got recruiters out here just blatantly telling lies. Oh, we average you $1,300 or 1,300 miles a week. Yeah. Sounds great. That’s one trip for the week. Everything else is 80 miles. Yeah, you’re gonna average 1,300 a week, but I can run for local loads and average 1,300 miles a week, you know, and have garbage pay. You know, not a hard thing to achieve. So I think one of the biggest things is companies need to be really honest with their drivers and really blunt and just look at their selves and go, can we pay more?”

Working Conditions and Safety (Fatigue, Hours of Service, Unpaid Non-Driving Time)

Driver #6

“One … issue I have is when you go to like to pick up a load or whatever to deliver. If you’re late, you know, they really refuse you. And then but they can take all day to just make you sit. That’s the thing that bothers me the most, is somebody just wasting my time.”

Driver #8

“For me there especially there are times when you’re sitting at the shippers for seven or eight hours you don’t know when … they’re going to call you to tell you you’re done. Or if they’re going to knock on your door and some of the shippers you have to go inside and they don’t call you- you just have to keep checking in over and over again. So you get there sitting for six hours and you’re like man, ‘can I take a nap?’ but then I don’t know if they’re gonna finish me so then you’ll get done sitting there for 10 hours full clock and then soon as they let you go you gotta go drive. So then sometimes you end up technically being up for 23 or 24 hours which I’ve done twice now I think just to make sure you could get back to get another run to keep that money coming in.”

Driver #15

“The ELD [electronic logging device] rules I think that’s one thing for drivers I think they should be a little more [flexible], you know what I mean? Because then what if … you’re at a warehouse but it’s midnight and you want to sleep but you can’t—you have to go because your logbook is saying go so now … you have to drive tired because you were waiting the stupid light to get green.”

Driver #24

“You know our trucks supposed to always be running. So how do I tell … my dispatch, that I didn’t get proper sleep? Because of one thing or another? Like, well, you, you know, you show that you were down for 18 hours, how are you still tired? Like, well, have you tried to sleep on a bumpy road lately?”

Driver #35

“I mean, the fatigue factor … if you’re trained right, you can operate off of 2 or 3 hours of sleep, but it takes … 5 years plus to develop your body to do that. You know, I wouldn’t advise a rookie to go ahead and [do] 6–700 miles off of 2 hour sleep—can’t do it. But somebody like me that been in the game for about 10 years, I can do it but I wouldn’t advise everybody to do it.”

Driver #39

“Sometimes you know you don’t get a good night sleep at night. You have problems at home. We all have problems and sometimes we don’t have a good night. And then we have a tight schedule and you know we gotta get there because if we don’t get there in time [they] say we got to sit there for one day. They’ll say your appointment is tonight at 8pm [and] you get there and you’re too late. They don’t want to take you anymore. You got to wait a whole day you know again to 8 pm.”

Factors Related to Turnover

Driver #1

“I’m trying to get on with another company … [but] they kind of over hired, so they’re kind of streamlining their stuff now looking at their drivers and seeing what they’ve got. [But] I’m gonna try to get on there if I can.”

Driver #8

“There’s a waste management company that’s not even eight minutes away from my place. And if I go there with a Class A, I can easily make probably 24 to 25 bucks an hour and be home every single day. And off the weekends.”

Driver #9

“…not too happy because [the paycheck always delayed] … like this month. I should have been paid this month on the first. I still not get paid. Last month … it was the whole month I didn’t get paid yet, the whole month. That’s not good. Next job, people should pay … less waiting time.”

Driver #10

“…they don’t respect our home time. They want us to ride when we hire or they try to rush us to get to a delivery or pickup. Yeah. Sometimes it [is] the pay. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes because their truck is raggedy.”

Driver #27

“They promise you everything until you get in the door and then things change around but this company right here I’m with now is the best one I’ve ever worked for. Besides my first one, which because it was family. They were great.”

ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS

The open-ended interview questionnaire was designed to elicit candid responses by allowing the drivers to speak freely. In addition, the interviewer’s experience as a trained sociologist who has conducted hundreds of interviews with long-haul truck drivers enabled him to communicate effectively with the group.

As such, additional information related to compensation methods, working conditions, and safety was obtained, which serves to add context to some of the issues discussed in the body of the report.

• Drivers, particularly those with many years of experience, suggested a variety of solutions to reduce the number of truck-involved crashes. These included educating the non-commercial vehicle driving public; stricter rules for truck drivers on driving while distracted; better recruitment and training practices by motor carriers; and more parking spaces for trucks.
• Some drivers reported receiving 1099s rather than W-2s, meaning that they were paid as independent contractors even though they were company employees. It is unclear why some motor carriers are improperly classifying drivers as independent contractors but the practice appears to be confined to small carriers. Independent contractors are not legally entitled to the same wage protections afforded to employees.
• The mandated use of ELDs appears to be of particular concern for truck drivers. As highlighted in earlier parts of the report, this method of reporting hours appears to constrain their driving time (which negatively impacts their earnings), so as not exceed the allowable 14-hour workday.

• As expected, the more experienced drivers in the group tended to give more insightful responses. For example, one driver with many years in the industry thought that high turnover was the result of a “de-professionalization” of the occupation, as megacarriers seek to hire drivers to increase their workforce but seek to reduce operational costs by offering only minimal training, resulting in poor performance by new drivers and high turnover rates.
• Unlike driving time, little of the time that drivers spend doing non-driving work is being accurately reported. E-logs are also able to capture the starting and ending time of most drivers’ 14-hour windows, although some drivers are driving beyond their 14-hour window by editing logs and using the FMCSA allowance for personal conveyance.⁴

These truck-stop interviews are meant to provide drivers’ perspectives on the working conditions and safety risks of operating a commercial motor vehicle over long distances for extended periods of time. There is a dearth of empirical research on the link between truck driver pay methods and safety performance, and even less information based on data gathered during field interviews. Although the views expressed by the drivers in the two groups are consistent with most of the research done to date, they should not be interpreted as representative of the views of the universe of U.S. long-haul truckload drivers.

SCREENING QUESTIONS FOR INTERVIEWS

The interviewer used the following script to screen individual drivers as candidates for full interviews:

Hello, I am Steve Viscelli, and I am conducting interviews in a study for the U.S. Department of Transportation on why truck drivers leave or continue trucking as a career, and on driving safety. If you qualify and participate in the study, I will give you a $75 gift card as thanks for your participation. I just have three quick questions to determine if you qualify.

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⁴ “Drivers can edit driving time for the purposes of HOS [hours of service] by changing it to off-duty (for ‘personal conveyance’). They can also edit the start and end period for their on-duty driving segments, but they can’t change mileage.” Steve Viscelli e-mail dated May 6, 2024. It should be noted that most of the large carriers do not allow the truck to be used for personal conveyance.

• Are you an employee of a for-hire trucking firm, or are you an employee for a private trucking firm, or are you an owner-operator?
• Is your typical trucking route at least 150 miles?
• How long have you been working as a truck driver?

[Only proceed with the interview if the person is an employee of a for-hire trucking firm and the typical route is at least 150 miles.]

[If they do not qualify:]

Thank you. Unfortunately, you do not have the characteristics we are looking for. We appreciate your cooperativeness in answering my few questions.

[If they qualify, then continue.]

You qualify to participate in the study. The interview itself will take between 45 minutes and an hour. Do you wish to participate?

1. In your opinion, what factors are most important in determining whether a driver stays with a carrier or switches to another carrier?

[Probe along the lines of: What about you? What would be your most likely reason for changing to another carrier? Do you expect to be switching?

2. More generally, what factors are most important in determining whether a driver continues with truck driving as a career?

[Probe along the lines of: What about you? How long do you expect to continue working as a long-haul trucker? Why? What would influence you to keep trucking for a longer time?

3. Based on your experience and observation, what are the major factors that cause truck crashes?

[Probe along the lines of: What about you? When you have come close to having an accident, what have been the main factors? What do you wish you had done differently? What do you think could be done to lessen the likelihood of truck crashes? Would training make a difference? What about truckers’ working conditions? What about road improvements? What about government regulations? What about the way in which truck drivers are compensated—e.g., being paid by the hour rather than by the mile?]

Finally, we would like to know a little more about you personally.