It has been known for some time that making truck drivers wait excessively before they can deliver freight at shipper facilities is not just an annoyance, but creates serious safety and economic consequences as well, knowledge that has been bolstered by new research recently released by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI).
“Detention is so common that many industry professionals have accepted it as inevitable without realizing the true extent of its costs,” observes Chad England, CEO of C.R. England, a truckload hauler and logistics services provider based in Salt Lake City. “ATRI’s report puts real-world numbers to the true impact that truck driver detention has on trucking and the broader economy.”
Although driver detention has decreased slightly in the last few years, the overall costs of being detained at customer facilities for more than two hours at a time is substantial, ATRI points out. In fact, the issue has been a continuing challenge since the origins of the for-hire trucking industry in the 1930s. It has become a safety issue because of stricter modern hours-of-service (HOS) regulations limiting driver work hours.
Over the years, truckers’ representatives have continued to complain to the government about the practice, including American Trucking Associations, the Truckload Carriers Association and Owner-Operators Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), but a regulatory solution has been hard to find.
The agency that created those HOS regulations, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), has expressed serious concern over the detention issue, and earlier this year initiated a year-long study that looked at the experiences of about 80 carriers and 2,500 professional truck drivers to assess how often and how serious delivery delays are occurring in the current environment.
In 2018, the Inspector General (IG) of the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a report concluding that a 15-minute increase in average dwell time at a shipper’s facility increases the average expected crash rate by 6.2%.
The DOT IG also linked detention time with reductions in annual earnings of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion for truck drivers in the truckload sector, and found that it reduces net income by $250.6 million to $302.9 million annually for the truckload companies who employ them.
The 2023 annual survey of independent truck drivers conducted by OOIDA Foundation and released earlier this year also showed the problem is a persistent one for drivers. It found that only 49% of surveyed drivers—primarily owner-operators—attempted to receive compensation for detention time the previous year, and those that did attempt to do so were only able to receive it on approximately 25% of their detained loads.
The federal HOS regulations stipulate that commercial truck drivers in interstate service spend no more than 14 hours on duty, of which no more than 11 can be spent driving. As a result, lengthy delays lead to a variety of cascading problems, the ATRI researchers observe. According to the institute’s 2024 detention survey of 587 drivers, released in early September, drivers reported that last year they were detained during 39.3% of deliveries.
Because this can result in major consequences for industry productivity and safety, truckers have sought to discourage these kinds of delays by charging shippers detention fees. However, ATRI discovered that while 94.5% of fleets charge detention fees, they are paid for fewer than 50% of those invoices.
“As a result, the trucking industry lost $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity from driver detention in 2023,” ATRI’s analysis said.
Additional impact assessments uncovered by the researchers also indicate driver detention leads to measurable inefficiencies in the supply chain, resulting in reduced driver compensation and increased turnover rates in an era when shortages of qualified drivers have become a continuing stress point for the trucking industry.
Measuring the Impact
Detention can take many forms and the causes are varied, the researchers found. It can be caused by scheduling issues on the customer’s part, inadequate parking and dock space, inadequate staffing at customer facilities, or upstream delays in production. The causes are many and varied.
Other findings of the ATRI study include:
- The frequency of detention was high among female drivers (49.1%), refrigerated trailer drivers (56.2%) and among those fleets that operate in the spot market (42.5%).
- Based on industry-reported data, each truck driver was detained between 117 and 209 hours per year, depending on the industry sector. In for-hire trucking alone, the total time lost to truck driver detention was said to exceed 135 million hours in 2023.
- An analysis of ATRI’s large truck GPS data at different customer facility types found that detention also contributes to higher truck speeds. Trucks that were detained were driven 14.6% faster on average than trucks that were not detained. Trucks were also driven faster on trips to facilities where they were detained, indicating that truck drivers know which firms and facilities will likely detain them.
- Detention can be caused by scheduling issues on the customer’s part, inadequate parking and dock space, inadequate staffing at customer facilities or upstream delays in production. In some cases, it may be caused by drivers’ late arrivals, either due to driver/motor carrier delays or to factors outside their control, such as weather or unexpected road delays.
- Strategies to reduce detention time include arriving early, trailer-based approaches, better communication with customers and even refusing service.
Unless the issue is addressed, the negative consequences for the economy in general and for logistics management in particular will continue to grow, according to ATTRI.
“For the supply chain as a whole, detention can cause numerous large-scale inefficiencies, from lost labor productivity to unnecessary fuel consumption,” it concluded. “Even customers, the primary source of driver detention, experience a variety of negative consequences such as delayed service, additional penalties and fees, and higher freight rates.”
It’s not like people in the industry haven’t come up with ideas over the years about how to solve the problem, but those have turned out to be devilishly difficult to apply—particularly when they require the cooperation of customers in a highly competitive industry where other truckers willing to put up with the problem are relatively easy for shippers to find.
As a result, simply choosing to charge shippers more is not the answer because truckers often have limited ability to negotiate detention fees, ATRI notes. “This is especially true for small carriers with less leverage, shipments for the food services industry where detention is particularly rampant, or during soft freight markets in which customers have more negotiating power.”
Simply endeavoring to show up earlier to beat the line of trucks waiting at the gate is impractical because it is difficult for drivers to accomplish, often means they have to wait longer anyway by getting there early enough to beat the other drivers, and violates the just-in-time concepts adopted throughout the supply chain, where arriving early can be just as bad as showing up late and in some cases draws fines from the shipper.
Drop-and-hook arrangements where the driver simply drops off a trailer and leaves can alleviate the problem, but that requires the shipper to accept that arrangement as well as a significant investment in extra equipment and sufficient space for parking the trailers. Improved communications also can help, but even that won’t make a difference if the shipper really doesn’t care.
In the end, shippers need to be educated about the unnecessary cost driver detention is layering onto the supply chain and the importance of addressing the issue, and this is where direct communication can help. As ATRI research with customers revealed, it turns out that many customers simply are not aware of how much detention occurs at their facilities and the many costs that can flow from it.
