Washington is recognizing that the American truck driver shortage might have been misdiagnosed.
Research from David Correll, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and co-director at the MIT FreightLab, has been getting some attention in Washington recently.
Correll's research focuses on data-driven approaches to understanding U.S. truck drivers' utilization, retention, and quality of life. His work on how trucker "detention time" — the unpaid time drivers spend at warehouses waiting to be loaded and unloaded, often lasting hours — has contributed to supply chain bottlenecks in recent months, is impacting policy.
Plans from the White House have referred twice to unpaid detention time as means to improve trucking conditions. At the same time, recent remarks from President Biden cite Correll's findings to address the logistics morass in the freight industry that might be contributing to shortages and inflation across the United States.