Are We About to Repeat History?

One of the most interesting people I've interviewed so far is Dr. Stephen V. Burks.

You don't meet many people who spent 10 years driving trucks, then earned a Ph.D. in economics and dedicated their career to studying the trucking industry.

What makes his perspective unique is that he didn't just read about trucking deregulation in 1980. He lived through it. He watched the industry change and saw how competition reshaped trucking over the following decades.

One point really stuck with me.

For years we've heard about the "truck driver shortage." But according to Dr. Burks, the long-term issue isn't a shortage of drivers. It's driver turnover.

Large truckload carriers often replace a huge percentage of their drivers every year. His research suggests that, from a business standpoint, accepting high turnover has often been less expensive than dramatically increasing wages or changing the way trucks are dispatched.

That isn't necessarily because companies don't value drivers. It's because every business tries to find the lowest overall operating cost.

Now we're entering another major transition.

Autonomous trucks.

Many companies developing this technology say they're helping solve the driver shortage. But if the long-term problem isn't actually a shortage, then what does the future look like?

Will autonomous trucks improve working conditions by taking over long highway miles?

Will they create new, better-paying local jobs?

Or will they simply increase pressure to move freight at an even lower cost?

The honest answer is...

We don't know yet.

That's something I appreciated about my conversation with Dr. Burks. He wasn't trying to predict the future with certainty. He simply reminded me that every major change in trucking creates winners, losers, and consequences that aren't always obvious at the beginning.

Looking back, deregulation permanently changed the trucking industry.

The question is whether autonomous trucks will become another turning point we'll still be talking about 40 years from now.

What do you think?

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