The FreightWaves Research Institute, in conjunction with industry partners, universities and technology vendors announces the “War on Detention Pledge” – a promise for companies involved in the freight transportation ecosystem to develop and advance research, initiatives and best practices to mitigate uncompensated asset and driver detention.
“Uncompensated detention is one of the biggest travesties in the industry that plagues our driver community, cost trucking fleets billions, and cause unnecessary costs to society,” Arlen Stark, EVP of the FreightWaves Research Institute stated. “By bringing industry participants, trade associations and major research universities together, we plan to use data to research the cause, cost and develop best practices to mitigate uncompensated detention from our industry.”
According to electronic logging device (ELD) data that FreightWaves has accumulated from technology partners across the industry, drivers are in uncompensated detention for seven hours per week, costing trucking fleets as much as $560 per truck/week or nearly $28,000 per year. Across the trucking industry, the bill could be as high as $25 billion in lost productivity and economic opportunity.
Uncompensated detention is also one of the fundamental reasons for driver turnover, and also contributes greatly to reducing the quality of life for many drivers. “If we want to solve the driver shortage, or mitigate the growing gap between demand and labor supply and protect public safety, we must find ways to end unnecessary wait-time at shippers which contributes to frustration and fatigue,” Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves stated.
The FreightWaves Research Institute has secured a number of university partnerships to provide research, technology vendors to provide aggregated ELD data, and industry trade associations that will be the backbone of this initiative. In coming weeks, the Institute will announce the initial partners involved.
Foundational to this program is the “War on Detention Pledge,” a non-financial pledge to participate in the development of programs and research aimed at tackling the problem of this unfair industry practice.
“Carrier, shippers, governments, freight brokers and technology vendors all have a mutual interest to identify the causes and develop best practices to mitigate unplanned detention. Detention is a lot like traffic. No one has a vested interest in creating traffic and that is how we should think of trucking detention,” Fuller stated.
The War on Detention Pledge
We understand the significant economic, environmental and direct personal costs of detention in the trucking industry, and its impact on society. We will contribute to initiatives and research that will aim to reduce these costs for all parties to the supply chain.
This means we are committing, where appropriate, to:
Increasing Hours of Service Driving Utilization from a current average of 6.62 Hours per Day to:
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7.4 Hours within 24 months
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8.1 Hours within 60 Months
Identify and communicate specific activities that we will undertake within our business with a clear focus on reducing truck and driver detention
Empower our employees and associates to identify and execute on solutions to inefficiencies in the supply chain
Acknowledge that doing nothing will lead to a growing labor shortage in the trucking industry
Provide resources and/or knowledge for industry initiatives
Consider implementing innovations within our business