If millennials are the answer to the growing driver shortage, this recent report from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety sends up some warning flares.
What do you do when you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place? That’s where the trucking industry might find itself…if it can’t convince millennials that getting a CDL is a pathway to a great career…and if it can’t improve the driving behavior of those same millennials.
A recent article on fleetowner.com details the problem by citing a 2017 AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety showing the need to not just train younger drivers but to actually change their behavior. So what are the numbers?
- Driving while reading texts or emails – 66.1% of millennials ages 19-24 vs.40.2% of all other drivers
- Driving while actually texting or typing emails – 59.3% of millennials ages 19-24 vs. 31.4% for others
- Running a red light – nearly 50% of millennials ages 19-24 vs. 36% for others
Even more alarming, nearly 12% of drivers ages 19-24 felt it was acceptable to drive 10 mph over the speed limit in a school zone. That’s compared to only 5% of all other drivers.
Now this obviously was not a survey of commercial drivers, but this is the pool of potential drivers we’ll have to recruit from for the future. This makes it essential that the industry understands these behavior issues and works tirelessly to lower those statistics within this age group. We all understand the liabilities we face as an individual business and as an industry when those we depend upon to transport our products disregard basic safety procedures.
Last year, fleetowner.com posted an article asking if millennials were “poised to totally reshape the concept of “work” as we know it via their knowledge of technology?” Most articles that appear on the subject of recruiting millennials tend to focus on providing a more inviting work environment for this group. And that is an important factor. However, it should not minimize the efforts of those in the trucking industry to reshape millennials’ attitude and behavior when it comes to safer driving
