The Voice Of GO(r)D podcast is very happy to bring you a discussion with former MIT Data Scientist Dr. David Correll, whose work within MIT FreightLab, a project of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, examines the mother of all problems in trucking, and the one that begets so many others, DETENTION.
For non-truckers, detention is when trucks are held up for unreasonable amounts of time in the loading and unloading process at customer facilities. Some facility operators are notorious for this, and I have spent days trying to get certain things unloaded, and will share a particularly egregious example in the book I am writing on the fate of the North American Trucker in 2025. (see details below)
Everyone remembers seeing footage of a hundred container ships waiting to be docked at the Port Of Long Beach/Los Angeles during Covid - imagine that this is what its like in many sectors of trucking, except it happens all the time, year in, year out, and has been this way since forever.
Dr. Correll’s research concludes, in his words, that America leaves “40% of its trucking capacity on the table every day” due to this pernicious and seemingly intractable problem, which is the proximate cause of -
- Truck driver churn and retention issues
- Speeding and aggressive driving behavior which pose a saftey hazard on our roads, and has resulted in the imposition of ELDs and other surveillance tech into the lives of truckers
- Shippers being ghosted by carriers who find better facilities to work with
- The wasting of millenia, yes, literally thousands of years worth of valuable human capital. Multiply all of the hours lost times millions of truckers times decades of this problem …. and its probably more than millenia.
- An unnecessary drag on the resiliency of American supply chains.
We had an interesting discussion that covers detention and then connects it to these other issues, and we also discuss possible solutions.
You can read all about it at the following links -
David’s testimony to the Biden ‘Trucking Task Force’ -
https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114233/witnesses/HHRG-117-PW0Wstate-CorrellD-20211117.pdf
David at Medium -
https://medium.com/mitsupplychain/is-there-a-truck-driver-shortage-or-a-capacity-crisis-73a7d7a5bcb
From MIT’s own news site -
https://news.mit.edu/2022/are-supply-chains-stuck-detention-0425
Some FreightLabs research papers for your perusal -
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/130093
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/142935
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/126383
You can find Dr. Correll online
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhccorrell/
Please enjoy this musical interlude -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7kwFSp7yh4&list=RDc7kwFSp7yh4&start_radio=1
I have written extensively about one of the solutions to this problem, and that solution has been sitting in Congress for 3 years, waiting to be acted upon. Its amazing how a one line bill that doesn’t include new taxes or giveaways to anyone seems to have so much trouble getting out of committee -
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/pay-truckers-for-their-work/
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and encouraged, especially if you are being abused by lazy and disorganized cretins holding you up and wasting the only resource you can’t make more of and is the most important thing we have in life - TIME.
gordilocks@protonmail.com
I’m almost done the rough manuscript of this detailed overview of what has become of the North American Trucker in 2025 -
https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/book-project-announcement-and-a-major
