Cracking the Code to CDL Shortages in Transit Operations

Stop Requested.

Welcome to Stop Requested, the podcast where we discuss everything transit. I’m your co-host, Levi McCollum. And I’m your co-host, Christian Londono, Senior Customer Success Manager at ETA Transit.

Today’s topic, we’re going to speak about CDL drivers and how important they are for the transit industry. According to an article by Smart Cities Dive, the Public Transportation Association communicated that 96% of the 190 transit agencies it surveyed in a 2022 survey have workforce shortages, with 84% of them saying the shortfalls affect their ability to operate.

So what do you think about that, Levi? Yeah, I mean, agencies need operators to be able to survive. Without operators, as the backbone of the agency, our services are going to be hindered. And that affects your ridership when you have to cut services.

And in the end, it eventually affects funding. So agencies should prioritize a way to be able to get operators trained and remain up to date on their training so they feel fully able to complete the job.

Yeah, that training is rigorous. It’s several weeks and CDL drivers are perceived to be a higher level of driver, right? They have much more responsibility. And even the way they behave on the road has to display that they are a CDL driver.

So it’s very important to have them train. Again, it’s a specialist training that they have to go through. And it’s also a requirement with a lot of regulations to be able to operate transit vehicles.

And so about this shortage, we’ve experienced a lot of that has started to be perceived or even more obvious during COVID. And a little bit after COVID, and as we just mentioned, those numbers from 2022, many agencies start trying, still trying to recover from that shortage.

So any strategies, anything that comes to your mind that you have heard of, I have one that I want to share with you, but I want to just allow you to kind of let me know what you’ve heard of or you’ve known of strategies to try to overcome that challenge.

Yeah, I think one that’s maybe the most obvious, but one that I’m familiar with is treating this like a vocation and working with vocational schools or community colleges to be able to provide this necessary training.

You have to start recruiting younger and younger. I think starting at that level, getting folks who are interested in operating a vehicle, specifically a large passenger vehicle like a bus or like a bus, that you are giving them the tools when they’re most amenable, that they would be open to the idea of becoming a bus operator.

If the agency is paying for this CDL certification, I think it’s much more likely that you’re going to get folks who are at least going to try it out. As you know, Christian, you’re not able to maintain 100% of the folks who end up applying.

It doesn’t work out that way. But there are incentives like paying for the CDL certification that would keep some of those folks around and then make them lifelong bus operators or move up in the food chain and a transit operation.

It becomes supervisors and so on. Yeah, I guess the key there is to make sure that it’s being presented as a career and not just as a job, especially when obtaining the CDL. On top of that, going through all the bus operator training is months of training.

It’s a big investment, not just on the agency. It costs money, but for the individual itself, right? Am I just going for a job and I get on board quickly and I’m doing this job or am I signing up for a career where all the time that I’m investing is something that is going to pay off for many more years to come.

So to your point of the CDL training, what some agents are doing is making sure that they can provide that certification in-house, right? Because it’s easier to find individuals that are looking for a job that might be looking for a career but don’t have CDL than…

finding individuals potentially with the transit industry experience. So they were formerly conductors or drivers and already have the CDL or folks with the CDL that are switching from potentially trucking to the transit industry.

So it’s a smaller market when you’re looking with folks that already have the certification versus working in-house to deliver the training yourself in onboarding those individuals from scratch. So I’ve known of agencies that have gone as far as going to job fairs and actually bringing a bus and allowing some of those that are interested to drive the bus.

and see if, you know, operating the bus is something that they would see themselves doing every day in and out. So I think that’s very interesting how they go to that extent. But, you know, to your point and the point we’re making, you know, it seems that a lot of the agencies are taking on delivering that CDL training in-house.

Yeah, and I think the exposure there is key. You know, even the example that you mentioned where these transit agencies are bringing buses to the job fairs, you know, some folks may not have stepped foot on a bus before.

They may not know what it’s like. And being able to see it, touch it, you know, drive it in a parking lot, even though it’s a controlled environment, you know, if they might come around to the idea of being a bus operator or a large vehicle operator.

I think that there are some other barriers that, you know, that are presented other than CDL, like, you know, unfortunately some of the news about what’s happening to a lot of the bus operator workforce, you know, violent assaults or, you know, incidents on the bus where the bus operator needs to step in, you know, that may prevent them from even stepping foot on the bus or even considering it as a profession.

But if you can at least reduce the barrier and entry for the certification, you know, I think that’s one way to be able to ensure that we continue to have bus operators in the future. Creating the pipeline is going to be essential because automated vehicles, autonomous buses are still well off.

I mean, that is not something that’s happening, you know, tomorrow within the next five years. So we have to figure out another solution. Certainly, and I know I would say best practice or example of innovative ways that agencies are attracting bus operators is what Palm Trend has been doing, I would say over the last year.

It might have been a little bit over that, but it’s advertising on the back of the vehicles and just… I don’t know if it’s happened to you, Levi, where you were driving around and then you see these vehicles that is for plumbing or it’s for all types of different services and it has the phone number and maybe you say, oh, I’m looking for a plumber, I’m looking for this type of service, and then you snap that picture or you take that information to reach out to that company.

Well, Pomp trim plays an ad in the back of the buses advertising for bus operator positions and showing all the different benefits that the agency offers as well as they pay. And the amount of folks that have been applying has shown that it was an effective strategy.

It really improved the amount of folks, at least the applicants, which helped the agency to reduce that gap. At some point, the agency, Pomp trim was down, I think, close to 70 bus operators and with that strategy, they were able to reduce the gap to like 15 bus operators.

In the matter of fact, they got Pomp trim to receive an actual award for that campaign. So I think that progress has been made around the country. Agencies have been able to reduce that gap, but it’s going to be important to tackle it from different aspects.

And I think one of the most critical ones, in my opinion, and through this conversation, is the training, is being able to deliver CDL training yourself. So you’re not depending on folks to come into your door with all the training and certification.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that. And I know that there are some agencies out there that are delivering a lot of innovative solutions. I wonder, though, just to kind of think about this from a slightly different angle, how much of this, though, the shortage specifically is tied to those macro.

economic conditions that the agency is unfortunately under the thumb of you know when folks are when they have more money or when more money is being offered they might end up jumping ship and you know going to an Amazon or go drive a school bus right if you’re getting a few bucks more an hour that makes a big difference in your life so you know we we have to pay competitively right we have to advertise the jobs we have to make sure that people are are in in the pipeline are open to the training that’s necessary you know I I just wonder that if the macroeconomic conditions were a little bit worse if pay was a little bit down or jobs were a little less available do people find a way to be able to to get to the transit industry specifically as,

you know, bus operators, or is it just on the transit agency to try to solve the problem? Yeah, I think that, and we’ve seen that, right? To your point, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, all these agencies that, you know, hire drivers, they’ve been increasing their pay almost at the same pace that inflation has been increasing.

While a lot of these drivers, they get paid according to a contract. And if the contract is not up for negotiation or is not negotiated just yet, the pay is based on a previous economical climate. Then therefore, you know, a lot of these drivers may be making less than $20 an hour.

They’re looking at this job offerings that are paying $25 an hour, $26, $28 an hour. And they’re thinking, well, maybe I just need to change the vehicle that I’m driving because I need to make more money to be able to afford my livelihood, right?

To be able to pay my bills. So I think that that definitely plays a big, you know, key, is a key component of this overall environment in how it’s changing. But 100% agencies, I believe that also what I’ve seen is the increase in driver salary.

It’s trying to be able to match the industry and offer something competitive. Agencies are going to have to think holistically and to the point earlier about autonomous vehicles. You know, while that may help, and there are certain cases where some autonomous vehicles are in operation in the United States and abroad, it’s not going to help.

not making a dent and being able to fill the gap between what’s needed, the number of bus operators that are needed versus what we have currently. So the more that we’re thinking about this complex problem from different angles, I think it’s more likely to get some good return and have a steady set of jobs and folks that are ready to take on those jobs that are fully prepared to have that fulfilling career in public transportation.

All right, Christian, well, this has been a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I hope our listeners have been able to follow along with the conversation and feel free to give us any feedback. Did we get anything right?

Did we get some things wrong? Please let us know, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of Stop Requested. Bye.