The American Transportation Research Institute’s 2025 edition of its annual survey of critical industry issues describes some familiar concerns still dominating the list. And there’s a notable newcomer that deserves attention.

Top Concerns
Through the survey of more than 4,200 industry stakeholders — from motor carrier managers to professional drivers — ATRI compiled a list of issues that include:

1. The Economy. Still holding the top spot for the third consecutive year as the freight recession continues.
2. Lawsuit Abuse Reform. Rising to #2 as nuclear verdicts continue plaguing the industry.
3. Insurance Cost/Availability. Premiums rose another 3% per mile in 2024.
4. Driver Compensation. Remains a top concern, especially among drivers themselves.
5. Driver Training Standards. – A new entry at #9 that’s worth watching.

Why Driver Training Matters Now
Here’s what’s interesting: Driver Training Standards first appeared on truck drivers’ lists of concerns back in 2019. It’s been simmering for years, but it finally cracked the overall top 10 this year at number nine.

The reason? Drivers consistently report that new entrants aren’t being adequately trained to safely operate commercial vehicles. And while FMCSA’s 2022 Entry-Level Driver Training (ELDT) rule was designed to fix this problem, there are significant gaps in enforcement.

The ELDT rule requires new drivers to complete structured theory and behind-the-wheel instruction before taking their CDL skills test. Training providers self-certify through an online Training Provider Registry that they meet federal requirements. But that self-certification process is where things get murky.

Moving Forward
The industry’s preferred solution? FMCSA needs to audit its Training Provider Registry to ensure providers are actually meeting the standards. Training provider associations themselves have joined the chorus, asking the Department of Transportation for stronger enforcement and oversight.

Nearly 43% of survey respondents believe better monitoring is the answer, while another 31% support developing industry-wide best practices and model curricula that all schools would follow.

The Bigger Picture
As freight companies navigate economic uncertainty, rising costs, and persistent challenges, the quality of driver training becomes even more critical. Well-trained drivers mean safer roads, fewer crashes, and ultimately lower insurance costs—connecting right back to issues #2 and #3 on the list.

For an industry built on safety and professionalism, getting driver training right isn’t just about compliance. It’s about protecting everyone who shares the road.

The complete ATRI report is available at truckingresearch.org.

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Drivers shouldn’t have to choose between safety and getting things delivered.

The American Transportation Research Institute’s latest industry survey digs into something we’ve known for years: truck parking isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a critical safety issue. Among professional drivers, the lack of available parking ranks as the second-most pressing concern facing the industry today.

Think about what that means for the men and women we partner with to move freight. After navigating traffic, weather, and tight delivery windows, they face another challenge: finding a safe, legal place to rest. The pressure to keep moving when parking isn’t available doesn’t just violate Hours of Service regulations. It also compromises the very thing NATCO values most: driver safety and well-being.

The consequences: Drivers parking in unsafe locations because no alternatives exist. Delayed deliveries because drivers had to end their day early to secure parking. The stress that comes with not knowing where the next rest stop will be. These aren’t abstract problems. They affect real people doing essential work.

That said, there’s encouraging news on the horizon. Ohio, for example, recently announced plans to add 1,400 parking spaces, with Pennsylvania following suit with 1,200 new spots. The ATRI report shows that more than a third of industry stakeholders believe dedicated federal funding for freight-critical parking locations represents the best path forward. We’re watching these developments closely.

At NATCO, our commitment to clear, proactive communication extends beyond coordinating dispatch. It means helping drivers find routes with parking availability in mind. It means recognizing that rest isn’t a luxury — it’s a requirement. And it means never asking a driver to choose between meeting a deadline and their own safety.

Because at the end of the day, a truck parked safely isn’t just good compliance. It’s respect for the people who keep America’s supply chain moving.

The post The Search for Safe Parking appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Truck driving can also provide a path toward stability.

Deep inside this year’s annual report, “Evolving Truck Driver Demographics: Issues and Opportunities,” from The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), there’s an extraordinary section on foster care and trucking.

ATRI’s definition: “Foster care provides temporary, court-monitored placements for youth when their home environments are unsafe, with kinship care being the preferred option. When family placement is not possible, children may live with non-relative caregivers or specialized services, and/or in congregate care settings.”

The numbers:

• 73.2 million children in the United States in 2022.

• About 1 in 128 (0.8%) were served by foster care at some point during the year.

• West Virginia (3.3%), Alaska (2.2%), and Montana (1.9%) have the highest shares of children in foster care.

• New Jersey (0.2%), Utah, Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland (0.4%) have the lowest.

Youth in foster care tend to have a lower high school graduation rates (56%) than the national average (86%), and ATRI’s connection is that housing instability and education are factors affecting a stable future.

Along come national, state, and local programs to help move foster care youth in a positive, more stable direction. Big Brothers Big Sisters has a mentorship program. Foster Care to Success has career counseling, internships, and scholarships.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act ensures those with housing instability have access to essential services and education. This legislation is one way that the trucking industry is able to reach foster youth and connect them to the possibilities of stability and income. It does so in part through programs like the Foster Care Transition Toolkit.

ATRI words the scenario respectfully and straightforwardly:

“As a society, including the trucking industry, it is important to recognize that foster youth should not be defined by their past experiences. The proper support can help ensure that they surmount any barriers to becoming reliable, motivated, and hardworking employees. By focusing on targeted outreach, inclusive hiring practices, mentorship, and career development opportunities, the industry can help break down stigma and leverage the strengths that foster youth bring to the workforce.”

Transitioning into adulthood is challenging enough, and those with housing stability have an extra set of challenges. Kudos to those in the trucking industry who provide them with an opportunity to go on a career path that can help with stability and a promising future.

The post Foster Care and Trucking appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) issued a report this summer: “Evolving Truck Driver Demographics: Issues and Opportunities.” It’s a goldmine of information about our nation’s truck drivers.

About halfway through the document, ATRI presents this table and discussion:

ATRI: Summary Statistics for Top Transportation Occupations

There’s much to unpack here. First, the caveats: The chart is not exclusively for tractor trailer drivers, and that $1,005 median weekly earnings for drivers doesn’t factor in any bonuses. (ATA’s driver compensation study lists that average at $1,470 per week. or some $76,420 per year). Still, we can see that the driver average is, in fact, average when held up with the entire U.S. labor force.

ATRI groups these top five transportation sector occupations to show a scope of industry numbers and then, cleverly, the study pivots into how the industry might effectively confront its perpetual driver shortage.

Which explains the title of that section: “Opportunity: Recruit Younger Employees from other Transportation Occupations.” As they describe the situation:

From which pool do you recruit talent?

“Driver/sales workers and truck driver not only have higher average ages but also higher median weekly earnings than other occupational groups … Consequently, motor carriers (and other transportation companies) may possess a pool of younger talent that is well-positioned to transition into truck driving roles (those with average ages in the upper 30s). Individuals in these positions may already be familiar with the requirements, lifestyle, and expectations associated with truck driving. This presents an opportunity for fleets to leverage their existing non-driving workforce to internally recruit and develop younger drivers.”

Here’s the rub. ATRI’s very next section in the study is “Issue: Declines in Teen Licensing May Impact Younger Adult CDL Applicants.”

Yep. It seems the percentage for those who are eligible to have driver licenses (16 years or older) and don’t is remarkably high. New York: 25%. West Virginia: 24%. Texas: 21%. Hawaii: 21%. Oklahoma: 20%. (All of these percentages are from 2023.) The national average of those without driver licenses was 14%.

So, some people need rides. Uber and Lyft are probably not complaining.

This presents yet another challenge for expanding a commercial driver pool that’s increasingly aging out. ATRI has a solid idea here: Pull from those potential drivers already involved in the transportation industry through aligned jobs. Yes. Start with what you know.

The post The Transportation Jobs appeared first on NATCO Transport.

⏤⏤

Homework? No homework. NATCO took care of that already.

We were one of Truckstop’s first customers. At night, we faxed in our loads to this place in Idaho, and the next morning they were posted.

I was asked to participate on the Truckstop customer advisory board: it took place on the basement of a cruise ship. (And no, they didn’t make us row the boat.) They put up the Truckstop logo and they’re like, “When you see this, what do you think?”

And I quietly — quietly, I thought — said in the back row, “Walmart…maybe a little on the cheap side.” I didn’t realize that Scott (Moscrip, Truckstop’s founder) was sitting across the aisle from me. “Cori, please say that louder.”

So, I did. and it was kind of a turning point. (My idea was) Truckstop has matured. It’s grown. It’s a good-sized company now. Let’s have the image and the logo and the marketing behind it to support that.

If you ask Scott, he says I called his 18-year-old baby ugly. That’s how he took the comments. We laugh and joke about that quite frequently.

Truckstop has always strived to be a partner, a partner with both carriers and brokers. Very on the medium ground: they want to be at service to the industry. It’s very evident of when you talk to somebody within Truckstop on any level of the team, they are “how can we better help you?”

I think that’s key because they’ve always valued customer input, and I think that’s the partnership that goes a long ways in this industry.

Happy 30th birthday, Truckstop. We appreciate everything you’ve done for NATCO Transport and the transportation industry over the years. Looking forward to the next 30 years together.

⏤⏤

You can watch Cori’s tribute to Truckstop.com HERE.

The post At the Truckstop (Meeting) appeared first on NATCO Transport.

And, well, the commercial transportation industry finds itself in a familiar, yet no less serious, pickle.

First, some numbers from the report:

• The United States relies heavily on truck drivers, as they moved roughly 72.6 percent of the nation’s freight (by weight, in 2022).

• Since 2011, truck drivers alone have accounted for approximately 2.2 percent of the workforce.

• In 2024, 3.58 million people were employed in truck driving roles, with some 57.6 percent of them working as tractor-trailer truck drivers.

• The remaining drivers primarily operate in local, last-mile, or direct-to-customer roles.

So far, so good. Right? Not exactly.

For example, “During moderate to strong economies, nearly every motor carrier will decline profitable revenue loads due to a lack of truck drivers; this reality creates a ‘de facto’ driver shortage that is not easily addressed by motor carriers alone.”

Other challenges include an aging driver pool, women accounting for only 4.1 percent of truck drivers, the average truck driver age now at 47 years old, and a faster pace of retirements.

So far, pretty bad, Right? Again, not exactly. Over the next select entries, we’ll dig into the downsides and upsides of the industry’s always-fluid driver situations ⏤ that’s situations, plural, because there are always variables that complement and compete.

Autonomous Trucking. Former Foster Youth. Justice-Involved People. With so many current and potential ways to get deliveries from point A to point B, there’s always friction among the actual competition and whatever’s on the horizon.

That said, NATCO’s success with driver acquisition and retention is still hiding in plain sight. We always emphasize clear communication, and we always treat our drivers with the respect and the appreciation they deserve.

Part of that approach is rooted in our rich history in the transportation industry. Cori Eckley — VP of NATCO’s operations since 2005 — represents the fourth generation in the family business. The value of transportation drove Eckley family dinner conversations then as surely as it drives Cori’s business strategy today.

Watch this space, and we’ll show you how that Eckley dinner talk has contributed to transportation.

The post Who’s Driving That Truck? appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Lingering Effects

NATCO was quite active in disaster recovery surrounding this past September’s Hurricane Helene. At least 234 people died and 26 remain missing as a result of the storm and, at $89.2 billion, Helene has proved to be the fifth costliest U.S Atlantic hurricane on record.

The storm itself dissipated on September 29th and, for many, the real trouble began after that: storm surge, flooding, landslide, and more. These are always awful; Helene has been particularly devastating.

A month later, the effects continue to impact the region.

Asheville has been much in the news due to it being so hard hit by Hurricane Helene. Alongside that, as of this writing the North Carolina Department of Transportation is logging some 395 incidents that remain unresolved. These include roads closed, roads impassable, lanes closed, lanes narrowed, local traffic only sections.

The vast majority of those are road closures.

The western part of North Carolina is a curious thing. Angling from southeast to northwest, it touches South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia.

We have the Appalachians tracking through the region. Just north of Asheville, there’s Mount Mitchell ⏤ at 6,684 feet the highest point in North America east of the Mississippi. The region is teeming with hills, rivers, small towns and isolated homes that are now, still, inaccessible. 

As our friends at Transport Topics headline it, “With I-40 Closed, Truckers Find Mountain Roads Tricky.” Not just tricky. Bottleneck-prone and dangerous:

The closure of Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge after Hurricane Helene has created challenges for some tractor-trailer drivers going between North Carolina and Tennessee.

Too many of them are ending up on two-lane mountain roads where they crawl along and sometimes get stuck. Officials from both states are urging through drivers to use only approved truck routes and to not blindly heed their computer navigation systems.

“Some trucks are following GPS routes that are programmed for passenger vehicles,” said NCDOT spokesman David Uchiyama. “Those are routes that accommodate passenger vehicles. But they’re steep, winding, curvy roads, not built for trucks.”

Good communication ⏤ say, between driver and dispatch ⏤ can proactively minimize getting stuck and putting person and vehicles in harm’s way. Here’s to that ability to communicate effectively. Here’s to a quick, safe, and effective recovery.

The post Carolina on Our Mind appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Between Storms

Late September 2024. Hurricane Helene became an exceptionally powerful and devastating storm, affecting a broad swath of territory, from Mexico and Cuba to the southeastern United States.

The weather predictions have grown more accurate, which gives people more advanced notice about getting out of harm’s way. It allows local, state and federal agencies to declare states of emergency. Notice buys time.

But there’s never enough time. We can tailor predictions to particular spots ⏤ say, creeks and rivers likely overflow their banks at particular spots and low-elevation places likely to flood ⏤ but a storm is not a static thing. It fluctuates.

We never know what the aftermath will bring.

Helene was bad. They’re all bad, these disasters.

We’re always busy at NATCO. And yet this storm was particularly intense and had us managing logistics around the clock.

At one point in time, we were coordinating 52 drivers on the I-95 corridor, from Florida to Maine.

We’re not crowing about this. As always, the point is that we have responsibilities ⏤ to our customers, our communities, and to our drivers.

Never enough time. All this was important, there in the first days of October, because Hurricane Milton was bearing down on the same region.

Milton brought even harsher intensity than Helene. In its wake are some 28 deaths, $85 billion in damage, losses of livelihood and home and business and community.

The goal is to coordinate our drivers reaching their destinations safely and leaving just as safely. Alongside that, we bring essentials such as recovery equipment and building materials to the affected areas.

It takes a long time to recover from relatively brief (and too-often ferocious) weather event. This snapshot of our 52 driver along the eastern seaboard is proof that we’re able to cover the area and stay out of the way at the same time.

The post In the 3PL Eye appeared first on NATCO Transport.

PeteysHead CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What It Takes

A truck blowing through a brake safety inspection: ironic, yes?

So it went in Park City, Utah, last month, with at least two incidents involving a cement truck and a dump truck. Possible reasons their drivers didn’t stop:

• They didn’t see the inspection spot.
• They saw the inspection spot but were behind schedule.
• They saw the spot and chose not to stop, thinking they wouldn’t pass the inspection.

All three of those possibilities are alarming, with degrees of negligence. But it’s the third one ⏤ not wanting to get busted ⏤ that’s most troubling and dangerous.

Anyone who’s been to Park City knows the majestic geography. Nestled into the Snyderville Basin, with mountains rising around it, I-80 and Route 40 also pass just to the north and east of town. With the popularity of the town (the film festival, the skiing, the foodie culture, the hiking trails) comes traffic and commerce.

Yes, you need trucks. Trucks with good brakes that pass inspection.

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) coordinates annual Brake Safety Weeks. Inspectors cover Canada, the United States, and Mexico. And the results are decidedly mixed. Sometimes they have unannounced brake safety events. It’s like a flash mob breaking into song in your local shopping mall, only they’re on your highway and there to inspect and either send you on your way or ticket and maybe take you out of service. So, it’s nothing at all like a flash mob at the shopping mall. And the results are decidedly mixed.

That’s how it went on April 30th of this year. By the numbers:

• 4,898 commercial motor vehicle inspections
• 88% passed inspection
• 570 vehicles placed out of service

As our friends at Transport Topics detailed it:

“Inspectors found other brake violations on 256 (44.9%) of the commercial motor vehicles inspected. Examples of other brake violations include worn brake lines/hoses, broken brake drums, inoperative tractor protection system, inoperative low-air warning device, air leaks and hydraulic fluid leaks.”

Proper preparation prevents poor performance, yes? There are any number of reasons or excuses for not having the vehicle checked. And that’s all vehicles on the road. We’re all better off when we’re prepared and alert.

The post Putting on the Brakes appeared first on NATCO Transport.

We’re Glad They’re Nationwide

24/7/365

We’re grateful to our truck drivers. Whether they network with NATCO or they’ve never heard of us, we appreciate the work they do.

Quite simply: our nation’s truck drivers drive the nation’s economy.

We’re happy to share all that. And it’s entirely fitting to have a National Truck Driving Appreciation Week, which has been celebrating our carriers this past week.

Social media is filled with shout-outs ⏤ individual appreciations and collective hurrahs alike ⏤ for this extraordinary workforce, especially this week.

As American Trucking Associations puts it:

“Nearly every aspect of daily life is made possible because a truck driver delivered the goods and resources people need.

“NTDAW is an important time for America to thank all the professional truck drivers for their hard work and commitment in undertaking one of our economy’s most demanding and important jobs. These 3.5 million professional men and women not only deliver our goods safely, securely, and on time, but they also keep our highways safe.”

G’head, check out #NTDAW24 on your favorite social media platform.

Some stats to back up the impact drivers have:

• American truckers driver more than 330 billion miles each yar

• Truck drivers deliver about 11 billion tons of freight each year.

• Trucks deliver some 70% of all freight moved in the United States.

• More than 80% of communities depend solely on trucks to receive their goods.

• There are some 8.5 million jobs directly related to the trucking industry.

They’re there in good times and bad. They’re the firefighters of the road: when bad things like natural disasters happen, truck drivers drive toward the danger.

Or, as Yogi Berra said, “When you see a fork in the road, take it.”

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