Truck Driver Detention Study Shows Some Improvement

The total time lost to truck driver detention in for-hire trucking was more than 135 million hours in 2023. That’s among the findings in a new report from the American Transportation Research Institute.

The report quantifies the major consequences that truck driver detention at customer facilities has on industry productivity and safety. The research quantifies the direct costs for fleets, truck drivers and supply chains in general. It also corroborates previous research that detained truckers drive faster both before and after they’re detained.

Truck driver detention is the additional time a commercial motor vehicle driver must wait at a customer facility to pick up or deliver freight beyond their scheduled appointment time.

Driver detention is regularly voted as a top issue in the industry, and in 2023 it was the fifth- highest issue for drivers specifically. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has also repeatedly identified detention as an area of concern over the past decade, including an audit as part of 2015’s Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act) a new study being conducted on the impact of detention time on safety and operations.

Comparing the new study's data with an ATRI 2018 detention survey, researchers found that while driver detention has decreased slightly in the last few years, the overall costs of being detained at customer facilities for more than two hours is substantial.

Driver Detention Findings

In 2023, drivers reported being detained in 39% of all stops. In 9.9% of stops – one in every 10 – drivers experienced more than two hours of detention.

The frequency of detention was even higher among some groups:

• Women drivers (49%)
• Refrigerated trailer drivers (56%)
• Fleets that operate in the spot market (43%).

Based on industry-reported data, truck drivers were detained between 117 and 209 hours per year, depending on the sector.

The good news is, significant detention of two hours or more became considerably less common, dropping by 11.4 percentage points between 2014 and 2023. At the same time, however, detention times of two hours or less rose by 4.9 percentage points between 2014 and 2023.

Data from ATRI’s three driver surveys suggest moderate improvements in detention over the past decade. Altogether, the frequency of stops with detention dropped by 6.5 percentage points between 2014 and 2023.

A majority of truckload drivers – 57% – were late to or had to cancel a pick-up or delivery due to detention at the previous customer’s facility at least once in 2023.

Furthermore, a majority of truckload drivers – 52% – ran out of available hours-of-service on-duty time at a customer facility due to detention.

How Detention Affects Truck Drivers

Detention presents more problems for drivers beyond scheduling. Drivers reported an average of half of customer facilities do not allow drivers to park in the facility while waiting to load or unload.

Without space to park, drivers may be forced to burn unnecessary fuel idling in both hot and cold weather conditions, park in undesignated or potentially unsafe areas, and lose valuable on-duty time seeking parking elsewhere.

On top of that, an average of 44% of customer facilities do not allow drivers to use bathroom facilities of any kind while waiting to load or unload.

In 2023, 35% of drivers reported that they had left a previous driving job in the past as a result of excessive or undercompensated detention time — although this percentage is partly skewed by years of experience in the industry.

Excessive detention times also cut into drivers’ income. A large majority of surveyed carriers – 97% – offer detention pay to their drivers to address this fact, but driver detention pay often does not fully compensate drivers for the per-mile pay they could have otherwise received.

Tracking and Charging for Detention

Most carriers, ATRI found, don’t track the amount of true detention time at each stop. Carriers do, however, possess accurate data on the total amount of total dwell time at each stop via GPS or electronic logging device data.

67% of carriers that charge detention fees do so starting at the two-hour mark. This report used the definition of detention time as all delay in excess of two hours.

Nearly 95% of fleets charge detention fees, which is an increase from 2018, when 80% of carriers charged detention fees.

However, collecting those fees is another story.

ATRI found carriers charging detention fees are paid for less than half of those invoices. As a result, the trucking industry lost $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity from driver detention in 2023.

Even when customers pay detention invoices, detention fees do not fully cover the revenue that might have been earned during the same time. Surveyed carriers reported increasing their detention fees by a median of just 3% over the past five years (2018 to 2023). This rate of increase is well below that of inflation and of the hourly cost of trucking during the same period, which rose by 21.4%.

Driver Detention Contributes to Higher Truck Speeds

An analysis of ATRI’s large truck GPS data at different customer facility types found that detention contributes to higher truck speeds.

Trucks that were detained drove nearly 15% faster on average than trucks that were not detained.

Trucks also drove faster on trips to facilities where they were detained, indicating that truck drivers know which firms and facilities will likely detain them.

“Detention is so common that many industry professionals have accepted it as inevitable without realizing the true extent of its costs,” said Chad England, C.R. England CEO. “ATRI’s report puts real-world numbers to the true impact that truck driver detention has on trucking and the broader economy.”

The report also discussed strategies to reduce driver detention, such as drop-and-hook freight, arriving early to appointments, and improved customer communication.

A full copy of the report is available through ATRI’s website.