The Motor Freight Carriers Association and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters - on a team led by Carnegie Mellon Driver Training and Safety Institute - have been awarded a grant to improve the training of truck drivers.

The Department of Education grant, "Partnership for Innovative Safety Transport Training," is a joint program of the United States and European Community under the Transatlantic Declaration on EC-US Relations that was signed by President Bush in 1990.
"Our European partners have a century of experience with apprenticeship driver training programs that we can learn from," said Timothy P. Lynch, President and CEO of MFCA, an association of unionized less-than-truckload carriers. "However, while the DOE grant program has been in existence for ten years, this marks the first time that the importance of vocational training of truck drivers has been recognized for funding," he said.
The partnership will investigate measures to improve the training of truck drivers by examining the most effective and efficient training methods in the United States and Europe. The partners, who also include the joint/labor management transport training boards of Denmark, The Netherlands, and Sweden, will explore such areas as:

• computer based training and e-learning for assessing trainees and training methods;

• new train-the-trainer methods;

• transfer of apprenticeship experience from Europe to the United States;

• the exchange of students in truck driving championships;

• identifying and analyzing global transportation trends that will impact the demand for new truck drivers.