Missouri truckers find themselves in the driver's seat amid national shortage [View all]

St. Louis trucker Hugo Rolin adores the open road. But near the end of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, he made the tough decision to walk away from the industry that employed him for most of the last 20 years.

Blame burnout, which Rolin attributes to relaxed regulations for people working to transport “essential” supplies during the pandemic.

“You could theoretically drive a 21-hour shift if that's what you wanted,” he said on Thursday’s St. Louis on the Air. “If you had essential freight, medical equipment, or even food and groceries — shippers and brokers and everybody needed so much freight, so fast, all the time, that it burned me out. It was just too much for me to do.”

Rolin wasn’t alone. In October 2021, around the time he was weighing the possibility of leaving the industry, the American Trucking Association announced that the U.S. would finish the year with an estimated shortage of 80,000 drivers — a shortage that could rise as high as 160,000 in the next decade.

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2022-04-14/missouri-truckers-find-themselves-in-the-drivers-seat-amid-national-shortage