38 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
in mosT sTaTes, aspiring barbers
have to spend as many as 1,000 hours
in training to get a license. To drive a
40,000-lb. truck, though, there’s no
minimum behind- the-wheel driving
time required, no proof of ability to navi-
gate through mountains, snow, or rain.
There’s a multiple- choice written
exam, a medical test, and a brief driv-
ing test—which in some states can be
administered by the school that drivers
have paid to train them.
As trucking companies hustle to hire
more drivers in response to supply-
chain issues, the roads may grow more
dangerous. First-year drivers are in-
volved in more crashes than other truck-
ers, and putting more inexperienced
ones on the roads could increase ac-
cident rates. The 5,005 fatalities from
crashes involving large trucks in 2019
were a 43% increase from 2010, even
though there were only 21% more trucks
registered to be on the roads.
Yet as Canada’s trucker protests
against a COVID-19 vaccine mandate
show, the global supply chain comes to
a standstill without truck drivers. Au-
tomakers including Ford, General Mo-
tors, and Toyota curtailed production
at U.S. and Canadian factories after the
protests closed the Ambassador Bridge,
which carries 27% of all trade between
the two countries. Trucking associa-
tions warned that the vaccine mandate
could further sideline more unvacci-
nated U.S. truckers.
But the demand for people to drive
goods across the country is not going
away, which is why the U.S. government
is scrambling to get more truckers on the
road. In the coming months, the mini-
mum age to be licensed to drive com-
mercial trucks interstate will drop from
21 to 18 for thousands of drivers as part
of a pilot program announced by the
Biden Administration. And on Feb. 7,
standards for driver training that had
been in the works for three decades fi-
nally took effect, but without a critical
component: behind- the-wheel training.
“We don’t want to do the hard things
in this industry, which is spending
extra money, taking extra time to train
people to safely operate trucks,” says
Lewie Pugh, who owned and operated
a truck for 22 years and is now executive
vice president of the Owner- Operator In-
dependent Drivers Association. OOIDA
has long pushed for higher training stan-
dards, which it says would help the
high- turnover industry retain workers.
The consequences of inadequate
training are most dramatic when big rigs
crash into other vehicles. In Colorado
in April 2019, four people were killed
in a fiery crash when Rogel Aguilera-
Mederos, an inexperienced driver, lost
control of his truck.
Aguilera-Mederos, who was 23 at the
time, had earned his commercial driver’s
license (CDL) in Texas, and was head-
ing to Texas from Wyoming when his
brakes failed coming down a mountain
on I-70. He was sentenced to 110 years
in prison for vehicular manslaughter,
later reduced to 10 years by the Colo-
rado governor. But the responsibility
shouldn’t lie only on the driver’s shoul-
ders, says his lawyer, James Colgan. “My
client never received any formal train-
ing in mountain passes and how to deal
with them,” Colgan told me. The truck-
ing company “let this inexperienced
driver take a mountain pass—they ac-
tually encouraged it.”
The company that hired Aguilera-
Mederos, Castellano 03 Trucking LLC,
has since gone out of business with-
out being held accountable. Aguilera-
Mederos had earned his CDL 11 months
before the crash and his regular driver’s
license two years before that, according
to court transcripts. He had been work-
ing for Castellano 03 Trucking for three
weeks when he found himself barreling
down a mountain at 80 m.p.h. with a
75,000-lb. load and no brakes. “I heldthe steering wheel tight, and that’s when
I thought I was going to die,” he told
investigators.ConCerned with a high level of
truck- driver crashes, Congress in 1991
ordered the Federal Highway Adminis-
tration to create training requirements
for new drivers of commercial vehicles.
But there still were no driving training
requirements by 2012, when MAP-21, a
law passed by Congress, mandated new
standards.
In 2014, the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration (FMCSA)—‘My client neverreceived any formaltraining in mountainpasses and how todeal with them.’
—JAMES COLGAN, ATTORNEY