Is 18 the Answer to the Driver Shortage
For decades the industry has tried to convince the world that there is a driver shortage. You can find an article 
everyday telling us that there is a shortage of at least 35,000 drivers and it is going to get worse. Try telling that to the driver waiting for freight. You will get a different answer. As your future FMCSA Chief it will be my job to find the truth, and make the nation's highways as safe as possible while maintaining the flow of interstate commerce.
My biggest stated goal as your FMCSA is to reduce the number of truck accidents – in short “Don't Run into Stuff”. It is important to be fair. It is more important to be honest. This country needs about 3.5 million CDLA truckers. It has about 12 million. That makes me think that there is not a shortage of available truck drivers. The problem is that we have not been able to keep them behind the wheel. Why haven't we been able to keep them? Trucking is a hard job. Some people just are not willing to work over 40 hours per week. Face it, successful truckers tend to work 60 plus hours per week. We complain that HOS regs won't let us log more than 70 hours in 8 days. Truckers tend to be a hard working group. Perhaps, the industry could look at ways to make that 40 hour week a practical reality.
Industry professionals will tell you that we do not recruit enough drivers. This makes no sense. We recruit nearly 40,000 people per month. I refer to my calculator. Every 7.3 years we could completely replace the driving force. It seems to me that we do recruit enough drivers. One could argue that we recruit too many drivers. If a supply is plentiful, it tends to get wasted. Once a supply becomes short, it tends to be treasured. If we cut in half the number of recruits and treated those recruits better, could we end up with more succeeding?
An 18 year old driver is much more likely than a 21 year old driver to “run into stuff”. That is not an opinion. It is a fact. The Center for Disease Control will tell you that a teen age driver is almost 3 times more likely the a 20 year old to be involved in a fatal accident. Insurance companies charge teen age drivers higher rates, because they are more likely to pay claims. That said 18 year olds are old enough to serve in the military. They can vote. We should look for ways to work them in. Some of them can be safe and reliable drivers. Perhaps, 
state boundaries are the wrong limitation. A driver can say service Council Bluffs, IA and Omaha, NE. Maybe we should be looking at a mileage limitation. 150 miles from a home terminal may be a reasonable start.
The industry needs to figure out how stop losing drivers. The idea of trying to add another generation of drivers before we solve the problem doesn't make sense to me. It is like putting more water into the sink without closing the drain.