A truck driver school association is calling on Congress to pass an infrastructure bill to help boost the economy, solve the unemployment issue, and rebuild U.S. roads and bridges.
The Commercial Vehicle Training Association, the nation’s largest association of commercial truck driving schools, said it supported the infrastructure bill proposed in late-March and urged its passage.
The bill, the group said, would not only provide much-needed maintenance and repair to roads and bridges across the country but would also produce jobs. The group estimated that infrastructure spending creates 13,000 jobs for every $1 billion spent.
“I think an infrastructure bill makes sense now for short and long term reasons because it creates more economic activity, which includes truck drivers,” said Don Lefeve, president of the Commercial Vehicle Training Association (CVTA)—the nation’s largest association of commercial truck driving schools. “Congress has the ability to enhance our infrastructure, which is sorely needed, but it also has the added benefit of boosting employment, which helps our economy at a time when it’s desperately needed.”
But, the group said, it needs to be able to train new truck drivers to take up positions to accommodate unemployed persons seeking new trucking jobs. The organization estimates it has produced fewer commercially licensed truck drivers during the COVID-19 pandemic, a loss of 50,000 drivers in just three months. The CVTA said it would only produce about 60 percent of the Commercial Driver’s License drivers over the next year.
“An infrastructure bill makes complete sense, but one major concern we have is 17 states DMVs remain closed, and the other states are only producing limited amounts of commercial drivers as a nation. As the economy rebounds, and assuming an infrastructure bill is completed, this creates a perfect storm where we will need more commercial drivers,” according to Lefeve. “We aren’t producing any drivers in roughly one-third of all states. This means that tens of thousands of new truck drivers cannot obtain their Commercial Learner’s Permits (CLP) or their Commercial Driver’s Licenses (CDLs).” Without a CLP, an individual cannot even begin the process of training—much less transition into the national supply chain as a CDL driver.
In response, the CVTA asked Congress to pass proposed federal legislation, which would give the Secretary of Transportation the authority to issue temporary commercial learners permits and commercial drivers’ licenses through third-party vendors.