Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
Driving Innovation: Transforming Flatbed Trucking Through Safety, Training, and Technology
Discover how two visionaries, Dan Shipley and Daniel Kinsman, are transforming the flatbed trucking industry with an unwavering focus on safety and security. Dive into their journey as they identify critical gaps in driver training and take bold steps to address them, from forming a dedicated Facebook group to establishing a thriving consulting firm. Learn about their mission to elevate industry standards, mentor new drivers, and enhance the overall safety landscape in flatbed trucking.
Unlock the potential within the diverse world of CDLs and endorsements as we discuss innovative hybrid training programs designed to meet ever-evolving industry needs. Explore the balance between online practice tests and in-person classes tailored to state-specific requirements, and discover how technology, including AI, is making learning more accessible and flexible. This episode provides a roadmap for aspiring drivers aiming to secure valuable credentials in niche areas such as hazardous materials and passenger transport.
Navigate the multifaceted challenges and technological advancements shaping the future of flatbed trucking. From labor shortages to infrastructure limitations, we examine how bilingual communication within a predominantly Hispanic workforce can enhance safety and efficiency. As the conversation shifts towards the potential of autonomous technology, hear why skilled human drivers remain indispensable. With a steadfast commitment to international collaboration and cutting-edge safety programs, this episode envisions a prosperous future for the trucking industry.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Aloha and welcome to another Candid Conversation. We're going down a different path today. We're going to introduce a flatbed safety and security program with two gentlemen Becky's who've been involved in they're going to introduce themselves, but who've been involved in putting this thing together from the get-go, have wonderful material. It's a lot of work and we're just going to be putting it up on the Learning Without Scars platform so everybody around the world will be able to have access to it. So with that as an introduction, I'd like to have I call them the two Dan's One of the Dan's to start and then we'll go back and forth as a ping pong ball. But how the devil did you guys meet? How did you start? Where did this idea come from? We're gonna say nobody's ever done this before right.
Speaker 2:So back in early or late 2021 going into 2022 my company pushed me into the flatbed industry first time I've ever done it Never done it before in my life and they promised me that I'd get the training that I needed. And their training was me going out on the road, meeting up with a driver at a shipper, and the driver showed me how to throw two straps over a load of shingles and that was it he left and that was all the training that I received going into the flatbed industry and I didn't like it. I wanted to know more. I wanted to be safe. I have a family at home. I want to come home to my family. That's my number one priority being a flatbed driver.
Speaker 2:So I read a bunch of literature, watched a bunch of videos, and then I turned to social media, Facebook groups and I looked for Facebook groups and there's one in particular. I'm not going to name it on here, but I joined it and I put my input in trying to receive help and I never got it, or I got laughed at or I got told improper securement and it wasn't what I was looking for. So I teamed up with another member of that group His name was James Goodson, and I reached out to him and said hey, how would you feel about starting up a Facebook group specifically focused on flatbed safety and securement? He loved the idea. Me and him worked for a couple months to get it going and shortly after that that he had some personal things going on so he stepped. He stepped down, so we started building the group up from there.
Speaker 2:Um, and it just so happened about two years into it I was talking to my admin team. I had the team of like 15 or 20 people that were helping monitor and run the group at the time, and Daniel Kinsman was one of my admins and I was very close with him. We didn't have a lot of conversations and I reached out to him. I said I'm tired of this being just a flatbed group. I want to turn this into a organization, a safety organization. How do we turn this into a safety consulting firm? And he said, hey, I know a guy, and that guy was Bob Rutherford. So he contacted Bob and just so happened. Bob had just talked to you and just so happened it was. You got, believe, you guys were talking about something to do with the commercial transportation industry and then that's that's when all of us got connected. What do you? You got anything to say to that Daniel Kinsman?
Speaker 3:So yeah that's. I came into flatbed. I came through a really, really rigorous training program at TMC. They have probably one of the best in the nation for training. From there, I went to another company called Hunt Transportation out of Omaha, nebraska. They don't hire a lot of inexperienced flatbed drivers but they do have a training program because they have primarily agricultural equipment, so there's a lot of specific. You can only tie down this load in this specific manner, so they teach you that side of it. From there, I went to a local job doing LTL flatbed for a custom steel company. To a local job doing LTL flatbed for a custom steel company, the company I worked for as a contract driver through AIM Integrated Logistics. I wound up becoming a trainer there and through that process I started to notice how there wasn't really a good method for training on flatbed. Aim did a good job at it, as good a job as they could, but there was no real standard. And then in what would that have been? That would have been 2022, middle of 2022.
Speaker 3:I actually got pulled into the weigh station near where I ran out of in Hubbard, ohio. The one officer in there actually asked me if I could go and assist a driver that barely spoke English and had no idea how to fix a load securement issue. The load didn't come off the trailer, it just wasn't secured legally. After working quite a bit with him to walk him through using hand motion and gesturing and just like trying to explain to him how it worked, I was frustrated at the fact that he was allowed to just get in a flatbed with no training and he didn't understand even the danger to himself that the way he had secured the load was the danger to himself that the way he had secured the load was. So after I delivered that load again still doing local, so I only had about a 20, 25 minute drive.
Speaker 3:I delivered that load, came back to the building I ran out of and in Hubbard I got on Facebook. I'm like there has to be a group where I can go and find other people that have a mentoring mindset about flatbed, that want to see it become a safer organization, and I found flatbed safety securement group. Uh, initially I was really hesitant because, like Dan Shipley said, I'd been in a bunch of other flatbed groups and it was mostly they claim that they're trying to help but they just really ridicule new drivers and it was all uh, they wanted the drivers to learn by hard knocks, not mentoring them. And I'm very much to this day, all the students I've trained in flatbed. I still have their phone numbers. They still contact me from time to time. I I'm a mentor, I'm not a trainer. So I found that that is exactly what FSSG had become was a mentoring page where we were trying to help new drivers. From there, my posts where I was posting up about coils and specifics about securing coils, which was most of what I did, as well as some of the other loads I would do how to secure them safely I moved up to admin and then eventually, like I said, like Dan said, he contacted me one day.
Speaker 3:He's like this needs to become more than just a Facebook group. We need to turn this into something that's actually we're helping the industry in the real industry, not just on Facebook. It just so happened that Bob Rutherford was a good friend and I had talked to them quite a bit, so I reached out to him real quick. He's like yeah, give me a call. I told him what was going on and he was like I just got off the phone with Ron Slee 45 minutes ago and I think this is right up his alley. This is exactly what we were talking about. We were needing, and from there we all met. We all met each other on the phone and had what I think it was supposed to be a 15 or 20 minute quick conversation. It turned into two hours and we launched this into a more professional thing.
Speaker 1:So the first thing that strikes me, guys, is I cannot believe, and I couldn't when we first started talking and I couldn't when I was talking with Bob Rutherford. Almost everything that we get in our lives comes over the road, whether it comes in a port, whether it comes in an airport, whether it comes out of a field. It has to go in a truck and it has to get delivered somewhere. And the thing I couldn't believe was what, dan, you went through. Here's the keys. What I lovingly say is I just hired a salesman. Here's the keys. Here's your customer list, there's the door. See ya, that's kind of what both of you had, isn't it?
Speaker 2:That's exactly what I had. It was no training. Go out there, get those loads, and I didn't like it. It was not safe and I wanted more. I earned for that learning. I wanted to be as safe as I could and, more importantly, I didn't want to hurt anybody else.
Speaker 1:And so, mr, importantly, Robin Abel. She's the founder of a highway patrolman came at you at a rest stop right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, at a at a way station, a DOT officer, my local run. I went by the skill all the time, multiple times a day. They knew me really well, not because I did anything wrong but because they knew I always had everything on point. So the one officer in there he apparently had been having trouble with this driver and he didn't want to just leave him sitting there and they legally can't tell them how to secure the load, right, you're, we're, expected to know how to secure our loads. So he actually had to take um.
Speaker 3:He saw me pull in and he just took a shot at hey, you know, I know he trained his new drivers, I know he his trainees. When I inspect them everything's always on point, they know what they're doing. So he just took a shot in the dark that I'd be willing to help which I'm always willing to help a driver because I don't want to see, I don't want to see a load in a cab or on the side of the road, any load in a truck. I always want to see it on the truck. Even if it's been put in a ditch, if it's been rolled over, I want to see it still on the truck.
Speaker 1:So, Mr Shipley, did you get any training like that?
Speaker 2:Have you received any?
Speaker 1:since.
Speaker 2:I can't say I've received any formal training. I've never been put through a class in flatbed. Everything that I know in the flatbed industry I taught myself.
Speaker 1:Okay, so one of the things that I think I have learned from you guys and Bob there's 11 different commercial driver's licenses, or something like that Is that close to true.
Speaker 3:So with the endorsements, depending on which endorsements you get, you have your uh, class a and b that would be for trucks, um, and then with your endorsements you could probably get 11 different combinations. Passenger is the one that nobody usually gets unless you're pulling a bus. So each one of those kind of will tailor you into a field of work within the industry.
Speaker 1:And with each of those licenses, there's obviously a driver's test in order for you to get the license. True?
Speaker 3:Yes, there's testing for all of them Is there a written exam as well. It primarily focuses on a written exam and then you have a driving test for the overall license. So the structure is you get the license, you can have a Class A CDL and you can have no endorsements. You can just drive a box truck or a temp control truck and that's it Right.
Speaker 1:Else you have to actually go through additional education and take a paper test that just shows your knowledge of the field and both of you work out of.
Speaker 3:Ohio, correct Correct.
Speaker 1:Does this apply across the country, in every single state?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 3:Yes, so the written exam that they have is there anything that would stop us from incorporating that into our program. Every state's exam is a little bit different. That's okay. Very easily incorporate it into the program to also add it as a back end or book end to the program wherein you'll actually get through our course, and then you could go through the process to get that through the knowledge test for your CDL.
Speaker 1:Precisely that's what I'm thinking of putting in assessments along the way that leads into the classes.
Speaker 3:Correct.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what the two Dans have done for me is create a hell of a lot of work, but it started from a lot of work from them too. They've given me 10 different sections covering 57,000 words, which is about 16, 17 hours worth of talking, and we're putting that into five-hour classes, no-transcript. So when the two Dan's, via Bob and the three of us, or four of us, got together and were talking about it instantly, I'm thinking to myself well, this fits. How do we get the material out of their heads and put it into the computer? They've given me this material. We've segmented it down into classes. Then we take artificial intelligence and transcribe the words, the word document, into an audio track so that a student can sign on to a class, choose a voice that they want to listen to At the moment there's four men and two women.
Speaker 1:They can choose the font they want to read. If they want to read, they could also just listen, and we give them subtitles, and at the moment it's only in English, but it can be in 130 different languages. We'll just start with English and we'll see where we go from there. So the reason that I was asking Mr Kinsman about the different states I think it would be beneficial. I'd like you guys to chime in on this. I think it'd be beneficial to have each state test on the program on the site. A student can take it we might even make it free and we'll get a score on how they did on that test. Does that make sense to you guys?
Speaker 3:It would be. It would make sense as they're taking a course that's designed more for uh, driving driver yep, so having that in there where you could then give them the free kind of a practice test that, hey, you've now gotten to a point through this that you're not just prepared for flatbed or load securement, you're also prepared to go and start looking at getting an actual license.
Speaker 1:And what did you call those? Your 11 different endorsements? Use the word.
Speaker 3:Yep, it would be your endorsements. So, within your endorsements your endorsements. So within your endorsements you have hazmat tankers, double, triple passenger.
Speaker 1:I believe I'm missing one, aren't I? Well, we can get them all. We don't need to remember. That's the good thing about computers.
Speaker 2:I don't have to remember a damn thing. I don't at my age anyways. So there are seven endorsements available for the CDL. In the US you got doubles and triple trailers, passenger transport tank vehicles, hazardous materials, combination of tanker and hazardous materials, school bus and air brakes restriction removal.
Speaker 1:So if we had a basic driving test like you would have in every state, just like it's a car test up on the website that a person coming in can take, that we get a feel for the kind of person, kind of knowledge, kind of skills they have. Then we ask them which one of those endorsements they're interested in and from that we direct them to the different content to help them learn that go through the testing in the segments and a final assessment that would allow them to go and get an endorsement. Is that kind of the way that we want to evolve this thing Is?
Speaker 3:that kind of the way that we want to evolve this thing. I believe we very well could. With the amount of information we're providing, coupled with the additional endorsements, that would be a good process forward. That would be a good evolution.
Speaker 1:What do you think, Mr Shipley? Do you?
Speaker 2:agree with that. Yes, I do do agree with that. I think that'd be a great idea. It gives, uh, another avenue for individuals looking for additional training to achieve that, that level of training okay.
Speaker 1:So we have what we call centers of excellence, which are schools. We have five schools now in the country. We're going to have 15 by the centers of excellence, which are schools. We have five schools now in the country. We're going to have 15 by the end of next year that carry all of our products. Do you think that your drivers would, in any case, be interested in going to a school to take classes, or would they be rather doing it online, like what we're doing with what we're developing here? Do you think anybody would want to go to a classroom, or would they want to stay online only?
Speaker 2:I think that's a tricky one. It might even depend on the demographic or the location. If it's somebody out in the countryside, it might be more feasible for them to do something online, or for something more urban they might be willing to go inside and do it physically. So I guess it just really depends on where the services are offered, where the services are offered.
Speaker 3:I would also go so far as to say it would depend on the current standing of the driver. Do they currently have a CDL and they're just looking at endorsements? Are they new to the industry or are they looking to start fresh? Somebody starting fresh might be more inclined to go to a classroom where they can actually sit down and review everything. Somebody that's got a CDL but is looking to add the endorsements and knowledge they might already be working a job where adding that classroom time every day is going to be a lot more difficult. So being able to just get online and do it online. So I think it would be more of a 50-50. Half will be in person, half would be online yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:It's see, I used to teach university and I talked to a lot of schools and I tell them they're dealing with 25 year olds and down with a professor I call it a sage on the stage talking to people and somebody in the audience listening to people taking notes. Maybe, but it's an old-fashioned learning process versus what we're doing is taking people. I'm trying to drive this thing to people from 16 to 76. They're in the workforce. Many of them be married, have children, they're busy. Some of them are overnight on the road. That's an easy thing. Our classes are five hours. We say, take an hour and a quarter a week and you got it done and you can listen to it.
Speaker 1:You don't have to go to a classroom, you don't have to travel anywhere. You can be in the tiniest town in the middle of nowhere or New York City and everything's cool. And that's kind of what's been in the back of my mind. I think that's been what's in the back of your mind as well. True, yes, yes. So let's wave a wand. How many people that are driving flatbeds? I'm going to call them flatbeds generically, would call it open deck, anything where you have to secure the load to the trailer. Yep.
Speaker 3:I'd say you're probably looking at. 70% of flatbeds are overnight. They might be home on the weekends, but flatbed is one of the fields where there's only pockets of local work. There's not like van freight and box freight. They have a lot of local work everywhere with LTL and like well, they're now defunct yellow. But like Arendelle Carriers and SIA and Estes they have drivers everywhere. But those are the big companies that do LTL. Flatbed companies are usually out for at least five or six days a week.
Speaker 1:And I'm assuming most of them are owner-operators, most of them are independent contractors. They're not their own businessmen, they're not affiliated with anybody, they're not part of a union. They just go get a contract and get a job and go do it.
Speaker 3:I'd say probably about half of the ones that are out all week are going to be. I'd put it as small fleet under five trucks, or five trucks and less, yep trucks and less. The owner of the fleet is probably driving one of the trucks himself all the way down to a single truck operation. I'd say that's probably about half of the industry, half of the flatbed industry, because then you do have big fleets TMC, maverick Rail and I'm trying to think there's a couple others out there.
Speaker 2:PGT the one.
Speaker 3:I-65. They're several hundred to several thousand truck fleets, but we're looking at 375,000 to 525,000 flatbed trucks on the road of all registered sizes. So out of that number you're looking at a lot of them being small companies and independent drivers.
Speaker 1:So let's just take 500,000 just as a round number. Should each person who has a CDL with an endorsement be required to pass a test every year, every two years, kind of like you do with your driver's license, your car driver's license? Or am I interfering too much in their lives?
Speaker 3:Right now it's usually every four years for a commercial driver's license license. Um, and testing we do do a test when you renew. The only difficult test they really have is hazmat. Yeah, other than hazmat most all the other tests are. It's just common sense test. It's like simple things. When you hook up a set of doubles, you should always have the heavy trailer as the lead trailer, not with the light trailer as the rear, and just little things like that that. If you understand basic physics, you'll understand how to answer the question. Should you study? You should spend some time studying that stuff because it will tell you little smaller insights. It will tell you little smaller insights, but it's mostly also generic that it doesn't really. You're spending more time studying than you're going to get out of the test itself well, the tests that the bmvs offer are generic.
Speaker 2:for example, when I got my cdl, they're so easy to take. Yeah, I took the tanker endorsements Only one I was interested in, no studying, guessed all the answers and I was able to get my tanker endorsement. That shouldn't have happened. I should have failed that test significantly and it should have caused me to want to study, to want to learn how to do it before I got it. So the endorsements that you can get, they're easy, they're not hard. That's what we want to do with the flatbed industry, I believe. What do you think, daniel? Yeah, he wanted to make flatbed close, go ahead.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say we want to make flatbed more in line with hazmat, where you actually have to spend some time studying, you have to understand your material. Uh, the hazmat test, they throw a lot of curveballs at you where they will intentionally get you thinking one path and then give you a curveball at the end and see if you caught it. So there's little things like that. That it's like that. That's how they prove that you truly studied the hazmat test and that you're going to be safe Theoretically, you're going to be safe and competent in transporting it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we do the same as teachers. We do the same thing when we put the tests together. There's traps. There's the same question area is covered three or four times in different ways. Mr Shipley, how many questions are there on your endorsement exam that you didn't even study for? Do you remember how many questions there were?
Speaker 2:Well, that was about 10 years ago. I want to say it was less than 25, just for the tanker. I couldn't give you an exact number. It wasn't a lot.
Speaker 1:No, no, that's cool. So all of our assessments the shortest we have is 90 multiple choice questions and with 90 questions I can get a really good bead measure of your skills and knowledge and we get a score out of that that then I can put you back into your material. If your score is less than, let's say, 75%, here's the places you need to go. If it's less than 50, here's the places you need to go, and I think that everything I've been hearing and all the material you've sent me says that's the way we should approach.
Speaker 1:This makes sense yes, it does so we haven't built those 90 question exams yet and let's not think about that just yet, because we got to get the material up there. We have all the questions that we have on each of the chapters, if you will, or sections that we can draw this from. But what I'm visualizing is we have somebody's interest, they want to drive, so we give them a free taste of a CDL type of test, kind of trying to promote the job function, kind of trying to promote the job function but also focusing, like Dan you started, that you want to come home every night safely, because safety should be our primary concern. Getting the load there, that's important. Cost-effectively, that's important. But to have the driver be able to go home at the end of the day alive, to me that's more important. To me that's more important. Once they get excited, we can start them into the material, into the classes with some fundamentals, with basics, and then we can tree it off to each of those endorsements and specific assessments for each of those endorsements. That are more than 20 questions, they're much more real. I'll give you another helicopter approach.
Speaker 1:Electricians in America have no exam To become a certified electrician in America you need to work five years as an apprentice with a certified electrician in America you need to work five years as an apprentice with a certified electrician.
Speaker 1:It blew my mind. The guy that's putting our classes together for electrical has been teaching it for 50 years at the university, at the technical school level, and it blew him away as well. So when we started talking, like Bob and I did with the flatbed road transportation, if we're careful on how we design the structure, get them interested free, introduce them to the fundamentals, safety and securement basics, introduce them to the different endorsements 720, doesn't matter, but the different endorsements and have specific material from your classes, the material you sent to me, designed and put in there. There might be repeats crossing different endorsements, designed and put in there. There might be repeats crossing different endorsements, but at the end of it there'll be an exam that's meaningful, that says yeah, you earned that endorsement on bus, you earned that endorsement on tankers, you earned that endorsement on open trailers, whatever. And all of a sudden we've got something meaningful that I think both of you guys were looking for when you started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So to people that are going to listen to this drivers on the road, et cetera I'd like to suggest we open up some kind of a suggestion box for the guys on the website, letting them participate in the creation of it. You've got the foundation, you've got the material. We'll find some way. When it's there let's call this a week or two away that we can promote and then ask the drivers their thoughts and opinions. Good idea or not?
Speaker 2:I think there might be some pushback from a certain group of drivers. You got the the old school, as we call it who don't want to. You don't accept any kind of change whatsoever. So I think testing the waters is a good idea, but we should also prepare for a lot of negative feedback as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that, mr Kinsman, you're in the same boat.
Speaker 3:I'm in the same boat. I understand a lot of drivers. I've been pushing for years for rewriting the entire licensing process and categories and I've gotten a lot of support out of people in the safety field at companies and people that work in insurance companies at for commercial transportation. Even some driver trainers have supported the idea. What really comes down to is a lot of the drivers of the industry look at it as this is the way it's been and this is the way it should always be, whereas Mr Shipley and I have really taken the approach of we don't want to want it to just sit like that. We want to challenge that it can be better than what it is now and to try and preemptively create that better for the industry and for the future, for people in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean for the industry and for the future, for people in the future. Yeah, one of the things that changes our enemy. It always has been, probably always will be, and the example I use and I put a blog up last week on this but the example I use is when we changed from a steam engine to an electric engine, everybody saw the benefit. They changed the tool, but they didn't change any of the processes around it until the generation went away. So we've got generational people that I call protecting the status quo. That's how we've always done it this way. Don't rock the boat. There's an equilibrium. We're all at peace with this. That ain't me. It never has been. Can't we do this a different way? I mean, my parents must have gone crazy. I know every employer. That's why I had to work for myself, because they go away. Yeah, that's the way we do it. Darn it.
Speaker 1:But what's happening right now is intriguing. My grandkids are 23 and 19. They're both very smart. They work very hard, but there's a thing that the younger generation calls quiet quitting, where people are only doing what they have to do to get paid so they can get on with their life elsewhere. That we don't have just generally in our American society and this is true of us my experience around the world we do not have enough skilled people to do the work that's required today. I'll give you an example. I live in Honolulu and there's a shortage of people in the waste management side of the world. So all the apartments that we have here, hotels we have here nobody can pick up the garbage hospitals, not enough nurses, doctors, etc. It's all over the place.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I was intrigued with is that in drivers on highway flatbed overnight, it's a lot of hispanics doing that driving now. So we've got a language issue that we have to play with as well. Now we can do Spanish, and we maybe should start off with that too English and Spanish both. But we're in a changing world and safety isn't something that's going to go away, and the material seems to. The trailers seem to get longer and longer. I call this putting profit over people. Somebody wants to make more money, so I can carry 60,000 pounds instead of 40,000 pounds, or I can go 60 feet with a hook instead of 40, or I can go 320s. I mean, where's the adjudication on this? Don't think there is much?
Speaker 3:So part of my approach when I said I was redoing the licensing, it was licensing and size and weight. I wanted to see us come online more with the rest of the world's weight allowances. Most of the rest of the world is allowing higher weights than we are for gross weight. So when we export stuff the loads are light. When they import they're heavy. So my objective kind of in redoing the licensing was to look at areas like that and then go through and hand-select drivers. It wouldn't be open to every driver, it would be a hand-selected group of drivers and even a hand-selected group of companies with specific routes assigned.
Speaker 3:One of the most densely traveled routes is New York City to Omaha, nebraska, interstate 80. That is a very heavily truck-trafficked route. So from New York City to Omaha, nebraska, we could look at the possibility of taking a select. Say we take 500 drivers from the 15 safest companies. They get to hand select their safest drivers, their best drivers. They would get a special license and endorsement. They would be able to operate trucks that are a little bit longer and a little bit heavier, but along with that their license would actually be a number that is displayed on the truck that shows this is the driver's license.
Speaker 3:So then it creates a progression and a goal for new drivers. If you want to make that higher money, if you want to be in that elite tier, you have to spend the time being extremely attentive to safety, being extremely attentive to what you're doing, learning the skill of your trade, and then you can move up to that position. But then that also means that there's going to be a small market For those drivers. So companies, initially the thought. Everybody says, well, they're not going to pay anymore. Well, when you've only got a set number of drivers, they are allowed to do this.
Speaker 1:Now, yep, yeah, one of the one of the things that you're crossing there, though, and it's going to be interesting, and and I wish you well on this the roads in Europe are built completely differently. Yeah, they're built for heavier loads, they're built for longer life. In America, we use you know, it's almost like we use asphalt. A kiss and a promise, right.
Speaker 3:Yep, I deal with trailers that are actually. I have extensive experience now with trailers built in Belgium. My current employer does a lot of work with the manufacturer to custom build, custom create models specifically for North America, and that's something we've had to explain to them is you've overbuilt the trailers so much because you're allowed so much weight per axle.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But we can't. We don't come close to maxing out, so we have to add more axles, more length. It works for us. But initially they were kind of confused as to why we needed so much extra. And it's like well, we only build our roads around that, they don't. The last time I saw a paper on it, the government was still building the road around. An average truck weight of seventy three thousand two hundred and sixty pounds.
Speaker 1:And what do you think? The?
Speaker 3:average weight is, should be now. We're probably over I'd say we're probably nowadays over 90,000 pounds for the average truck weight.
Speaker 1:So basically, you're moving from 30 tons to 45 tons.
Speaker 3:Yeah, between the number of permit loads, as every piece of construction equipment, agricultural equipment, gets heavier, everything gets heavier and heavier. Our average weight is just skyrocketing. Yeah, we're paying for the permits to go overweight, but you have to build the roads accordingly, and as a country we're not, and it's a blind area that nobody really wants to discuss.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well it's, yeah, we get ourselves in traps here, but that's why I remember about three, five months ago, we, we were talking about putting sensors, and that idea has not gone away a sensor on each side, about 10 feet on each wheel, on each hub, so that we'd know what's going on with the tires, with the rims, with the load, and, and we'd have a specific geometry and a center of gravity. You know, use good science for safety and you know it all dovetails together, doesn't it? But there's a hell of a lot of work that has to be done here. I like the idea of picking a specific route New York to Omaha. What's the other side? Omaha to where?
Speaker 3:From Omaha, nebraska, branches out a lot.
Speaker 1:So it's not as much point to point.
Speaker 3:It's not as much point to point From Omaha it'll branch south, it'll branch just west of Omaha. Well, the west side of Nebraska, you can go down to Denver, you can go up to Salt Lake, you can go out to Seattle. Everything just kind of spiderwebs out from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got you. So, from Omaha going east is the same type of thing, true, yep York to Philly, to Baltimore, to Atlanta, da-da-da-da.
Speaker 3:Yep, I think it's five major corridors. You have Interstate 80, interstate 40, interstate 75,. Interstate 40, interstate 75, interstate 95, and Interstate 90 are your five major freight corridors where a significant amount of the population lives along those corridors and a significant amount of the freight traffic travels on them, which means, for instance, when you go up I-95 or Interstate 81, it is just a constant, constant bumper to bumper, semi-trucks, there's cars mixed in, but even at two o'clock in the morning it is still. It is still a severely heavily truck routed road, and that was before the hurricane took out a lot of north carolina so.
Speaker 1:So let me ask you a crazy question. With the way that this current administration I don't want to get into politics, but has been trying to get us to electric vehicles, do you see autonomous vehicles hitting the flatbed business, or not? Not soon?
Speaker 3:We've discussed this, yeah, hitting the flatbed business or not, not soon? We've discussed this, yeah, so I'll put my two cents in the complexities of securing a load and the nature of doing flatbed. For some freight you could have an autonomous vehicle pull it For a lot of the loads, having a driver in the cab that can look in his mirror and see that strap is getting loose, even with sensors. A driver that's trained properly will be able to pull a truck to the shoulder with a load that's barely even secure. He will know and understand how to safely slow the truck down that's barely even secure. He will know how, know and understand how to safely slow the truck down. Um, similar to tanker. They have a lot of issue with tanker flatbed. Um, we have twisting motions that you don't have in van trailers that can cause the trailer to start rocking a little bit. It's a very uh, I call it human intelligence heavy operation that is often overlooked.
Speaker 1:Mr Shipley, are you of the same mind?
Speaker 2:Yes. So me and Mr Kinsman discussed this early on about well, what do we have to look forward to if we can form FSSG into a company? And that is autonomy is coming. Whether we like it or not, it's going to come. But how can autonomy enter the flatbed industry? Well, it's a lot harder because the load has to be monitored. So we've been discussing things like sensors on the top of the trucks that monitor the load, sensors on the flatbed itself.
Speaker 2:But we also have to advance into more significant securement technologies, like the winch has to be tight, the binder has to be tight. If the strap breaks or the chain breaks or a tire blows or a hub goes, how? What do you do? So it's it's going to be a problem. It's going to take a lot of research and a lot of great minds to to figure it out. But but it's something that me and Mr Kinsman have been looking at is how can we contribute to it? So I guess what we can do is wait for it and just cross our fingers they get it right, or we can try to put our brains together and figure it out for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I look at this in a different way and I think both of you will understand where I'm coming from. An airplane has a pilot. For that reason, 99.999% of the time the pilot's not necessary, but that 1% of the time, or the 0.1% of the time that he has to come down on the Hudson River and save lives, I don't care what that pilot's worth, what you pay him, I want him on the plane. If I'm lying on the table and you got me open and you're playing with my heart, I don't want DEI, I want the best damn surgeon you can find.
Speaker 2:I think the bottom line here is they're going to have to keep a driver in the truck, an experienced technician in that truck that knows what. They're going to have to keep a driver in the truck, an experienced technician in that truck, that knows what they're doing.
Speaker 3:No matter what load is behind you, we need somebody in that truck period and I believe, as we get more into autonomous vehicles, you're going to see a quick separation of the cream rising to the top. The best drivers, the safest drivers are going to be weeded out of the industry and pulled into positions where their attention to safety and attention to detail is going to be compensated very well, because they're going to be the few remaining drivers that they're actually out there tasked with making sure everything gets safely delivered, making sure everything gets safely delivered.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're getting into the world of very specific skills, and data is going to drive our world. It's going to be driving your world much like. I'm not going to see it all, but, as an example, md Anderson, which is one of the medical center companies in America, is digitizing all patient data from the year 2000 to 2020. Everything blood tests, doctor visits, everything, operations, recovery, rehab Just imagine what that gives us. So when we talk about sensors, now I can drive a mining truck in a mining pit and I'll know what the engine temperature is, what the brake temperatures are, how much wear there is on the brake lining, all of this stuff. We're getting to the point. We get a lot of information, but it scares a hell of a lot of people because we don't know what to do with it yet. So I'd like to commit to you guys we'll get the flatbed safety and securement program started and up in place by the end of January. All of it that the three of us will try and noodle out how we want to entice people to the career of a driver with some kind of an interesting promotional type of test, but then look at the endorsement test and, mr Shipley, so that it's more than something that you can just sit down and fake your way through it and get a pass. It's meaningful from a safety point of view, a technology point of view, a load balancing point, all of it, and we'll start pushing this thing around.
Speaker 1:I'd like if you guys could put together a blog for me for sometime between now and middle of January, talking about our launch and what you're trying to get done. We've done it in pieces, but let's start a program where, every month, we devote a night a week for you guys to have something, and it doesn't have to be just the two of you. It can be other people that you want to draw in and take, like Bob Rutherford. He's got experience. He can introduce us to other people as well and just start promoting this. I love the idea of the corridors, mr Kinsman. I like the fact that Europe and America are starting to come together. That was the intent with the European Union in the first place. Europe happens to be falling apart right now. Germans' government's messed up, france and England, blah, blah, blah, all over the place. We are too, but we've got a lot of work we can get done. I think we can do it effectively.
Speaker 2:I think this is a good introduction.
Speaker 1:We've gone about 45, 50 minutes. Do you want to give me a wrap, Mr Shipley? What do you think we've done so far?
Speaker 2:Well, I think we've talked about a lot of good things and covered a lot of good bases, and one of the bottom lines about where technology is going and how it ties into the flatbed or trucking in general, is data is very important. We learn a lot from data. We need to be open to that and learn what we can about data. Um, that's going to make flatbed safer in general for everybody. We need to understand the g-force uh of a load to see when it's going to break. We need to understand stopping distances. We need to understand what happens in the rain with a truck when you try to stop. I mean it's. There's so much that we can learn with data, not just in the flatbedders but in trucking as a whole. I think it's important that we all get on the same truck, for example, and get to that destination to figure out what we can do to make the transportation industry safer as a whole, not just flatbedding.
Speaker 1:One of the better professors of leadership in America's name is Bennis. He said we all got to get in the bus together, so I'm not going to call it a truck. You know, we got to get everybody on the bus. Mr Kinsman, do you want to give us a little bit ofa wrap?
Speaker 3:I would say where we're at right now.
Speaker 3:We need to be able to take a moment to analyze the data we have and also, as an industry, as a group, come together to preemptively plot a route forward for us.
Speaker 3:We can have all the data in the world, but recognizing where we are short insufficient on, and training individuals to utilize that data, to understand that data, is a major aspect of it, and part of this is also an eventual goal of mine personally is to take the knowledge and understanding that we're creating in this program and apply it to other fields. Agreed, it's you have to have a brain that can really think through problem solving, because they don't place on there, a lot of times, any good places to hook load securement to. So, having this course where it is tied in with college if you're going to school for, say, mechanical engineering yes, sir, perfect. Now you need to take this is a course that you need to take, not because it's going to help you design something, but because it's going to help you design something to be transported, because nothing is built where it's going to be used. Everything is built where it's not going to be used.
Speaker 1:So, to expand, on that a little bit. So to expand on that a little bit ports, ships, rail yards, railways, cranes, container handlers it opens up a completely different avenue that I don't know that very many people. I congratulate you guys for being that far ahead of the world. I teasingly say to people the only person that has a half-decent view on a dog sled is the lead dog, and we all know what the rest of the dogs are looking at. So, with that, thank you, gentlemen. I really appreciate it and thank you for listening to us, and we're going to do more on flatbed safety and securement, I promise you. So, for those of you listening, tune up, tune in and look forward to having you with another candid conversation in the near future. And, while I'm here, happy 2025. Make it the best and the safest of your life, Mahalo.
