They're chewing up the pavement along the way, adding to the congestion and irritating residents who have to contend with 18-wheelers and delivery trucks as soon as they pull out of their driveways. They're also causing problems for state and local governments, which are facing multibillion-dollar bills to fund road maintenance and expansions.
Thousands more delivery trucks on neighborhood streets and tractor trailers on interstate highways are compounding the problem.
"People don't like them in their neighborhoods," Seth Millican, a transportation expert with the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, said. "However, they want the package they ordered from Amazon in two days."
These tensions collide in Atlanta's Riverside neighborhood, which is home to Dustin Hillis, a city council member who has spent years attempting to keep tractor trailers off residential streets.
"There isn't a week that goes by when I don't get complaints about trucks running over street signs, stop signs, electrical poles, and cutting through people's yards," he said.
Don Penovi, a Riverside resident, has taken it upon himself to walk the streets, sometimes wearing a yellow vest, guiding errant trucks back to the highway and calling the city to replace destroyed street signs.
"It appears to have gotten worse in the last six, eight months or so," he said.
To avoid going under a low bridge, tractor trailers, or 18-wheelers, cut through the neighborhood's narrow, tree-lined streets where there are no sidewalks. To prevent trucks from plowing through their front yards, some residents on corner lots have placed traffic cones or boulders at intersections.
A truck came through Allison Rea's yard in the summer of 2020 and dragged away two of the three boulders she'd placed there. She rented a forklift to transport them back.
According to data from FTR Transportation Intelligence, a freight forecasting firm, truck mileage—tractor trailers and delivery trucks combined—on all roads reached a record of nearly 300 billion miles in the 12 months ended September 2021, up roughly 2% from the same period in 2019, before the start of the pandemic. Overall traffic, which is mostly made up of passenger cars, remained about 3.5 percent lower than it was in the same period last year.
According to FTR, truck mileage will increase 4.5 percent in 2022 over 2021 and 2.9 percent in 2023.
Analysts do not expect the surge in trucking to abate even after supply chain snarls are cleared. Business inventories that have been depleted will need to be replenished. A rebound in home construction and manufacturing will increase demand for freight. Furthermore, road and bridge construction funded by the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed into law by President Biden last November will necessitate the use of more construction trucks.
It's also likely that online shopping will continue to grow, which means vendors will need to increase their freight capacity. Amazon, on its own, recently announced the purchase of 100,000 new electric delivery trucks.
According to the American Trucking Associations, an industry group, the United States requires an additional 80,000 truck drivers to meet demand. To address the shortage, the Biden administration unveiled a plan in November to make obtaining a commercial driver's license easier and to create trucking apprenticeships to attract young people into trucking careers. This could result in an increase in the number of trucks on the road.
"Trucking is like breathing," Rodney Morine, a third-generation truck driver from Opelousas, Louisiana, said. "You don't think about the air you breathe until it's gone."
Government forecasters expect tractor-trailer traffic to grow nearly three times faster than car traffic over the next three decades, and single-unit truck traffic to grow nearly four times faster.
According to engineering studies, the damage trucks cause to pavements increases exponentially as the weight on each axle increases. Doubling the axle weight causes up to 16 times the damage.
Despite accounting for less than 10% of total miles driven, state and federal transportation agencies estimate that trucks account for between 35% and 40% of highway maintenance costs.
Due to a severe lack of parking spaces for all of those trucks, drivers have been forced to pull over on highway shoulders, mall parking lots, and residential streets to take the required federal breaks. Truck drivers told a Georgia state panel in 2019 that they pulled over up to four times a week in unauthorized parking areas.
Few cities have been as impacted by the truck boom and its aftermath as Atlanta, a city with a long history as a freight hub that was once dubbed "Terminus." According to the American Transportation Research Institute, a trucking think tank, the Atlanta area has two of the top five truck bottlenecks in the country. According to the group, truck backups are also common in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Cincinnati, and Houston.
According to data from the state department of transportation, there were 16 percent more trucks on Georgia interstates from January to mid-October last year than in the same period in 2020 and 19 percent more than in 2019. This is expected to rise in part because the Port of Savannah, about 250 miles away, is expanding its capacity, allowing more goods to pass through Atlanta-area warehouses.
Linda Jones relocated to a quiet subdivision in suburban DeKalb County, just outside Atlanta, ten years ago. Warehouses began to spring up around her in recent years, and the streets became congested with trucks.
She now has to weave through tractor trailers whenever she leaves her subdivision, she claims. Trucks frequently park in her neighborhood shopping center and on the side of the interstate exit ramp.
"We feel like we're in Truck City," she explained.
Donna Mullins lives in Clayton County, Georgia, just south of Atlanta, on land her grandparents used to raise hogs and grow vegetables. Warehouses have sprouted in the area, bringing heavy trucks with them. She monitors traffic through the window of her home office.
"I can see seven to ten on any given day," she said. "They fly right down here."
Ms. Mullins runs compliance training sessions for the logistics industry as part of her consulting business. "We'd perish if we didn't have our trucks," she said. They should not, however, pass through residential areas, she added. "There has to be some distance."
Local officials in Henry County, just a few miles from Ms. Mullins' home, who once welcomed the warehouses and distribution centers, are now reconsidering.
The board of commissioners has discussed imposing a moratorium on new warehouse construction or charging a fee to fund transportation improvements.
Voters approved a new 1% sales tax in November, raising $245 million over five years for transportation improvements. The funds will be used to widen roads and interchanges in order to reduce truck traffic. It will also aid in the repavement of roads damaged by heavy traffic, according to Sam Baker, Henry County's transportation director.
Georgia has launched a $11 billion construction project that will widen highways, rebuild interchanges, and open the country's first truck-only lanes on Interstate 75.
A state legislature special committee recommended that the Georgia Department of Transportation spend up to $1.5 billion more per year on freight infrastructure through new fuel taxes or user fees. This would imply a roughly 40% increase in the department's annual budget.
GDOT Planning Director Jannine Miller stated that the goal is to make it easier for trucks and residents to coexist. But, she warned, the trucks aren't going away.
"It's not something we take lightly, but we can't please everyone," she explained.
In recognition of the damage trucks cause to roads, the federal government imposes special taxes on them. Tractors and trailers are subject to a 12% sales tax, as well as a weight tax for heavy trucks and a tax on large tires. Diesel fuel has a higher gas tax as well.
According to a study by David Austin of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan scorekeeper of Congress, these taxes do not cover their total impact on pavements, congestion, safety, or pollution.
Raising truck taxes to cover the full cost would result in more goods moving by rail, reducing the number of highway truck trips by up to 3.3 million, according to the study.
According to the American Trucking Associations, trucks already pay 45 percent of all highway user fees despite accounting for less than 10 percent of total miles driven. According to Robert Costello, the ATA's top economist, the group supported raising fuel taxes across the board to pay for the recently passed infrastructure bill.
Instead, Congress borrowed heavily and repurposed Covid-19 relief funds to fund the bill, which included more than $8 billion in grants for freight infrastructure and safety programs.
The pandemic has accelerated a trend toward e-commerce that has been in the works for several years. Online retail accounted for 16% of retail sales in November, the most recent month for which data is available, up from 14% in the same month in 2019, before the pandemic.
All of those purchases depleted retail inventories, resulting in a flood of new orders to manufacturers, who in turn had to order new parts and machinery to meet the demand. Getting those goods to homes and factories necessitates a network of warehouses and trucks that shuttle between them. According to CBRE, a real-estate firm, warehouse space in the United States will increase by 2.8 percent in 2020, the largest increase since 2001. In 2021, warehouse capacity will increase by another 2.5 percent.
Backlogged supply chains have driven up the number of trucks on the road. Businesses are willing to pay more to get products where they need to go due to a shortage of parts and equipment. Companies are now booking trucks on the spot instead of shipping goods by train, which is a less expensive but slower option. According to Eric Starks, CEO of FTR Transportation Intelligence, some of those trucks are being moved without a full load.
According to FTR data, truck utilization rates, which measure the percentage of trucks on the road, reached 100 percent in both the second and third quarters of 2021. That meant that every available truck and driver were on the road.
Mr. Starks explained that high utilization rates have resulted in a shortage of containers and chassis (the support on which truck containers rest), which means that some trucks are being sent over the road to move a chassis rather than freight.
"Everyone's going insane," he said. "When that happens, the system becomes even more inefficient." You're getting paid a lot of money, and you don't care whether or not you're efficient."
There are numerous reasons for the trucker shortage. One source of frustration is the job itself, which includes tensions that arise as a result of the increased conflict with the public.
Truck drivers say they have to deal with reckless drivers and an unappreciative public who expects packages to be delivered as soon as possible.
"Truck drivers were looked at as heroes at the start of the pandemic," said Hamlin Raney, who drives a flatbed truck across the Southeast. He claims that the sentiment has faded. "It's a daily occurrence for people to cut you off."
According to Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents smaller trucking companies, roughly 70% of American freight is moved by truck.
"A reasonable person would assume we have to have trucks," he explained. "An accommodation must be made, and people are not in a very accommodating mood."