By Tim Roberts, Founder of Docktime
Picture a cramped classroom. Students doodling in their notebooks, teacher staring mindlessly at the ceiling, the clock slowly ticking to 4pm and dismissal. Detention. The dreaded afterschool punishment every kid sought to avoid (some better than others).
Now picture something far worse than that: also detention. Not the same kind of detention though; now, we’re talking truck detention. Instead of students sitting in a classroom, it’s truck drivers sitting at facilities, helpless to do anything while they watch the chaos and inefficiency of the yard. Soon, they run out of hours of service, meaning they won’t be able to pickup their next load and may even arrive home late, missing out on precious family time.
Truck detention was voted as the fifth-highest issue for drivers and causes the industry over $15 billion in annual losses according to a 2024 study by ATRI. Yet most people in the industry accept detention as a cost of doing business, something that can’t be avoided.
As Chad England, CEO of C.R. England, says, “Detention is so common that many industry professionals have accepted it as inevitable without realizing the true extent of its cost.” When digging further into the data, it’s clear that detention and its impact are worse than many realize, and even when detention is paid out, the cost is far greater than the fees.
The Detention Numbers
In September 2024, the American Transportation Research Institute released a comprehensive study on detention, updating an analysis first released in 2019. The data shows that detention occurs on nearly 40% of all stops and actually goes to 56% of stops for reefer loads. That sums to 135 million hours of detention a year in the for-hire trucking industry. For context, that’s enough time to run almost 1 million round trip lanes from Chicago to LA.
With all that lost time comes lost dollars. In terms of top-line revenue–mainly the revenue lost from the truck not being able to drive–the impact is $11.5 billion every year. Detention fees are paid out by the shipper in less than half of all incidents, and even when they are paid out, they do not cover the full expense. Direct expenses incurred while waiting in detention, such as fuel, salary, insurance, and truck payments, total $3.6 billion annually.
What’s causing this detention? Every instance is unique, but there are several common themes:
- Scheduling issues on the customer’s side
- Inadequate parking and dock space
- Inadequate staffing at customer facilities
- Upstream delays in production
- Drivers’ late arrivals
That last issue–drivers’ late arrivals–is one of the more pesky parts of the crisis. If a driver shows up 30 minutes late and then waits 8 hours because they are now a work-in, can they still charge detention? By the letter of the rate con, likely not, but was an 8 hour delay really necessary for showing up 30 minutes late? And what if the driver was late because they were detained at their previous stop? Who should be responsible for that scenario?
The monetary costs are just a sliver of the actual impact of truck detention. Recouping detention dollars is great, but in the long run, what matters most is the driver, their safety, and their quality of life. Drivers hate detention and especially hate when they don’t get paid their fees. About 35% of drivers left a previous job due to uncompensated detention time. This retention issue then hits the carrier, who has to find new drivers and train them. Furthermore, nothing should be as important as getting drivers home on time and safely. Unfortunately, detention often disrupts this. When detained, drivers drive 15% faster; refrigerated drivers drive 27% faster. An extra 15 minutes of dwell time raises the crash rate by 6.2%. Drivers attempt to make up for lost time and as a consequence, are more likely to get injured.
The Solution–Is There One?
There is no cure-all for detention. It is a pervasive problem that is rooted deep in the industry. Although a free market can fix many inefficiencies, this is one that has not yet been solved. The power and informational asymmetry between carriers and shippers is massive and a major factor in why detention is so hard to eliminate.
Many TMSs have detention modules that claim to solve the problem. As the owner of a 150-truck fleet in Arkansas puts it, “We pay for our TMS’s detention module but our dispatchers are still doing 99% of the work.” The modules track the trucks and may even alert dispatchers when detention is starting. However, they typically require a manual touch from the dispatcher. And, they miss out on many of the edge cases because they only go surface deep.
So, how do we start to solve it? First, it will take an attitude adjustment on both sides. Carriers should not simply accept this as a cost of doing business. Shippers should stop treating trailers as though they’re temporary storage and should instead view detention as the inefficiency it is. That’s not to say there aren’t good shippers. In fact, the transportation manager of a Fortune 500 company recently said that they want to pay detention, but they need to confirm it’s valid. This important information will provide insights into their problem facilities and allow them to allocate the right resources.
Of course, a mental shift isn’t going to solve the problem on its own. Carriers need access to the same information as shippers. If a shipper can vet a carrier, why can’t a carrier vet a shipper for how it handles things like detention? What is the average wait time at the shipper’s facilities? When detention does happen, how often does the shipper pay it out? These answers, among others, will help carriers better make decisions on loads, including how to properly price them to account for expected detention.
Once shippers start feeling the burden of detention, either through payment of detention fees or increased rates, they will be financially incentivized to improve their operations. Investment in warehouse and yard management systems will increase and in turn, driver detention will decrease.
It is a long way off and will require collaboration from the entire industry, but eliminating truck detention is a real possibility. Trucks will arrive and depart facilities in under 30 minutes and the supply chain will be better off for it.
For now, let’s start by getting to the ground truth. How much time are your trucks spending in detention? The number is almost certainly higher than you think.
About the Author: Tim comes from a family with a long history in the trucking industry. His great grandfather started working in trucking nearly 100 years ago and his father and grandfather founded a small reefer trucking company 40 years ago. After graduating from MIT in 2019 with a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering, he worked for six years in renewable energy before coming back to the family business.
About Docktime: Our goal at Docktime is to eliminate truck detention. We’re doing this in two ways. First, we’ve built DockClock, which helps carriers maximize their detention collection rates. Second, we’ve developed DockPages, the Yelp for shipper/receiver facilities that equips drivers and carriers with the knowledge to have a seamless experience at facilities.