John Esparza, Texas Trucking Association Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
John Askedparaza joins US Texas Trucking Association. That's a lot
of truckers the sideline. You think that number is accurate, John.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Oh, very well, could be accurate, but it is a
relatively small number when you think about the amount of
truck drivers that you have out there on any given
day on our highways.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Six thousand, though I know that there's tens of obviously
there's how many How many trucks do you estimate that
we have if you had to do a ballpark guess
of how many people are driving trucks in this country
on any given day. Yeah?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Sure, that's roughly about three and a half million truck
drivers on any given day across the entire country, upwards
of three hundred thousand in the state of Texas on
any given day.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Okay, Well, that puts the number of perspective. You're right
about that. Still, you know there's been a trucker's shortage, right,
We've needed to attract more people into the trucking industry,
and now we're just taking six thousand people out of
the system. So I get the question is not whether
or not that's the right thing to do. We clearly
need to give licenses to people who speak the language

(01:04):
of the country under which they are driving. The question is,
how do we go about replacing those six thousand positions
and hopefully even more because there is a shortage.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well, this is true. It's a challenge that we've had
as an industry for a number of years. I know
you've heard folks that will disagree with that, but I
think this illuminates what part of the issue is. Is
that we are talking about qualified drivers. There are far
too many individuals behind the wheel today that are not
qualified to be behind the wheel, and that is due

(01:37):
to fraud in our system and whether that's third party
testing or issues that we've seen with the Mexican government
and issuing FRAU Mexican CDLs. We have a lot of
areas that we need to improve and when we saw
this come out initially, it was one an area that

(01:57):
we couldn't disagree with. I mean, this is a law
that's been on the books for quite some time and
not enforced, going all the way back to the nineteen thirties,
and in this day and age, it's not about reading
a stop sign or a traffic light. This is about
some of the communication that occurs with digital advertising, let's say,
with text doc when it comes to intersections or low

(02:19):
bridge warnings. These are important communications that are impared to
the safety of our highways.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Absolutely, and the problem wasn't just a Mexico. We had
problems on the West coast. California was issuing CDL licenses
to people that shouldn't have gotten a license.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Oh, absolutely, Florida, there's other states that have been named
in this. I know that there's investigations going on currently
about the issuance of these fraudulent license You can get
on Facebook and find where a lot of these are
coming from, and I know that's occurring currently. So we've
got some work to do in that area so that
we're ensuring that a CDL is not just a means

(02:59):
to get to this country from all parts of the
United States all parts of the world, I should say,
in order to take a job. And this is what
the industry looks at also as a means to protect
US and American jobs, and that's currently against law. It's
called cabotage. You cannot move freight domestically point to point

(03:22):
and come in from whether you're from Canada or Mexico.
That is something that is against the law, but it's
not been enforced, and those are the things that are
changing in order to protect those jobs.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Okay, good to hear. Thank you, sir, appreciate your time.
John Esparsa, he's with the Texas Trucking Association. It's five
fifty six.