Your neighborhood street and the interstate you travel on to get to work or school may be snow-covered longer this winter thanks to driver shortages.
Press Secretary Matt Bruning said ODOT is having to compete with many other businesses looking for qualified drivers and there just aren’t enough people with CDL licenses.
“The supply of CDL drivers isn’t really matching that demand, so that’s where ODOT is in the same boat that people like Amazon, Rumpke or any of those other folks who rely on CDL drivers are,” Bruning said.
Bruning said it’s really the bigger cities where the transportation department is having a tougher time finding drivers.
“At ODOT we have a goal of getting our main routes back up to speed within two hours of the end of a storm event,” Bruner explains. “And that’s a goal that we hit 95% of the time last winter. It very well may take a little longer this year if we don’t have the qualified drivers that we need to fill all the seats in all the trucks.”
“Staffing levels are always going to go up and down,” said Jarrod Bolden, superintendent of the city's Traffic and Road Operation. “We don’t have enough drivers for 3,300 lane miles to put a driver on every street, but we have enough drivers that our motto is that 24 hours after the last snowfall, we aim to have a passible lane on every city street.”
Visit ODOT’s snow and ice information page for more information.
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