Infrastructure Law Creates Under-21 Truck Driver Apprenticeship Pilot

In November 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act became law, bringing a set of trucking provisions with it. President Biden signed the bill (H.R. 3684) on November 15, 2021, as Public Law 117-58. The most closely watched trucking item was a pilot program that would let drivers under 21 with a commercial driver's license (CDL) drive in interstate commerce through employer-run apprenticeships.

The under-21 apprenticeship pilot

Section 23022 told the Secretary of Transportation to set up the pilot program within 60 days of enactment. In the pilot, an "apprentice" was a CDL holder under age 21. Employers would run the apprenticeship programs, which had two stages:

• 120-hour probationary period: 120 hours of on-duty time, at least 80 of them driving. The employer had to find the apprentice competent in interstate, city traffic, rural two-lane and evening driving; safety awareness; speed and space management; lane control; mirror scanning; right and left turns; and logging and following hours-of-service rules.
• 280-hour probationary period: 280 more hours on duty, at least 160 of them driving. Benchmarks covered backing and maneuvering in close quarters; pretrip inspections; fueling; weighing loads, weight distribution and sliding tandems; coupling and uncoupling; and trip planning, truck routes, map reading, navigation and permits.

During both stages, apprentices could only drive trucks with an automatic or automated manual transmission, an active braking collision mitigation system, a forward-facing video event capture system, and a governed speed of 65 mph at the pedal and under adaptive cruise control. An experienced driver had to ride in the passenger seat. That driver had to be at least 26, have held a CDL for the previous two years with no preventable reportable accidents or pointed moving violations in that time, and have at least five years of interstate driving experience.

Apprentices in the pilot could not haul passengers or hazardous cargo, drive vehicles in special configurations, or drive a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating over 80,000 pounds. No more than 3,000 apprentices could take part at any one time. The pilot would end three years after it was established, and the Secretary was to collect safety data and report the results to Congress.

The same section also directed FMCSA to arrange, within one year, a Transportation Research Board study of how driver pay methods, including hourly pay and payment for detention time, affect safety and retention.

Other trucking provisions

The law's motor carrier safety title included several other items, among them:

• Women in trucking (Sec. 23007): FMCSA was to set up a Women of Trucking Advisory Board. Congress's findings put women at 6.6% of truck drivers.
• Truck Leasing Task Force (Sec. 23009): to be set up within 180 days with up to 10 members, to look at lease-purchase agreements offered to owner-operators.
• Automatic emergency braking (Sec. 23010): a federal safety standard was to be issued within two years requiring automatic emergency braking on new heavy trucks covered by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 136.
• ELD oversight (Sec. 23017): a report to Congress within 180 days on the cost and effectiveness of electronic logging devices, how FMCSA reviews ELD data and protects private information, and how operators can challenge ELD-related violations.
• Livestock (Sec. 23018): an added hours-of-service exemption for drivers hauling livestock, including insects, within 150 air miles of the livestock's final destination.

Other sections dealt with underride protection, a crash causation study and broker guidance.

Archive: this article describes rules and events as of November 2021. Regulations may have changed since, so check the current rule before relying on it.