Counting the Minutes—Measuring Truck Driver Time Efficiency

How truck drivers spend their time is crucial to the profitability of motor carriers. However, the aspect of time has been marginally addressed in industry practice and academic literature on motor-carrier strategies and operations. Given the importance of the drivers in transport operations, the purpose of this article is to outline how driver time in motor-carrier operations can be measured using various methods. The underlying empirical data related to transport efficiency have been collected over five years throughout numerous projects in Europe. The article summarizes the experiences from the measurements carried out in these projects. In total, 80 drivers from 22 motor carriers were measured using different types of participant observations and driver self-observation. Practitioners addressing drivers’ time use will find important principles to guide their work in measuring drivers’ activities. For future research into driver activities, we suggest using the nine activity categories proposed in our note.