The Driver Shortage Isn't Just a Trucking Story - Its a Transportation Story
Updated: 5 days ago
Say “transportation staffing crisis” out loud and most people picture the same image: a line of semis backed up somewhere, a trucking company begging for CDL holders. Fair enough — that story gets the headlines. But wander a few miles away from the interstate and you'll find the exact same crisis wearing different uniforms. A wheelchair van company that can't keep drivers past their first few dialysis routes. A school district running buses two drivers short every single morning. A transit agency spending its safety budget on de-escalation training because operators are getting assaulted at a rate that's roughly doubled in under a decade.
None of these companies answer to the same regulator trucking does. None of them are hauling freight. And all of them are drowning in the same combination: not enough people, doing jobs that require more training than ever, delivered in ways that were never built for how often they now have to repeat it.
Non-Emergency Medical Transportation: Caregiving With a Steering Wheel
Non-emergency medical transportation, or NEMT, moves people to dialysis, chemotherapy, behavioral health appointments, and routine care they'd otherwise miss. It's a federally recognized Medicaid benefit, and for a lot of riders, it's the only thing standing between them and a missed treatment. The industry has its own serious turnover problem — not as extreme as trucking's, but still enough to keep most operators in a constant hiring cycle. Annual driver turnover is running above 64 percent (RouteGenie, 2026 NEMT industry trends report), and the workforce skews older, with too few younger drivers entering to replace the ones aging out.
What makes NEMT different from a delivery job isn't the driving. It's who's in the vehicle. Passengers may be managing dialysis fatigue, cognitive decline, or genuine anxiety about the appointment they're heading to. Industry commentary on driver training keeps circling back to the same missing piece: drivers are taught how to operate the vehicle and secure a wheelchair, but rarely how to actually talk to someone who's scared, confused, or in pain, or what to do in the narrow window between “nothing's wrong” and “call 911”.
Layer onto that a regulatory map that changes at every state line — vehicle standards, driver qualifications, and reimbursement rules all differ by market (NEMT Platform) — and you get an operator running in three states effectively running three different training programs, none of which have time to be built well because the seat needs filling by Monday.
Motorcoach and Charter Bus: A Shortage Nobody Can Fully Explain Away on Wages
The motorcoach industry — the buses that run tours, school trips, and cross-country charters — has been open about the size of its problem. A national survey from the American Bus Association Foundation found 21.4 percent of the industry's driver demand going unfilled (American Bus Association). That's not a rounding error. That's one bus in five sitting in a lot somewhere because there's no one to drive it.
What's notable is where operators put the blame. Low wages and tough schedules matter, but weighted by need, nearly half of respondents — 47.4 percent — pointed to training availability, licensing delays, and insurance issues as the bigger drag (American Bus Association Foundation). In other words: even when someone wants the job, getting them qualified and endorsed takes long enough that plenty give up or take something faster along the way. Motorcoach drivers need FMCSA entry-level training just like their trucking counterparts, plus a passenger endorsement, and the industry has spent years watching federal rulemaking on standardizing that training start, stall, and restart.
A charter bus also carries a different social load than a truck cab. There's no dispatcher smoothing things over when a tour group is unhappy about a delay, or when forty strangers on a three-day trip start getting on each other's nerves. Defensive driving still matters, but so does a driver's ability to hold a room, and that's rarely part of the standard training package.
School Bus: The Shortage With a Second Set of Background Checks
School transportation has its own version of the same crisis, and arguably a harder one to
solve. Districts had 12.2 percent fewer drivers in September 2024 than in September 2019 (Gigafact), and more than 90 percent of districts report some level of staffing shortage. Pay doesn't help the case: a school bus driver earned roughly 43 percent less than the median weekly wage in 2023, in part because most only work about 32 hours a week split across two shifts — a schedule that's genuinely awkward to build a second job around.
The path to actually driving a school bus is longer than most jobs paying this little. It requires a CDL plus both a Passenger (P) and School Bus (S) endorsement, on top of state Department of Education background checks that go well beyond a standard driving record — fingerprinting, child-abuse registry checks, sex-offender registry checks, and often an annual physical stricter than the baseline DOT medical (ResumeGeni CDL guide). None of that is unreasonable given who's in the seats behind the driver. But it does mean the CDL-plus-endorsement pipeline, which already takes weeks and real money to get through, is only the first hurdle.
Add a growing number of students with special needs riding the same routes, each requiring specific handling, securement, or behavioral support, and the training list for a school bus driver ends up longer than almost any other transportation role — evacuation drills, loading and unloading procedure, de-escalating a conflict between students, recognizing a medical emergency, and the actual driving, all stacked on top of the same licensing burden everyone else in commercial transportation is fighting through too.
Public Transit: The Assault Problem That Turned Into a Federal Mandate
Of everything in this list, public transit is the one where the training conversation has shifted fastest, and the reason is hard to look away from. Major assaults on bus transit workers — the kind serious enough to require medical transport or resulting in death — have climbed from 172 incidents in fiscal year 2015 to 379 in fiscal year 2025, according to National Transit Database figures compiled by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA/APTA Mobility Conference data). That's roughly double, and it doesn't count the far more frequent “minor” incidents — thrown objects, thrown liquids, verbal threats — that never make the count at all.
The federal response was General Directive 24-1, issued in 2024, which requires transit agencies to assess assault risk to operators and, where warranted, put mitigations in place.
As of early 2025, roughly 85 percent of affected agencies had completed a safety risk assessment, and 68 percent of those determined some mitigation was necessary. The most common one agencies chose was de-escalation training (FAAC, citing FTA data).
What large agencies report back to FTA is genuinely instructive. New York City Transit, one of the largest systems in the country, completed de-escalation training for all 12,500 of its bus operators and now runs biannual refresher training for 6,000 operators a year to keep the skill current (Letter from MTA to FTA). Smaller systems working through the same directive report a blunter problem: training thousands of operators is a logistics and overtime headache, and getting operators to actually use the techniques in the moment, rather than just sit through the class, is still an open question agencies are candid about not having fully solved (FTA General Directive 24-1 fact sheet).
That combination — a mandate to train a large, high-turnover workforce on a recurring basis, on a skill that decays if it isn't reinforced — is close to a textbook argument for short, repeatable video over a one-time classroom session. It's also worth noting that transit ridership includes a wide range of language backgrounds, so a de-escalation module that only works in English narrows its own effectiveness before an operator ever uses it.
The Thread Connecting All Four
Strip away the differences — Medicaid rules for NEMT, FMCSA endorsements for motorcoach and school bus, an FTA directive for transit — and the same shape shows up every time. A workforce that's shrinking or churning faster than it can be replaced. A training list that keeps growing, whether it's driven by regulation, litigation risk, or simply more vulnerable passengers needing more specific care. And a training format, usually classroom-based or generic online modules, that wasn't designed to be repeated this often or delivered to this many people this fast.
None of these operators need to be convinced that training matters. They're already required to prove it happened. What they need is a way to deliver it that doesn't eat a driver's entire day, that holds up when a regulator or a plaintiff's attorney asks for records, and that actually reaches a workforce that doesn't all speak the same first language or learn well from a slide deck.
What That Looks Like Built as Video
Each problem above points to the same fix, built differently for each mode:
NEMT's caregiving gap? Short videos on de-escalation, recognizing a passenger in distress, and what to do before EMS arrives — built once, reused across every market a provider operates in, instead of rebuilt state by state.
Motorcoach's licensing bottleneck? Entry-level and passenger-endorsement training modules a new hire can move through faster than a packed classroom schedule allows, plus refreshers on handling a difficult tour group.
School bus's stacked requirements? A separate short video for each layer — evacuation drills, special-needs securement, recognizing a medical emergency — with a tracked completion record for every driver and every route.
Transit's assault mandate? De-escalation training built for one shift's worth of time, available in the languages an agency's ridership actually speaks, and repeatable on the biannual cadence agencies like NYC Transit already require — without the overtime cost of pulling operators into a room.
In every case, the fix isn't more classroom time or a longer course. It's a shorter, more targeted format that gets built once and reused as often as the requirement demands.
See What This Looks Like for Your Operation - Take the Custom Challenge
Book a call with us so that we can learn more about your training needs. Then, send us one item from your own training list, a de-escalation module, a securement procedure, a piece of new-hire onboarding and we'll build a sample video around it so you can see exactly how it would work. If you like it, purchase It and put technology to work for you. Don't like It, not a problem, cutting edge technology isn't for everyone.
For the trucking side of this same story — a different regulator, a similar shortage, and its own unique wrinkle around English-proficiency enforcement — see The Trucking Industry's Training Problem Has Nothing to Do With Training Content. And for the full picture across every mode, Training That Keeps Every Corner of Transportation Moving lays out where video training fits by industry and by topic.
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