Transport companies tend to play the victim.
The passenger transport sector is in dire straits. The cause is the increasing tension in the labor market. The number of open vacancies is rising, while the number of job seekers is falling, reports the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). The excuses used to explain to parents of children why their children have not been picked up for school for days in a row and the situation is spiraling out of control are surprising.
The most obvious reason being called now is a lack of drivers. The latest in the list in recent weeks, now that the whole of the Netherlands has put its holiday behind them, is traffic on the road, which means that the driver is late. Provided that the driver is to blame in very few cases, he is merely the executor of often bad planning. Due to staff shortages, some transport companies also hire people who are less suitable for the position.
As a result, travelers are immediately the victims of poor planning and incorrect assessment of the situation or handling of transport problems. Problems are too often dismissed as 'the software doing it wrong', or 'an update that went wrong' or the 'computer or data communication systems that malfunction'. With such apologies you often easily get away with the clients, but not with the parents of children who cannot go to school.
management
Rarely, say never, do you hear the sound of management or stakeholders failing to make the right decisions that benefit travelers and employees. While transport companies increasingly think that they should become an ICT company themselves - keep your shoemaker close - we see the quality of transport deteriorating on all fronts and that employees are increasingly succumbing to the work pressure. It starts with acknowledging your own mistakes. And isn't justifying your mistake just a way of ignoring what you've done?
In some large cities such as Rotterdam a true musical chairs are going on. If you offer a few cents more to an employee with wages that are far too low, he will switch in no time. That's not the problem, is it? Perhaps the sector urgently needs to think about a decent hourly wage. Then this can contribute to the result that people who are suitable for the position carry out their profession with passion. Everything stands and falls with employee loyalty.
When complaints are received for years in a row about the timeliness of transport or the composition of the transport planning when picking up students, you can no longer classify this under the heading 'staff shortage'. No, then something structurally goes wrong with the person responsible for the quality of the planning department.
It would be a mistake to put all the problems below. Many department heads have little to say and accept what they have been given. Here too, management can make a contribution to regard that mandate as 'full'.
Fines
Transport companies implement a tender they have won. Large companies - often at the expense of smaller entrepreneurs - acquire transport lots. That goes hand in hand with big promises on paper that they want to fulfill. It is now up to the clients and especially the politicians to demand the quality that transport companies have promised.
If this is not done, then there is an unfair situation that has arisen vis-à-vis the companies that have lost the tender on the basis of their quality offered. If the winners cannot do this, there is still the possibility that they will outsource work to companies that can deliver the quality.
Often the 'winners' the kind of companies that often wave fines at their carriers or freelancers who work for them. For some companies, it is a business model to fine a taxi driver if he starts his shift too late or arrives too late at the customer's place. The fact that in the latter case the transport planning was the basis is then irrelevant. They are also the kind of companies that also fine their own suppliers if something goes wrong.
Fines established within the tender must be passed on without first giving the benefit of the doubt. If the executing party does not agree, they can protest and come up with arguments to the contrary. By increasing the pressure, this can only benefit the monitoring and quality of the personnel. The latter can be accompanied by a solid hourly wage for skills.
boomerang
There are a number of reasons why many transport companies are now without drivers. Plans and routes in student transport are too often made 'just-in-time' during the holiday period. In addition, there is the fact that the municipality also passes on the last complete lists of names of the children just a little too late - due to vacation of their employees - and the suffering is incalculable for parents and students. Only the last week before the start of the school year does each transport company know where it stands with regard to the deployment of the number of vans and drivers.
Making a bad planning - due to a combination factor that is too low - guarantees the deployment of extra vehicles. The latter means looking for additional drivers. Poor transport planning can be caused by various factors such as the spread of the locations and students or even the starting times of the different locations, so that the vans have to be present everywhere at the same time within the same time slots. Everything stands and falls with the creativity and knowledge of the material by the planner. Good software that can support this.
This year, more than other years, the factor 'loyalty' among the carriers comes into play. During the corona period, many subcontractors and self-employed people were placed on a non-active basis or were forced to leave the sector. Some of those drivers returned but were then attracted by 'smart' transport companies through a bonus or a slightly higher hourly wage. The way in which many large transport companies dealt with drivers during the corona crisis is now coming back like a boomerang.
race to the bottom
The fact that the 'race-to-the-bottem' no longer allows this is due to the sector itself. As a result, margins have now been marginalized. In an attempt to gain as much market share as possible, the bottom was sought. The result is now that the passenger transport sector is in dire straits. According to KNV, higher wages are not the solution. Spokesperson Hilbert Michel of the trade association Royal Dutch Transport (KNV) acknowledges the problems. “There are just too few people.”
