Why are there no truck drivers?
When we read that there is a lack of truckers in the UK, it is said that it is all and only Brexit's fault, and to enjoy it curly-like. But that's not the case. In the sense that Brexit sent England into the worst possible situation, and therefore allowed the phenomenon to emerge in a brutal way, but in reality the danger concerns all countries.
What is happening in the world of truckers? Who has kidnapped this tribe of nomads, famous for stopping only around the best restaurants, with the flannel shirt and the butt line strictly in sight?
First, if we exclude Brexit for a moment, there were two major changes in logistics during Covid. The first was a huge increase in online purchases, which brought the big online vendors (Amazon, Allegro, Cdiscount, FNAC, Otto, Rakuten, Real-, Bol, Spartoo, Zalando, La Redoute, Asos, Onbuy, etc) to stress their logistics centers.
And that's where it all starts. Because the truck driver has a first great commandment: "you will not go home empty". In short, on the outward journey it must be loaded, on the return it must be loaded, because the more time passes from loading, the more time passes by being paid. It must ALWAYS be charged.
It is quite simple to understand that large logistics systems are, for the truck driver, far more profitable precisely because the extreme computerization (and the economy of scale) mean that their trucks almost always travel loaded. And this is a very good thing for the truck driver.
The second point is that if something in the IT world is convenient for Amazon and for others, someone will be born who resells the same opportunity. Take a company like this:
TIMOCOM GmbH 
One of the services they do is to offer a kind of marketplace for truck travel. It means if you want someone to transport you something from A to B, you can put on their system that you need a truck. This transforms the truck driver (in turn registered) into a pure commodity, but gives him a great advantage: he can choose the routes that suit him, he can organize and plan, avoiding all the waste that previously made him waste time and money. .
The Romanian truck driver who first went to transport something from Berlin to Paris today will be able to transport something from Bucharest to Berlin, then from Berlin to Paris, then from Paris to Trieste, then from Trieste to Bucharest. And if by any chance he has a hole, he can always look (during the trip) if any offers come up.
This sudden efficiency, however, has a "technical" problem. Which favors the denser "grids". If you see the traffic as a colored and oriented digraph, there is absolutely no doubt that an isolated arm that moves away from the "dense" body of the graph is not very frequented.
Now, if you are a truck driver you better be in the center of the graph. At any time, you may find a north, south, east, and west request. If you are in Portugal you may find requests to the east, and short routes in all other directions. In short, a well-organized and efficient truck traffic in terms of income for the truck driver AVOIDS dead branches and is concentrated in the "central" areas.
The peripheral areas will therefore be affected. The Polish truck driver who goes to work in England, besides feeling vaguely hated, has a simple problem: if he wants to go back loaded he must find a load that passes through the Eurotunnel.
If, on the other hand, he takes a job for, I don't know, Holland, it's a kind of mecca where he just has to choose where he wants to go.
Here a second problem arises: time. The truck driver wants to cash in quickly. If there are six hours of waiting in Calais, the result is that instead of earning X in one day, he earns 75% of X in one day. (assuming you always travel and always full).
But modern logistics and transport digitalization platforms do nothing but optimize. For example, the company I showed you above also manufactures a kind of "assistant" (an intelligent transponder) that the truck driver installs and (in addition to paying the toll in different countries) collects data on their position (and informs them if they are empty and there are some opportunities around). But in doing so, the platform has learned which are the fast routes and which are the slow ones.
Since the console does the calculation between the fare and the time, giving the income / hour to the truck driver, not only the peripheral routes will be avoided: the LENS routes will be avoided.
It would therefore not surprise me to know that Southern Italy or Greece also have similar problems.
During the Covid period, a gigantic digitization of the truck driver took place. Which has the effect of making peripheral routes and slow routes enormously less attractive.
However, on the demand side, it made things easier. You want to transport things: you subscribe to one of these systems, and poof: transport is almost a commodity.
Obviously this makes life easier for truckers, because they no longer depend on who provided them with the trips: they now have a dozen marketplaces to choose from. So the big transport company is in trouble because, without intermediaries, the truck driver can find the races.
Let me be clear, this transformation was already underway: COVID only accelerated it by a factor of two, or three. In short, these two years have been five or six in terms of technology.
Brexit obviously exacerbated the problem: at the time that the lorry driver has to lose in order to bring the goods, it has added border bureaucracy and a UK visa. But why should a Romanian truck driver waste time and money, when he can find convenient routes for all of Europe, including Turkey and Ukraine that do not require all that bureaucracy?
We cannot say "it was Brexit", therefore, but we can say "Brexit collided with a huge push to digitize logistics, which pushes the truck driver in the opposite direction to borders and visa applications".
The rest is history, and we're living in it. Because the rule of digitization is very simple: "the closer you are to the center of a large market, the better ".
Whoever detaches himself, or goes away, is lost.