You can't recruit your way out of the driver shortage

The numbers on Europe's driver shortage are sobering, and they're getting worse.

Roughly 105,000 bus and coach driver positions are currently unfilled across Europe — about 10% of the entire workforce. The gap has grown 54% since 2022. The demographics point only one way: the average driver is over 50, only 3% are under 25, and women make up just 16% of the workforce. Retirements alone could push the shortfall toward 275,000 by 2028.

Operators have responded exactly as you'd expect — higher wages, better conditions, active recruitment. These are right, and they're necessary. They are also insufficient. You cannot hire your way out of a structural demographic shortage fast enough, and every operator I talk to knows it.

So let me suggest a reframe. The driver shortage is usually treated as a recruitment problem. It is at least as much a productivity problem — and productivity is the part you actually control.

Here's the logic. If you can't reliably add drivers, the next-best move is to stop spending the drivers you do have on work that doesn't require a driver. And there's a large, predictable pool of exactly that work sitting inside the depot fence.

Consider it in human terms. Across Europe, drivers spend roughly the equivalent of an extra month of driving time each year on depot manoeuvres — parking, charging approach, repositioning, staging. That's a month, per driver, of skilled time spent moving an empty bus at walking pace across a yard. What would your network look like if you handed that month back to passenger service?

That's the heart of the smartbus case, and it's why I'm careful about the language. Automating depot movements is not about replacing drivers. It can't be — there's already a shortage. It's about relieving drivers of the most thankless part of the job: the technically demanding, low-speed manoeuvres at the end of a shift, when fatigue is highest and the yard is most congested. Less late-night manoeuvring means less stress, less fatigue, fewer minor collisions, and more of the driver's time spent on the part of the role that actually matters — carrying passengers.

The operators leading on this say it plainly: autonomy doesn't replace people, it supports them. Relieving drivers of end-of-shift manoeuvres lowers risk and improves working conditions at the same time as it recovers capacity. Those goals don't conflict — they're the same project.

There's a recruitment angle hiding in here too. A role that's less about fatigued midnight yard work and more about the job people actually signed up for is, over time, an easier role to fill and to keep.

So yes — keep raising wages, keep improving conditions, keep recruiting hard. But stop treating that as the whole answer. The fastest capacity you can add to your network in the next 24 months isn't on the labour market. It's the month a year you're currently spending, per driver, inside the fence.

We quantified the shortage and the productivity opportunity — depot by depot — in The State of Smart Depots 2026.

See how much driver capacity is recoverable in your operation.