At Pay4Freight, our goal is to make life easier for busy truckers and owner-operators looking to keep up on industry news. As part of these efforts, we present our August snippets.
What ELD exodus? Major broker’s anecdotal take on capacity constraints under mandate.
Executives from one of the continent’s largest freight brokerages this week said that, so far, they haven’t noticed carriers hanging up the keys due to the electronic logging device mandate, as was predicted in the run-up to the mandate’s implementation.
However, the productivity hit brought by the devices — and the surging freight market over the past year — has prompted it to bring on thousands of additional carriers.
There was “a lot of projection and speculation around what…percentage of trucks might exit the market or not renew their registration and whether 2 percent, 3 percent, 5 percent of capacity would leave the marketplace,” said C.H. Robinson CEO John Wiehoff, according to a transcript of the call published by Seeking Alpha. “We haven’t really seen any of that. We continue to have very healthy signup of new capacity, and we really, anecdotally, don’t know of much meaningful capacity leaving the marketplace.”
While spot rates fall in August, van and reefer ratios increase.
Spot truckload rates continued a seasonal decline during the week ending Aug. 4 as the overall number of loads posted on DAT load boards fell 0.7% and capacity dipped 1.3%. The national average van rate slipped 6 cents to $2.24/mile, the flatbed rate fell 3 cents to $2.75/mile, and the refrigerated rate was 8 cents lower at $2.54/mile compared to the previous week.
The number of available van and reefer loads on the DAT network both increased, however, reflecting strength in the spot market for late July and early August, and the $2.24/mile van rate equaled the monthly average for January, which was a record at that time.
Van and reefer load-to-truck ratios also made slight gains while the flatbed ratio settled lower into a typical mid-summer pattern, albeit at an elevated level compared to previous years.
As a national average, the price of diesel was unchanged at $3.22 per gallon.
At Pay4Freight, our goal is to make life easier for busy truckers and owner-operators looking to keep up on industry news. As part of these efforts, we present our August snippets.
