What is the current state of the transportation market?
The title of a Wall Street Journal article published a few days ago sums it up nicely: “The Cost of Transporting Pretty Much Everything Just Won’t Stop Going Up.”
“Trucking expenses are at their highest level since the Covid pandemic snarled operations around the world,” the authors report. “Diesel prices are up 77% in the past year. Freight railroads are adding surcharges. And the nation’s busiest port is the busiest it’s ever been. There’s virtually no way for businesses to avoid paying more, and they’re passing on the pain to consumers.”
Remember the freight recession? Yeah, that was so 2024.
When I think of the transportation market, I often find myself singing (in my head, of course) this lyric from one of my favorite Oingo Boingo songs: “We close our eyes and the world has turned around again.”
Based on data from ATA, DAT, and others, freight demand remains relatively soft and uneven. Freight capacity, however, has tightened significantly this year. A big factor has been…
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I run ops at a food distributor with our own trucks. Everybody sees the rate line. What hits a private fleet first is quieter.
When the market is loose, a bad night has a backup. A truck goes down, you call a carrier, and somebody shows up. When capacity gets tight, that call gets slower and costs more. Some nights nobody picks up.
So a tight market pushes the problem back onto your own fleet. Every truck you run has to have a route that holds, because the bailout isn't there anymore.
Are you seeing private fleets add trucks again because of this? Or just plan tighter with what they have?