Some of the issues of most concern to the industry, such as the driver shortage, hours of service, and truck parking, are affected by the growth of e-commerce and omni-channel marketing. The American Transportation Research Institute released an analysis of these impacts, including the challenges and opportunities posed by more regionalized retail supply chains and the proliferation of urban “last mile” deliveries have presented.
Tag Archives: Over-The-Road & LTL
Walmart is raising trucker salaries in its push to hire 900 more drivers this year across the United States, including Texas, where it has a big concentration of large distribution centers where empty trucks get filled.
American Trucking Associations’ advanced seasonally adjusted For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index increased 6.6% in all of 2018 – the largest annual gain since 1998 and significantly better than the 3.8% increase in 2017.
For US shippers struggling to secure truck capacity, now is the time to act, and the first thing they should think about is time, especially how much time is lost in their supply chains. Capacity most often is measured in drivers, tractors, trailers, containers – all physical assets, human or otherwise – and space, as in the amount of space available in a trailer or on a pallet. But the fourth dimension is capacity’s hidden dimension. Shippers facing concrete limits in physical capacity need to work with time to create capacity without adding assets.
As the era of the electronic logging device (ELD) enters its second year, US regulators are focusing their attention on the hours of service (HOS) those ELDs are designed to monitor. They are mulling proposed adjustments to the HOS rules and may be pressed by industry to go even further and consider broader changes to help give truck drivers greater control at the wheel.
Truck tonnage closed out 2018 on a 20-year high with an annual increase of 6.6%, American Trucking Associations announced. The result was the highest for the federation’s seasonally adjusted for-hire truck tonnage index since 1998, when truck tonnage rose 10.1%, ATA said. And last year’s gain came despite a downturn in December, when tonnage dipped 4.3% to 111.9 from November’s level of 116.9. In calculating the monthly index, 100 represents 2015.
Mixed economic signals are proving to be somewhat of a Rorschach Test for shippers trying to gauge freight demand levels heading into the strongest part of the 2019 freight season.
Truckers Stand as One hopes to call attention to HOS reform, parking and other issues during a nationwide non-driving day in April.
Add another factor to the long list of contributing causes to the US truck driver shortages: Skills testing delays. Would-be drivers suffered a cumulative 6.4 million days of testing delays in 2016 alone, according to the Commercial Vehicle Training Association (CVTA). Those delays put 258,744 jobs on hold, at a cost of $1.4 billion to local economies, the CVTA said last week.
Data on producer prices shows that overall inflation pressure calmed further in December, weighed down again by declines in energy prices. Industry detail showed that trucking rates continued to surge, however, driven by another large gain in long-distance trucking rates.