The state of rail service and the ability to get rate relief were top of mind for rail shippers at last month’s North American Rail Shippers Association meeting in Chicago. Many of the shippers at the annual event were eager to discuss the state of their rail service and strategies for improving the service they… Read More »
Trucking conditions are in wonderful shape. Fleets can’t keep up with demand, and freight rates are high. Sales of new trucks and trailers are expected to approach record levels this year. The need for additional truck drivers is huge, and fleets and many owner-operators are making lots of money. What’s going on? – Total Manufacturing… Read More »
Paper shippers focused on finding solutions to the tight capacity in the rail and trucking sectors dominated the TAPPI Shipping, Warehousing, and Receiving Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, earlier this month. Shippers across the board said they were searching for capacity solutions given the increasing pricing and limited availability of capacity. Truck and rail logistics… Read More »
It was just a matter of time, and apparently the time was the week of February 12. The debate has moved from whether the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate is affecting transportation to what we can do at the government level to alleviate those effects. We might not have seen the peak of the ELD… Read More »
Only once in the last decade have we had January spot market rates come in above December. That was at the start of 2014 when we also had a strong December increase in rates and we were coming off the HOS implementation at the end of 2013. Well, we can now add a second. Not… Read More »
We have our first week of data suggesting that the trucking market is returning to “normal”. The Market Demand Index (see graph below) saw a notable drop in week 41 after a very small decline in the prior week; however, market conditions are still significantly tighter than we saw last year (up 153% y/y). That… Read More »
A panelist at the recent FTR Transportation Conference reminded us that businesses like it when the government stays out of “their business.” He said companies were benefiting from the new “hands off” environment. He claimed this had improved business confidence, and, more importantly, business performance. We have seen these conditions before, usually when power in… Read More »
Industrial Production figures for August came out on Friday and the topline news wasn’t positive. Nor should you have expected it to be. Hurricane Harvey shut down a major industrial center for nearly 2 weeks and had impacts that spread out both before and after it. That means that August production was impacted for at… Read More »
This September 12-14, we are holding our 13th annual Transportation Conference in Indianapolis. As a lead-up to the conference we will be holding a complimentary industry webinar: Key Issues in Transportation. The theme of this year’s conference is Gaining Traction? Next Year. Next Decade. I will be moderating the webinar discussion which highlights the transportation… Read More »
By Noël Perry If you are like us at FTR you watched the debate on the repeal of ‘ObamaCare’ with great interest. The debate is of critical interest to all of us because it is the first in a long line of debates that explicitly addresses the ‘entitlements’ we have voted ourselves. In this case… Read More »