DC Velocity - March 2016

newsworthy

IS THERE REALLY A SHORTAGE OF QUALIFIED commercial truck drivers? Or are drivers just becoming really adept at choosing the loads they want and ignoring those they don’t?

There is nothing new about drivers “kicking the tires” on the freight before they commit to revving up their engines. However, it appears that, more than ever before, drivers are looking before they leap.

Scott Moscrip, founder and chairman of New Plymouth, Idaho-based Truckstop.com, one of the country’s top three trucking load boards, estimated that 20 percent of driver visits to its site are just to look at the loads, not to make a truck available.

Today’s drivers have access to a wide range of sophisticated user-friendly technology that allows them to make smart calls about the loads available to them. In years past, for example, a driver may have hauled a load into a market where the rates were good, only to find little lucre in the outbound direction. Now, with the software available to them, drivers might not even want to bid on the inbound lane if the outbound holds little promise, Moscrip said.

“Owner-operators want to be in control. But today they’re not in control of their logbooks. They aren’t always in control of their pickups and deliveries,” Moscrip said. “But now they have the ability to search and find the next job they want to do. They are more in control of their lives.” He added that the technology has made drivers better negotiators and has also benefited shippers by helping them understand the true value of the markets where they deploy their loads.

There will always be geographic imbalances on the
country’s truck map. Hauls into Florida, which is a
consuming state that’s light on production, will always
command good rates. By contrast, outbound runs
from the Sunshine State will be less abundant and
certainly less lucrative. Yet for the most part, there are
enough drivers and trucks to move the nation’s goods,
and there is no shortage of individuals entering the
business, experts contend. Moscrip said Truckstop is
signing up about 1,000
carriers a month. He
added that, for the first
time since records have
been kept, the average
size of a truck fleet regis-
tering for authority with
the federal government is
one.

BIG GROWTH AMONG SMALL FLEETS

Jeff Tucker, president and CEO of Tucker Co. Worldwide, a

Haddonfield, N.J.-based third-party logistics service provider (3PL), said one of the biggest untold stories in transportation is that more than 409,000 for-hire drivers have entered the field in the past four years, a 21-percent aggregate increase that brings the total number of drivers to more than 2. 35 million. Of those, Tucker reckons that the number of fleets with one to six trucks grew 42 percent, fleets with seven to nine trucks grew 29 percent, and fleets with 20 to 100 trucks grew 22 percent. By contrast, the largest fleets—those with more than 501 trucks—grew by 10 percent, he said. “Every fleet size grew since 2012, but the clear winners of the driver war are the smaller and mid-sized fleets,” Tucker said in a recent blog on the company’s website. He advised shippers to partner closely with smaller fleets and with the 3PLs that know how to reach them.