Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

Found this at Dan Goodwill’s blog. Dan has the best technical analysis of trucking on the net. Quoting a truck industry stock analyst, “The freight recession is over.” According to tonnage indices and demand trends, the freight economy is on an upswing.

Don’t start throwing parties yet. Dan goes on -

This view is supported by a number of trucking companies and shippers with whom I have spoken in the past six weeks. Several interesting events have been taking place. They include:

• Carriers are deciding to no longer serve certain accounts (e.g. “firing customers”) and are allocating capacity to better paying accounts.
• Carriers are no longer providing capacity to certain freight management companies either on specific lanes or no longer doing business with these companies altogether
• Carriers are submitting freight bids on specific blocks of traffic and then pulling their bids
• Carriers are submitting rates on designated lanes of traffic and then not showing up to meet with the shipper
• Shippers are finding a tightening of capacity and are experiencing more difficulty covering some of their loads

The upshot of all this activity is that there is a “buzz” in the industry that has not been there for the past year or two. There is an optimism that this incredibly difficult freight drought is coming to an end.

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Regarding who to blame about the high cost of fuel.

And what to do about it come November.

There is a LOT of comment regarding the high cost of fuel on the internet. Some of you might have missed it so here are a few links of interest…

As reported on Power Line

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Everyone has GOT to sign this. It only takes a second. This is the only real solution for the trucking industry. Strikes and anything else are either worthless or only short term. They’re looking for 3 million signatures. My previous post about this. Go to American Solutions.com - Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.

We currently have 393,582 signatures.

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I’ve heard many arguments about the fuel price crisis lately. We’ve all received quite an education on oil and it’s effect on the economy. I was quite surprised to find out something new from a Hollywood type like Ben Stein. He was on Glenn Beck discussing the oil scams and debating how we could become oil independent if the will was there.

He commented that Germany ran out of oil when their supplies were cut off in World War II. Under dire circumstances and heavy bombardment, they still managed to have plentiful supply of synthetic oil from coal. Here’s a long-winded link about how they did it. I found it very interesting that home heating oil and diesel make up 90% of the content when the oil is extracted. Sure, it’s not easy or cheap, and the Germans had a plentiful supply of slave labor, but it wasn’t difficult enough to slow their war machine.

If the Germans could do this back then under bad circumstances, what is our hold back to switching technologies now? I’m not saying coal is the total answer, I’m thinking that we have the technology to use coal and numerous other sources, other than just ethanol, to come up with a solution that works well. Like Ben said, the will just is not there. The will was never there at any other time that a supply crisis was claimed either.

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Do any of you have children? Do you recall the scenes where the little darling breaks something, or spills something, or otherwise causes a minor calamity, and then runs to mommy and blames it on another toddler. Or better yet “Sally MADE me do it!”

I was reading some posts regarding the recent Hijinks by the Senate Judiciary committee and that little scenario repeatedly came to mind. Children. We have children in office.

Vindictive and spiteful children. ”

Leahy and his comrades showed up ready to blame American oil companies for the high price of gasoline,

Not very bright children.

Not surprisingly, the petroleum executives stole the show, as they were far smarter, infinitely better informed, and much more public-spirited than the Senate Democrats.

And very, very, greedy children…

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This is the first large carrier I’ve noticed to go under. It’s largest creditors were T-Check and a fuel company, so I’m assuming fuel prices played a major part. I hope other preventable factors played a major role, but I would not suspect it.  I don’t know too much about Jevic, but they appeared to be a strong company.

I talked to one of their drivers about a year ago and he really liked working for them. He had a reefer LTL deal that was making money for him. I would not have suspected a company involved with LTL and refrigerated to be one of the first big companies to file.

There are plenty of links all over the web about this, but I found this one interesting. What other industry that is non-union would have “so what” type of comments from people? You know out of 3,000 people there are at least quite a few hard working people that have just everything pulled out from underneath of them. Most will find another job quickly, but their health insurance and other benefits are gone, and gone in the blink of an eye with no warning. It will probably have an adverse effect on their customers and their employees too.

I have to wonder how many more companies will follow suit and I would really like to know the details of what went wrong with them. I’m sure I’m not alone.  It worries me about the economy overall. Jevic had over 5,000 creditors with the largest debt being over $1.5 million! Wow. If more companies do follow suit, that is a huge wake to leave behind.

I fear this may be bigger than previous market “adjustments” where weaker companies go under. No need for a strike if this keeps going, there will be plenty of involuntary strikers out there.

I should not have checked the news today. It looks like an economic doomsday if you believe it all. I usually don’t believe it, but then you see news like this. Other fuel dependent business, such as airlines, are starting to scream for relief and making drastic changes also. Time will soon tell if Jevic just had common industry problems or if others are on the brink of disaster also.

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If it wasn’t so serious it would be funny.

I subscribe to a Blog written by a fellow by the name of Warren Meyers. His Coyote Blog is a hoot. It’s also very educational. I highly recommend it to all who would like an insight as to how the world works from a small business point of view.

On May 21 of this year he posted Congress, Sue Thyself.

It seems that our leaders in congress are upset about the high cost of fuel. Nevermind that THEY are the ones primarily responsible for that same high cost.

The fact that Congress has placed many of the places in the US that are known to contain oil OFFLIMITS to drilling and production,

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The oil companies….right?

Well, actually no.  The oil Companies, those eeevil oil companies that have invested untold billions of dollars in exploration, production, development, research ,transportation and retail of fuel, nope…not them.  They’re the LAST people that should be blamed.

They’re running as fast as they can while governments of all flavors heap extra taxes and fee’s upon them. Citizens groups and the Main Sewer Media heap scorn upon them and normal everyday folks complain.  What are they to do?

The government, aided and abetted by the greens won’t let the oil companies drill in several places where we KNOW there is oil.  ANWAR (what a misname.  A bleaker area you’d have to go to the moon to find and what wildlife?), the west coast,and  the east coast.  There’s oil and gas there but ;it’s off limits.

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Dan Goodwill has a great article (again) -

Coming Soon – A Truck Capacity Shortage and Higher Freight Rates

Those carriers that are still in business are trimming their truck fleets. Truckload carriers are cutting capacity at the highest rate in a decade to create a better balance between supply and demand. Bob Costello, chief economist of the American Trucking Association has supplied data that showed a 3.6% drop in capacity in January and February, “the largest since we began collecting the data”.

It’s what we’ve been talking about for months, except Dan has all the numbers. Manufacturers are also cutting back on production and even the used truck market is going to be tight because of all the foreign truck buyers.

The good news -

As demand increases, there will be a lot less truck supply than at the start of this freight recession. While some parked trucks will be put back into service, it will take time to ramp up truck production, hire and train drivers and replace the trucking companies that have gone to “trucking company heaven”.

Personally, I think the rise in rates will be more than 10% as the rest of the article states. This last month I’ve actually worked more than usual. I’ve even heard the cries of a shipper being desperate. Reality was they weren’t that desperate, but it’s a start.

It’s a good article and the point is that we may be at the bottom or at least close to the bottom of the slowdown and it may be picking up soon and the trucks / owners that have survived will be able to call the shots. I don’t think it will get much better till after the election. Shippers and manufactures are unclear about what the next President is going to do. Even though they’re all the same and have the same plan to destroy the economy, but that’s a different post.

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As I wrote in a previous post. Fuel prices are high and they’re going to STAY high.

And this is a GOOD thing.

(boink!!!!!!!???, this is a good thing? How can that be? Stay tuned, more on that later)

Whatever can we do?

Well, buying a new truck is right out. I checked into that this last month. To replace my old KW it would cost me just about TWICE what I paid for it about nine years ago. Not quite but almost. I paid ninety something thousand in the year two thousand and the local KW dealer wants almost a hundred and seventy thousand for a very similar replacement.

And the new truck get’s worse fuel economy.

So no thank you. I’ll overhaul and rebuild for a while.

How long a while?

That’s kind of what THIS post is about.

Things are being done. It’s possible to get diesel from other places than an oil well,

from plants, algae and trash.

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