TRANSPORTATION TRENDS: 12-19-2022

LTL Carriers continue with general rate increases amid freight volume decreases. New legislation is being prepared to help everyday life for truck drivers.

Holiday Season:

TLI would like to extend happy holidays to all shippers, carriers, employees, and their families! Our team will be observing the holidays on Friday December 23 and Monday December 26. There will be limited skeleton crew running, but plan accordingly!

Truckload:

The government continues to work to make the truck driver experience more attractive and is doing so with legislative that requires commercial warehouses, retailers, and ports to allow access to bathrooms during pickups or drop offs. You can read more about it here.

Capacity is tightened across all equipment last week as load-to-truck ratios rose across all equipment. Dry vans rose 10%, flatbeds rose 22.9%, and refrigerated equipment rose 13.5%. Overall, national rates do not appear to have increased heavily due to the tighter capacity.

Less-Than-Truckload:

Although freight volume has decreased in the networks, General Rate Increases (GRI) are continued to be reported by LTL carriers. Old Dominion announced a 4.9% GRI effective on January 3 while Yellow, T-Force, FedEx, ArcBest have implemented GRIs earlier this quarter. These GRIs are being reported as an effort to combat rising costs of real estate, new equipment, technology investments and competitive employee wages.

LTL carriers are continually working through capacity issues on a terminal, shipment, and day-to-day basis. Weekly updates/directions are given by carriers to help alleviate their terminal which may include: freight embargos, dimension/quantity restrictions, and transit delays. TLI is actively monitoring these situations and will update any affected customer with solutions.

TLI is actively monitoring situations in the industry, such as acquisitions, embargos, and other industry disruptions. If a TLI client is directly affected by any of these events, your TLI representatives will reach out to discuss what this means for your account.

TLI highly suggests that on all shipments you provide our team with the “Must Arrive by Date” (MABD) as to when you need the product delivered. This will help us select the proper transit time / equipment type at the best current freight rate.

Please contact your Translogistics team at 610-280-3210 for any further questions. 

*article written by Mitchell Kinek, Sales/Marketing Executive, Translogistics. Any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out!

The chart above depicts national average line haul rates and fuel surcharges for equipment in the past 4 months, from DAT.