Rates haven’t been as good as they were last week since the Snowpocalypse of 2014, notes DAT’s Ken Harper. But before you attribute that to the unknown number of owner-operators who shut down last week (best estimate we have from online polling of readers, likely a high estimate at that, available at this link) in solidarity with demonstrations around the country against the FMCSA’s electronic logging device mandate, consider truck posts on DAT boards throughout the week weren’t off by much.
“Initial data indicates the shutdown doesn’t appear to have had much effect on truck posts on DAT” boards, Harper said at the end of last week, a couple percentage points at most.
What that amounts to is a few hundred truck posts less than seen in the prior week, and what Harper calls a “drop in the bucket” of well more than half a million combined load and truck posts over the course of any given week. Not all truckers make it a habit to post their trucks to the load boards, of course, nor do anywhere close to the total utilize boards as a principal load source. So measuring the impact with that number alone wouldn’t work.
And in a market like the one we’re currently in, “with the volume of freight that’s moving, there’s no perceptible decline in searches,” Harper says. Just the opposite, in fact. “It wouldn’t be unusual at all for truck posts to decline in a robust market like this with national average van rates at $2.09/mile, but searches to remain high as carriers can be more selective.”
At once, I might postulate that if brokers were finding it more difficult to match freight with trucks, and there was anecdotal evidence of such from owner-operators last week, an overabundance of load posting activity could have led what was a national van load-to-truck ratio that hit its highest mark ever recorded in DAT Trendlines last week.
Spot market conditions were already quite good for truckers, as we reported last week with the weekly update of DAT’s state-by-state demand charts for dry van and flat segments. As for this week, says Harper, “anytime the national van load-to-truck ratio is above 6 and national rates are north of $2/mile, it’s good times.”
Other factors at play include a strong economy “gaining steam as we go into the holiday season, which is now extended and accelerated by e-commerce,” he says, tightened capacity as a result of that as well as Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and East Coast ports benefiting from ships unloading there rather than the Southern ports (Savannah, Miami) that were still recovering from the hurricanes or dealing with relief efforts in the Southern U.S. and, later, Puerto Rico.
