A Possible Unintended Consequence Of CARB '14 Regs....

He's got a point, WCP. It would in effect be asking other states to dedicate resources to enforce California's law. And in this age of tight budgets, that's unlikely.

 

FL freight has changed over the last few years with the housing crunch. There are a lot less flats coming in to compete with. I imagine Vegas might be a similar scenario for you. They are here at Landstar if you know where to look. I've been off for a little over a month renovating my new house, and had to beat $3-4 per mile FL outbound loads off with a stick. I dreaded seeing that agent's number on the caller ID, now I stare at the phone wanting it to pop up.

 

Ain't it crazy how that works? July, as far back as I remember, has always been a slow month for van freight. So I always plan to work as little as possible then, if any at all. This year the phones were ringing off the hook according to friends. I was getting some too and ignored them. Ready to rock-n-roll by late August and all of a sudden nothing hahaha ######! Lesson learned and I should know this already. Roll with it when it's there and park when it's not. Planning to take "xx" amount of days off because" - several months or a year in advance - because conventional thinking "it's ALWAYS normally a bad time to truck anyways" can bite you. The spurts and dead times seem off. Jan and Feb were very busy for me and as long as I can remember those were normally bad months for van too. With hindsight that should have been a clue about things to come the rest of this year. It's always 20/20...

 

Got called for a hot load today that I had to turn down. $3 per mile outbound FL, but my baseboard contractor didn't finish their job like they said they would today, and also put a baseball sized dent in my new $2,000 stainless fridge! Now they are buying a new door.

 

What is this California that you speak of?

 

It is a land far, far away, filled with fruits and nuts and flakes!

 

I think the widening of the Panama Canal is supposed to be completed in 2014. Some of the newer/bigger container ships will then be able to pass through the canal and haul those containers to a destination closer to the customer, thus bypassing CA.
This could help offset the possible reduction in available trucks in CA caused by the CARB laws.
The result could be no increase in CA freight rates. Or even a decline in rates.

 

A lot of East and Gulf Coast ports have already upgraded to handle those ships too. I think I'd be shorting the railroads that ship the cans from the West Coast once it opens as well. A huge majority of the pollution in ports is caused by ships burning bunker fuel. If CARB had demanded the relative few ships to be retrofitted they could have reduced air pollution by 70%. However, it was never about pollution, it was about the unions trying to eliminate O/O from the ports using CARB.

 

mainly because they would want to get their cut of irp fees for California based trucks that want to be tagged to run Illinois. these days everybody gets a cut, ifta and irp you know