Are there too many trucks?

Always comes back to supply and demand.....Too many trucks for too little freight= low rates.....Start making stuff here again and the demand for trucks goes up....No trucks available to haul the freight, particularly perishables, rates go up, pretty simple analogy I know.....

 

I stopped OTR in 2001 at what I consider to be the best top of the entire industry possible and still be a driver. In those days money flooded everywhere, more than could be spent. Literally gravy train, good times.

Fast forward to today. If I was to run a truck again, I would not hire on for less than .50 a mile, however companies are putting immigrants into the cab and send two trucks out for the cost of one of me.

Also Elogs. You need teams to repower more late loads. Rates are indeed dropping. Survival of the fittest, meaning those without debt. Everything has tightened up regulations and laws etc. The so called captian of the ship freedoms have gone bye bye.

Govt Emissions of engines are parking millions of Old Iron that otherwise would be very good today. What a waste. We will almost have to suffer a EMP attack that destroys todays modern computerized trucks to bring back the old iron.

This nation does not do warehousing. Not in the old way anymore. They will not pay a dollar to store toliet paper anymore. It goes right off the truck into the delivery truck and direct to the store. Holding any amount of inventory not sold and not pending shipping is a cost most companies will no longer bear. We literally as a lack of a better concept live pay check to paycheck, companies live shipment to shipment.

That creates a problem should we suffer a national disaster such as the new madrid fault or the ones in California or Yellow stone etc. There is no inventory being stored that will tide us all over 3, 6 or a year ahead. What is consumed is lost right away. We have no fallback.

The Military does, FEMA as well. But only because they have to.

People like me have become Non PC for today's industry. I would be like a disruptive force inside a company office today. People are too young to understand me and get offended easily. Then call me names like Bigot etc. They literally don't have that toughness that we all had growing up prior to the 70's It is far better to make me go away and stop bothering all those tender young dispatchers and buttercups.

See where Im going?

 

Yes, there is too much capacity for the available truckload movements but there should always be a little more capacity than freight to absorb any anomalies in broad-scale national/regional shipping needs that spike from time to time. That said, there is still too many filled seats, messing up rates and a given driver's wages. For large carriers, they don't see much difference in driver payroll, they're still paying the same payroll, except it's spread out thinner over more drivers. And they have the available instant growth capacity to take on a new large shipper that may get fed up with their current carrier.

 

Too many trucks or too many drivers willing to work 60+ hours a week and acting like there's a problem when we can't max out our hours?

Depends on your perspective I guess.

HOS is like minimum wage.

How many would work for a wage they can't live on if the powers that be didn't say it acceptable to pay so little?

How many would expect to work the hours we do if there weren't rules that made it the norm?

Yeah, just rambling.

It's funny, most drivers you talk to, regardless of when they started, think that it was great when they started and the industry started to slide just after they got into it.

 

They are already jobless.

Companies want to buy Ottos and eliminate the human hassle of herding drivers.

I for one stand against Otto and what they represent. And am happy to live far enough away to avoid the chaos 10 to 20 from now, I don't expect to be with us 5 years from now anyhow.

 

In other threads this time of the year people are quoting some news story about not enough drivers. Everyone seems to think this is news for some reason. If only they could see the history that this story comes up everytime this part of the year.