Author Archive

How Fleets are Chasing Drivers with Better Pay and Quality of Life

In the past few months, many fleets have increased wages in an attempt to find and keep new drivers. Facing high turnover and fewer entrants to the industry, these companies are competing for a pool of talent that is only thinning out each year. But the life of a truck driver can be difficult, and […]

Expect truckload market volatility to continue through the fall

To say that the first half of 2018 was “a period of both extreme volatility and unprecedented imbalance between capacity and demand for trucking services in North America” at first sounds like hyperbole. But if you ask anyone who lived through it, they’ll probably tell you it’s an understatement.

Rail Traffic for the Week Ending August 4, 2018

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) today reported U.S. rail traffic for the week ending August 4, 2018. For this week, total U.S. weekly rail traffic was 570,995 carloads and intermodal units, up 4.2 percent compared with the same week last year. Total carloads for the week ending August 4 were 279,907 carloads, up 3 […]

Strong peak season to test Mexican container capacity

Second quarter intermodal volume growth picked up where the first quarter left off: heading in the right direction and going strong. That was one of the key takeaways from the Intermodal Association of North America’s (IANA) quarterly “Intermodal Market Trends & Statistics Report,” which was released this week. (This article requires registration at the Journal […]

Outpacing market in trans-Pac gains, OOCL warns of tariff impact

The container shipping companies are faced with the perfect storm with the ever tighter environmental regulations coming into force and oil prices jumping, exerting further pressure on liners to squeeze out profit from the buoyant demand. (This article requires registration at the Journal of Commerce. To access, please click on the above link)

Diesel average sees slight decline

This slight decline follows a 0.6-cent gain last week, which was preceded by 1.9-cent and 0.4-cent decreases, respectively, the previous two weeks. Prior to those two weeks of declines, the national diesel average was up 0.7 cents and 2.0 cents, respectively. And those gains came on the heels of a four-week stretch of declines, which […]

California Passed $15 An Hour Two Years Ago — How’s It Working?

In April, 2016, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15-an-hour minimum wage law into effect. As a consequence, the minimum wage went from $10 an hour to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees on January 1, 2017. On January 1 of this year, the minimum wage was hiked again to […]

Trade War Target Practice: China Will Punish These American Businesses Next

Last week, President Trump announced that the proposed 10% tariff on $200 billion worth of China imports would be more than doubled to 25% in order to offset any change in currency prices. China warned that they are not going to take this sitting down, and said they have $60 billion worth of tariffs of […]

NAFTA trade growth streak continues

The total value of cross-border trade between the United States and its partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement – Canada and Mexico – climbed another 9.2 percent to $102.5 billion in May compared with the same month a year ago, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of […]