How Much Are You Willing To Pay For Toilet Paper?
We've all heard the phrase, “If you got it, a truck brought it,” and truer words have never been spoken.
As you continue to read this post, take a look around. Every single thing you see was transported by a truck at one time or another. Things you rely on every day would be unavailable without trucks. If you’re reading this in the bathroom, take a minute to check the toilet paper roll. If it’s empty, you may be at the mercy of your coworkers, but you’re always at the mercy of the truck drivers who deliver it to the grocery store. These days however, legislators seem to have forgotten “logistics 101” as to the number of trucks that are critical to continue to “bring it” and the effects their new policies would have on freight prices at large.
Since the inception of new transportation safety regulations, small trucking companies making up over 97% of all trucking companies in the U.S. and over 85% of the trucks delivering goods on America's highways every day are being squeezed out of the freight equation.
A study recently conducted by the GAO found that small carriers are being unfairly targeted with the new FMCSA safety regulations. You can easily see below that the smaller the carrier, the higher the number of violations.
Why should we, the general public care? Because when small carriers are forced to drop out of the marketplace, the effects directly impacts your wallet. Every item on the shelf in every store you shop in becomes more expensive when truck demand is higher than truck supply.
To make matters worse, small carrier profits are not increasing along with the freight prices. With embedded costs such as fuel, brokering and factoring fees, and additional fleet maintenance, and don’t even get me started on the cost impact of the driver shortage; small carriers consider themselves lucky to pay the bills. And don’t even get me started on the cost impact of the driver shortage.
No one is advocating for unsafe carriers to be allowed on America’s highways, but the system needs to be fair. Who’s speaking out for the little guy? Where is the balance? Why is the FMCSA avoiding real data when it benchmarks carrier safety?
We hear from small carriers every day here at Go By Truck, and nearly every call, message and email includes a thank you for being willing to take a stand for them. It is our mission to bring light to the disenfranchisement taking place in the industry and restore opportunities for small carriers.
With the obvious costs and inconveniences that every American faces if a resolution is not found, I think it’s worth reminding our regulators that even they rely on trucks. If they don’t scrap the policies that are putting small carriers out of business, they might find themselves stranded in a bathroom stall when the cost of toilet paper becomes so high that they can’t clean up their own messes.
Photos courtesy of: www.istockphoto.com and www.gao.gov
Produktionscontrolling
10yif new regulation drives OO out of the market there are 2 options: either the capacity is added by a bigger carrier (result: capacity remains the same) or it is not added which in return will lower the entry barrier for the next OO -- that's how the market is supposed to work! if there would be a requirement for operate at least 10 trucks and statistics remain the same that would result in a 60+% drop in violations according to the graph - and that would lead to less accidents for sure. the smaller the carrier the more the power balance is shifted towards the shipper ...
Code Witcher
10yNo one has explained to me why we should bother about this at all when the shipping industry is about to be turned on its ear. I'm estimating 10-15 years before a self-driving truck is a reality. Traditional trucking will be destroyed overnight as the big companies switch everything to round-the-clock robots. There's too many big players for governments to keep self-driving trucks illegal for very long.
CEO and Founder
10yRami Al-Sabah I may not have made it clear enough that the graph actually reflects the carriers' violation RATES, not their actual number of violations. The CSA uses a formula that compares violations to the number of trucks a carrier has, so the same violation carriers much more weight for a one-truck owner-operator than it does for a carrier with hundreds of trucks. That means that an OO who has one HOS violation, for example, can have a higher violation rate than a mega-carrier that has multiple violations across the board.
Senior Labor and Employee Relations Specialist at FDIC
10yWhile I would not want to see unsafe trucks on the road no matter the size of the carrier, I think it is essential to drill down into the data to get the kind of look that can address the problem. What are the violations? Is there a common thread? What is the root cause of the problem? Is there an avenue that these small carriers can use to compare data so that they can address the issue as an industry and not as individual small fish that have to compete against the large carriers who may be using economy of scale to address maintenance and safety issues.