After 13 years in business, 101 Transport Inc. of Hudson, Wisconsin, has ceased operations, citing skyrocketing insurance rates and maintenance costs as the main reasons behind the decision to close.
Tom Dahlberg, owner of 101 Transport, said the death knell for his company was when his insurance rates spiked 70% compared with the previous year after one of his trucks was involved in a serious crash in Utah in 2019.
“Insurance is making it untenable to do business,” Dahlberg told FreightWaves. “The government has got to step in on this issue before more companies go out of business.”
Dahlberg had 72 company drivers and the same number of power units until about six months ago, when he was forced to let his company drivers go and return the equipment in an effort to keep the carrier afloat.
“We were just trying to trim costs and maintenance expenses, which were out of this world,” Dahlberg told FreightWaves. “It would cost us around $10,000 to $15,000 every time one of our trucks was in the shop.”
At the time of the company’s closure, he had 32 owner-operators hauling contract freight for 101 Transport. He said drivers were notified of the company’s closure on Feb. 29.
The only upside is that a larger carrier has agreed to hire Dahlberg’s owner-operators, pending the outcome of the drivers’ background and safety checks.
As of press time on Monday, Dahlberg said he wasn’t able to reveal the name of that carrier.
“Hopefully, we will be able to name the carrier once we have everything in place and get everyone rolling by Wednesday,” Dahlberg told FreightWaves.
The 40-year trucking veteran said he isn’t sure what his next steps will be as he winds down operations.
“I guess I will be looking for another opportunity,” Dahlberg said.
Jesse Ganley
Don’t feel bad for this owner of 101 transportation Tom Dalhberg was involved in drag racing and he spent hundreds of thousands on his sport! Well maybe instead of spending money on drag racing he should have been more involved in his business! Not to mention the company had foreign drivers that were clearly inexperienced and there accidents was probably why the insurance was too high!
Tom RIDDLE
The transportation industry is not for the faint of heart. In my experience with the industry if you are not willing to be on duty 7/24 you will not be very successful . Been at it 43 years now and the industry hardly resembles the 70s hard to change your ways as fast as the industry changes but you will have to or get left behind {just rambling thoughts of an old dinosaur}
Bob harmsy
Good post…drive safe driver
A Driver
The market is balancing itself. Nothing new here.
Bill
I am glad I am starting to see others looking at the history of these carriers and not seeing the feeling sorry for them.
It has been clear for some time if you are not improving on the safety side you are going to pay for it at renewal. Yes, loss runs are important. But if you have a bad year on losses and you have no story to tell, and based on their scores, they don’t, then you are going to pay higher rates.
In 2019 there are carriers that had record profit years. When you look at those carriers you will see that they not only had good safety records but they improved on safety. They didn’t expand in 2018, they reduced debt and invested in technology and programs to make the more profitable. And they are rewarded with better insurance rates, low driver turnover, and better contracts (good safety and drivers opens doors).
The trucking industry is seeing Darwinism enter at a faster pace.
Elvis Durant
And they expect GOVERNMENT to step in on the abusive insurance rates issue? Yeah ok….good luck with that!
Bill
Right! The trucking sector for insurance companies is losing money every year. The only way the government is going to fix this is through tort reform.
Mike
Insurance and maintenance are ridiculous. These EPA trucks are financial bancruptcy waiting to happen, as that is how they are designed, these new trucks are throwaways. Take a truck into a shop with a dirty sensor and they replace the turbo for $6000. When you take it back, they slap an EGR Cooler on for another $3000… When in reality, the motor is packed with soot and just needs a good cleaning and sensor replacement. Cost, around $1000, cheaper if you take a few hours and do the work yourself. The insurance? That was my last straw, I could no longer justify the rates I was told to pay for the income I saw coming my way when all of the other expenses were added in. I cannot compete with 1099 outfits run from off shore any longer, while my fixed costs double and expenses triple. No money in this racket, at least not as a general freight hauler with one truck that runs legally.
Abe F
Sounds like you have a shop problem, not a truck one.
Stephen
Many trucking companies in Ontario Canada are being (forced to close down after one or two bad accidents. It is almost impossible for a trucking company with less than 15 trucks to employ new truck drivers. Manitoba and B C have public insurance. A number of the smaller trucking companies and wheelchair transport companies (taxis) are looking at this as the only way to keep 5,000 small trucking companies and taxi fleets in business.
Jason Miller
To provide a bit more color on this carrier’s safety history, I suggest checking its SMS profile (DOT# 1705392). If you look at the historical Unsafe Driving BASIC scores, you can see problems occurring in 2015 through 2017 where the score averaged above a 3, which puts the carrier in the 90th or so percentile of safety for carriers of a similar size based on prior academic research (reference at the end of this post). It’s HOS Compliance BASIC has also been weak, with many scores around 0.60 prior to the ELD mandate (which is about 70th percentile, though in fairness, it’s HOS Compliance has improved since the ELD mandate started before degrading more recently). Looking at the specific HOS violations over the past two years, there are three 7-pt hits for having “False report of drivers record of duty status” and another two hits (7-pts each) for violating the 14-hour (in addition to other single occurrences of 5-,7-, and 10-pt violations). It’s trajectory on Vehicle Maintenance began to decline heavily starting around mid-2016 where the BASIC was ~2.5 but has since risen to 5.01. That 5.01 score is at about the 80th percentile for large carriers.
In other words, this carrier has had a history of mediocre safety performance, which when combined with a serious accident, made this carrier a prime candidate to see its insurance rates spike.
Miller, J. (2020). Why Are Larger Motor Carriers More Compliant with Safety Regulations?. Transportation Journal, 59(1), 28-72.
MNTruckerMike
Thanks for this reply…I was also getting ready to go down the “how safe is this carrier” search path, but you did the work for me. Everyone these days places blame…but the truth is companies are more hungry to fill seats, than to fill seats with safe drivers…so this ultimately contributes to their demise. 13yrs isn’t a long time to be in business, this is a minor blip on the trucking industry radar….but every little company that goes out of business, if we make a big deal about it, then all of a sudden its a Huge Issue…fake news.