The Playbook

Knight-Swift, Chubb telematics failures built a $130 million highway safety crisis. What Biden and Buttigieg missed on America’s roads.

FreightWaves SONAR will launch its first virtual Driver App Shortage Hackathon on June 15-22 to address the lack of software built primarily for truck drivers.

The benchmark used for most fuel surcharges fell for the fifth straight week.

Why the Monthly Payment Is the Wrong Number to Focus On The monthly payment is a cash flow number. It tells you whether you can keep the lights on week to week. It tells you almost nothing about what the truck actually costs. What the truck actually costs is the purchase price plus every dollar […]

Spend a day on any interstate in this country and you will lose count. Trucks rolling down the highway with the company name scrawled on the door in black marker. USDOT numbers handwritten so small you would have to be parked next to the truck to read them. Letters smeared, crooked, half peeled off, applied […]

(The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FreightWaves or its affiliates.) Recently, a driver pulled into an Arizona scale house learned that an officer could reconstruct his entire multi-state trip from license plate readers and roadside cameras, matching the real timeline against paper logs […]

Why This Matters More Than It Did Two Years Ago Trucking insurance is expensive and getting more so. According to ATRI’s 2025 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, insurance premiums hit a record 10.2 cents per mile in 2024, following a 12.5 percent increase in 2023 and an additional 3 percent rise in 2024. […]

The Gap Is Bigger Than You Think Picture two owner-operators, both running a regular Midwest corridor. Same general freight, similar weights, comparable miles per week. One of them is averaging somewhere around 7.5 to 7.8 miles per gallon. The other is pulling 6.1 to 6.3. On a week where each truck burns 400 gallons of […]

The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges has fallen to its lowest level in several months.

A Note Before We Start Tax law is not a place for general advice to substitute for specific counsel. The concepts in this article are educational. The numbers used are illustrative. Your actual tax situation depends on your entity structure, your annual taxable income, your state’s conformity with federal law, and decisions that need to […]

As enforcement tightened on long-haul trucking, marginal operators did not leave the business. They moved into hotshot and auto transport, where the rigs are smaller, the inspections fewer, and the insurance cheaper.

Two weeks ago, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration flipped the switch on the biggest overhaul of its registration infrastructure in decades. The legacy systems carriers had used for years, including the Unified Registration System, the Licensing and Insurance public filing system, and the FMCSA Portal’s registration functions, were permanently retired at 8:00 PM Eastern […]

A notice has been going out to carriers in the C.H. Robinson network, and it is worth reading carefully because of what may sit behind it. The message, branded under C.H. Robinson and titled “Changes to carrier eligibility,” tells the recipient that their company “exceeds intervention thresholds for C.H. Robinson’s scoring model based on data […]

The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges fell for the sixth time in seven weeks.

Commercial auto has lost $4.9 billion in a single year. Fourteen consecutive years of underwriting losses. Crash rates are actually falling. So why is the industry bleeding? It stopped doing the one thing insurance was designed to do.

Pull up the import data on U.S. charcoal briquette shipments and you are looking at something that some people in trucking would not think to check heading into a holiday weekend. But that data, read against the consumer spending picture for Memorial Day 2026, tells you something specific about the supply chain, the retail freight […]

A Freightliner Cascadia operated by Amritsar Trans Inc., a five-truck carrier out of Manteca, California, rear-ended three vehicles on Highway 99 near Lodi on May 19, 2026, killing two young men. The driver fled on foot. The carrier sits inside a web of 267 carriers clustered across residential addresses in the same ZIP code, and 10 involuntary revocation actions.

FMCSA removed 12 more electronic logging devices from the registry today, bringing the total to 79 revocations since January 2025. The registered list is bleeding devices faster than the market is adding them. At this rate, the agency may be building a de facto third-party certification standard without ever formally adopting one.

On Monday, May 18, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced that FMCSA is deploying $217 million across four grant programs targeting trucking safety enforcement, CDL program modernization, technology deployment at roadside inspections, and career training for military veterans entering the trucking industry. This is not a future commitment. Applications are open right now. The […]

The benchmark price of diesel used fo most fuel surcharges declined this week.