The Supreme Court just told 28,000 freight brokers that they owe a duty of ordinary care in carrier selection. The question every broker, shipper, and 3PL should be asking is not whether they need a carrier vetting process. That question was answered on May 14. The question is: what technology are they using to build one that a jury will believe?
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that state negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the FAAAA. Twenty-eight thousand brokers just woke up in a different legal universe.
The American trucking industry built its workforce narrative on a myth, and the modern driver, who wants to be home by Friday and isn’t interested in sleeping in a cab for two weeks, is the one exposing it.
An investigative analysis of the security gaps in American commercial trucking, from terrorism to trafficking and how CVSA Roadcheck plays an important role.
COVID nearly killed the motorcoach industry. Hantavirus is not COVID but the lessons still apply. Here is what passenger carriers should be doing right now without losing their minds.
The Iran war is impacting FedEx operations in Dubai, which wants U.S. permission to pause flights there from Hong Kong so it doesn’t lose the right to fly that route.
An investigation found 195 active motor carriers clustered along a few miles of East Dublin Granville Road in northeast Columbus; the same corridor was just exposed for a billion dollars in Medicaid fraud. Federal inspection data shows those carriers have been involved in 275 crashes, including 4 fatal and 74 injury crashes. The world’s largest retailer appears in 175 inspections across 44 of those carriers with a 20.6% out-of-service rate.
We have a carrier-quality problem with a specific geographic signature, an enforcement problem documented for decades, and a financial problem for American carriers competing against operators who pay their drivers 35 cents a mile to do work that American drivers expect 78 cents a mile to perform.
We have never seen a twelve-month period in which the White House, the Department of Transportation, and FMCSA moved as aggressively, as comprehensively, and as effectively on the specific safety failures that haunt our highways and our industry. Before we sit down with Derek Barrs on Monday, here is the year that got us here.
Every year, roughly the same time, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance runs its International Roadcheck. Three days. Thousands of inspectors. Tens of thousands of trucks. The dates get announced months in advance, the focus areas get published, and somehow, fleets still get caught off guard.
The rate is the rating. When the cheapest available carrier becomes the default selection criterion, the safety rating nobody actually checks becomes irrelevant anyway. The Supreme Court will decide by June whether brokers face any liability for that calculus at all.
On April 23, a State Department spokesperson confirmed that commercial truck driver visa processing has resumed under strict new standards. Now the question is whether the states tasked with running the new system have the institutional capacity to maintain what federal audit pressure forced them to fix.
The single most common-sense safety reform available to the trucking industry right now is to acknowledge that a regulation based on annual snapshots of a driver’s licensing status is inadequate for an industry where licenses can be suspended, revoked, or downgraded at any time.
A CDL driver disappeared from a Florida rest stop on April 17 with multiple vehicles missing from his hauler. Cargo theft is at record levels and the pipeline moving stolen American vehicles out of the country has never been more active.
This week the agency announced that new Clearinghouse registrants will have to prove their identity before gaining SAP-level access to a federal database that 38 million queries have trusted since 2020.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has given China Central Airlines the okay to begin cargo flights to the United States under a temporary license.
Gord Magill has been behind the wheel since high school. So was his father. So was his grandfather. That lineage gives “End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers” something most books about trucking fundamentally lack: the credibility that comes only from someone who actually lived it.
FMCSA confirmed today that $73,502,543 in federal highway funding has been withheld from New York after the state refused to revoke non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses that its own DMV system issued illegally. More than half of the records audited violated federal law. Decertification of New York’s entire CDL program remains explicitly on the table.
On Nov. 30, 2022, a delivery driver put Athena Strand in the back of a branded van and strangled her. The company that hired him was seven months old. Its owner had never worked a day in the trucking industry. The box was checked. The FBI has linked more than 850 murders to commercial truck drivers since 2004 and is tracking 450 active suspects right now. This is a hiring problem. It has always been a hiring problem.
The war with Iran moved diesel up nearly 50 percent in five weeks and analysts are modeling $6 and higher if the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted into summer. Carriers are repricing surcharges, shippers are absorbing new fees and everyone is looking for relief. The biggest lever most fleets have on their fuel budget is not an aerodynamics package or a new engine spec. It is the driver.
