The ‘ingenious strategy’ behind most truckers’ least favorite week of the year: International Roadcheck

International Roadcheck Week is hardly the sexiest topic in trucking, but it is a darn-tootin’ important one. Inspectors in the U.S. and Canada halt tens of thousands of trucks for vehicle inspections for a few days every summer or early fall. They remove thousands of trucks and drivers from the road; in 2021, 16.5% of inspected vehicles were put out of service along with 5.3% of drivers.

It’s uncommon for truck drivers to actually get their vehicles inspected at random during most of the year. To avoid International Roadcheck Week, many truckers simply don’t drive during that period of time — which, presumably, means more unsafe vehicles and drivers on the road outside of the inspection blitz. It’s a question that ate at Andrew Balthrop, a research associate at the University of Arkansas Sam M. Walton College of Business.

Around 5% fewer one-person trucking companies are active during International Roadcheck Week. But Balthrop and his fellow researcher, Alex Scott of the University of Tennessee, found a major upside to the inspection blitz — even with all the folks who avoid it. According to their working paper published in March 2021, vehicles are safer a month before and after the inspection period. There’s a 1.8% reduction of vehicle violations, according to Balthrop and Scott’s analysis. Surprise inspection blitzes don’t result in the same uptick of compliance.

I caught up with Balthrop about his research last week at FreightWaves’ Future of Supply Chain conference, and we chatted again on the phone this week about his findings on International Roadcheck Week.

Enjoy a bonus MODES and a lightly edited transcription of our phone interview:

FREIGHTWAVES: For our readers who are not aware of what Roadcheck Week actually is, can you explain a little bit about what it and why it is important to drivers and companies?

BALTHROP: “The International Roadcheck is part of an alliance between the inspectors in Canada and the ones in Mexico and the U.S. to have a unified framework for making sure trucks are safe to operate. That should make it easier to go across borders when you have this kind of unified structure.

“In the U.S., one of these CVSA inspection blitzes is the International Roadcheck that happens for three days in the summer. Usually it’s a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And usually it’s the first week in June.

“And in it, they focus on Level One inspections, the North American Standard Inspection where they inspect the driver records, the hours of service, the licensure and I believe medical records as well. Then they inspect the truck. It’s an in-depth inspection where the inspector will actually crawl under the truck to look at various things. And these inspections, from the data that I’ve seen, take about a half an hour on average.

“During the Roadcheck Week, they’ll do about 60,000 inspections, so 20,000 a day. They’re going to pull over a lot of trucks, and this can cause a little bit of congestion at the weigh stations and the roadside inspections localities as the inspectors are doing these inspections.”

Roadcheck Week doesn’t catch all truck drivers, but it has a long-lasting benefit to safety

FREIGHTWAVES: So, can most drivers kind of expect to be pulled over? How likely is that?

BALTHROP: “There’s 1 million or 3 million trucks on the road, somewhere around there on any given day. With 20,000 inspections, most drivers still will not get inspected, but there’s going to be a higher proportion of drivers inspected.

“You’re more likely to get inspected on these days. If you don’t have a recent inspection on your record, or if you have a bad recent inspection on your record, you’re more likely to be pulled over on these days.”

FREIGHTWAVES: Your research focused on that it’s just unusual that this inspection is announced, that it’s planned. We were talking before about how normally, if you’re trying to assure quality or compliance, you would not announce an inspection in advance. It would be more of a surprise-type situation.

Can you walk us through why that’s so unusual, or what’s the rationale that you see behind announcing it in advance?

BALTHROP: “It is unusual, and on the surface, it doesn’t make much sense, but it turns out to be kind of an ingenious strategy. So I’ll walk through it here.

“Over the course of a year, there’ll be 2 million inspections of 3 or 4 million trucks out there. The average rate of inspections is pretty low. It’s not uncommon for truckers to go years without having an inspection. With this low inspection intensity, the FMCSA has sort of a problem of, how does it get anybody to abide by the regulations?

“I’m a jaded economist, and I don’t worry or consider too much ethics and morality and all that kind of stuff. It comes down to incentives for drivers to follow these inspections. The incentives do guide behavior. So, how could the FMCSA incentivize drivers to follow these regulations more closely and adhere to the standards?

“They do this by announcing the blitz. This does two things. On one side, it allows everybody to prepare in advance. There’s a bunch of anecdotal evidence out there that people do prepare for these blitzes in advance. They will have their trucks inspected beforehand for any problems. They’ll time maintenance and upkeep in advance to make sure that their vehicles are in order. “They’ll be a little bit more cognizant of the driver-side regulations. One thing we notice in our study is that hours-of-service violations really drop during these extensions, because people see them coming. They don’t fudge the books in any way.”

Owner-operators can evade Roadcheck Week. Big carriers, not so much.

BALTHROP: “The issue with the announcement, on the flip side, is that it allows people to just dodge the inspection entirely. For a long time, people have talked about how owner-operators and smaller carriers time their vacations for this particular time. They could do this for a couple reasons. To avoid the hassle is a nice way to put it, but it also allows you to be noncompliant to avoid the high-intensity inspections.

“You have this balance here that on one side you get the behavior you want with people complying with regulations. That’s the behavior the FMCSA wants. But on the flip side, you get a bunch of people that are kind of outright dodging inspections.

“When you compare these two things on balance, the policy is actually pretty effective because you get a lot of people focused on maintaining their trucks and obeying the rules during that particular week. Especially with the vehicle maintenance stuff, that lasts a long time.

“In our research, we saw that vehicle violations, a month before and up to a month afterwards, is when you still notice your vehicle violations. That trucks are kind of better maintained around these blitzes.

“The ingenious aspect of it is that the FMCSA, by concentrating their inspection resources all at one time and announcing it, they’re making it clear that they’re serious about enforcing these regulations and everybody prepares for it. For the number of inspections that are happening, you get fewer tickets than you would have otherwise expected.

“The FMCSA, they’re putting people through a little bit of a hassle, but they’re not having to write a bunch of tickets to get people to comply. They’re not really punishing a whole bunch of people because, by making this apparent that this is going to happen, people comply and the FMCSA gets what they want essentially without having to come down on carriers too hard.”

A convenient time for a vacation, indeed

FREIGHTWAVES: OK, interesting. And how does this pattern of shutting down, how does that compare for an owner-operator versus a driver for a big fleet?

BALTHROP: “If you’re a motor carrier with thousands of power units, you can’t just pack up and not do business on a particular day. They just don’t have that option. So they get inspected at a higher intensity, and you see the larger carriers kind of more focused on making sure that they’re prepared for these inspections. With so many inspections, the larger carriers are going to be inspected at higher rates. You can really damage your reputation if your equipment isn’t in order on this particular day.

“Versus the smaller carriers, especially if you’re talking about a single-vehicle fleet, an owner-operator type, it is not that difficult to just not work for those three days. And so you see a lot about that.

“In terms of what the roadway composition looks like, if we look at inspection data and relative to a typical day with the usual inspections, on these Roadcheck days, you have about 5% fewer owner-operators on the road than you otherwise would expect.”

FREIGHTWAVES: Wow. And when you say owner-operators, you also mean just like fleets with just —

BALTHROP: “One-vehicle fleets.”

FREIGHTWAVES: OK, that’s interesting.

BALTHROP: “You know, you see a little bit of effect with the smaller fleets, below six vehicles, but it basically disappears by the time you get to a hundred vehicles.

“This effect is being driven by smaller carriers staying off the road in terms of avoidance. You see this goes also how you would expect; it’s also older vehicles that stay off the road. This is correlated with carrier size. The larger carriers use newer vehicles and owner-operators tend to use some of the older vehicles. But it’s particularly the older vehicles that are off the road.

“This makes intuitive sense. Older vehicles are more costly to keep compliant. Maintenance is more costly, and they’ve been around longer so there’s time for more stuff to have broken essentially.

How a truck driver gets stopped for inspection

FREIGHTWAVES: Can you explain a little bit more, the idea of having this inspection history and why it would benefit a larger or small carrier?

BALTHROP: “Getting flagged for inspection is sort of random, but not totally. If somebody notices something obviously wrong with your truck, that’s ground for a more in-depth inspection. Or if you get pulled over for some other reason, this can be grounds for inspection of some type.

“But there’s also the inspection selection service. The computer program that is random, that it randomly flags people in for inspection, but it’s based on your inspection history.

“So if your firm hasn’t been inspected recently, or if your carrier doesn’t have a very dense inspection history, you’ll be more likely to trigger that system to pull you in and have you inspected. If you have a dense inspection history, you’re less likely to get inspected.”

FREIGHTWAVES: So how do you get pulled over for inspection? As a person who only drives a passenger car, my main interaction with being pulled over is, I’m driving down the freeway or wherever, and I get stopped by the police. How does it work for a truck driver? How does getting pulled over or inspected work in that way?

BALTHROP: “The law is that you cannot pass a weigh station without pulling in and getting weighed. At that point they may flag you to be inspected. Now, in the past decade or two, there’s been a bunch of electronic devices that are installed in cabs. You may have heard of PrePass or Drivewise. This allows you to pass weigh stations.

“I don’t have data on how many trucks have the in-cab devices. But from a trucking perspective, they’re so convenient that you don’t have to stop every time you cross a state line. I think the vast, overwhelming majority of trucks have some sort of one of these electronic devices. The DOT inspectors at these roadside inspection points have a dial they can twist essentially about how many people they want to inspect.

“So during the roadcheck inspection week, they’ll crank that dial all the way up and pull everybody over. And if they get too backed up, they might crank it back down a little bit and so on.”

FREIGHTWAVES: OK, interesting. It reminds me of a highly sophisticated E‑ZPass.

A $10 million-plus expense to trucking companies every year … but it’s worth it if just one fatal crash is avoided

FREIGHTWAVES: Zooming out, when we hear about large truck crashes, something like a vehicle maintenance issue is not really the most sexy explanation. But just looking at the FMCSA data, in 29% of all truck crashes, a major factor is brake problems. So it seems like a lot of the truck crashes on the road are caused by vehicle maintenance, versus something like the driver using illegal drugs or some other sort of more dramatic explanation. Can you speak a little bit to why this sort of vehicle maintenance is important for safety in preventing large crashes?

BALTHROP: “We did a little bit of a back-of-the-envelope cost benefit analysis of this. Let me try and make sure I remember it clearly, but we have it in the paper that the cost of this on one side is that you have the compliance costs the firms are undertaking, and then you have to add to that the delay costs from doing this, and then the cost of the inspection itself, having to pay federal inspectors to do this.

“On the benefit side, it reduces crashes. So when we add up, just looking at the cost of what an inspection is, we don’t have a good idea of how to measure the compliance cost. It’d be fun to measure the delay cost, but I don’t have good enough price data on that to get at that cost.

“But if you look at what the cost of an inspection is, it is something like $100 or $120 is what you would pay to have one of these inspections done privately. A lot of people do this in the run-up to inspections, and have it done privately so that you can fix whatever the problems are and be sure that you would pass the FMCSA inspection.

“With that $120 figure, if you aggregate that up to 60,000 inspections or whatever, and you take that in comparison, I’m going to give you a bad figure here, it’s on the order of $10 million. That is about the value of a statistical human life. Looking at this economically, it’s worthwhile if it saves one human life. If you identify just one faulty brake system that would’ve resulted in an accident, you’re getting some value out of the program.

“When you add those other costs in there, we’re going to need to save a couple of lives, but in terms of cost benefit analysis with this kind of stuff, we’re usually looking at orders of magnitude differences in cost and benefits to say something for sure.

“If you can save just a couple lives, this program will pay for itself.”

Time to start inspecting in the winter

FREIGHTWAVES: Then one last question: Is there any rationale for this program happening in the summer?

BALTHROP: “I think part of it is that for the inspectors this gets much harder and much more miserable to do in winter conditions.”

FREIGHTWAVES: That makes sense.

BALTHROP: “Inspectors are less productive. One of the things that we talk about in the paper, that they have in addition to the International Roadcheck, is that they have Brake Week where they focus a little bit more on brake inspections. You have Operation Safe Driver a little bit later on in the summer, usually in September, where it’s a little bit more focused on passenger vehicles and how they drive around these trucks.

“But there’s not one in the winter time. There’s an unannounced brake check that usually happens in May, a surprise inspection that’s just one day. But you’re right in pointing out that it might be worthwhile having one of these in the wintertime. You have this periodic high-intensity inspection that kind of incentivizes everybody to be compliant through the summer.

“But there’s nothing in the winter, so that’s an area. But if I was managing the FMCSA, that would be one of the first questions I ask, ‘Why don’t we have one of these in the wintertime?’”

FREIGHTWAVES: That makes sense. Maybe they can do it in the South or something. Maybe a Miami January inspection …

That’s it for this special bonus MODES. Subscribe here if you’re not already receiving MODES in your inbox every Thursday. Email the reporter at rpremack@www.freightwaves.com with your own tales on International Roadcheck Week or any other trucking topics.

Why the Northeast is quietly running out of diesel

The nozzle of a diesel fuel pump is inserted into the tank of a commercial truck as its driver looks on the bankground.

The East Coast of the U.S. is reporting its lowest seasonal diesel inventory on record. And some trucking companies appear spooked.

The East Coast typically stores around 62 million barrels of diesel during the month of May, according to Department of Energy data. But as of last Friday, that region of the U.S. is reporting under 52 million barrels.

The sharp increase of diesel prices has been a major stressor in America’s $800 billion trucking industry since the beginning of 2022. According to DOE figures, the price per gallon of diesel has reached record highs — a whopping $5.62 per gallon. It’s even higher on the East Coast at $5.90, up 63% from the beginning of this year.

When relief is coming isn’t yet clear, and experts say higher prices are the only way to attract more diesel into the Northeast.

“I wish I had some good news for the Northeast, but it’s bedlam,” Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at OPIS, told FreightWaves.

2022 has seen record-setting diesel prices. (SONAR)

Everyday Americans don’t fill up their cars with diesel, but the fuel powers our nation’s agriculture, industrial and transportation networks. More expensive diesel means the price of everything is liable to increase. Trucks, trains, barges and the like consumed about 122 million gallons of diesel per day in 2020.

Patrick DeHaan, a vice president of communications at fuel price site GasBuddy, reported that retail truck stops are hauling fuel from the Great Lakes to the Northeast, calling it “extraordinary.” We’ve also seen anecdotal reports from truck drivers posting company memos:

pic.twitter.com/yFYyjzYMWE
— Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🇺🇦 (@FreightAlley) May 11, 2022

#FuelShortage #DieselShortage #SupplyChainCrisis pic.twitter.com/zVmXlshXN0
— Don Ricardo 👑 🇺🇸 🇩🇴 (@NjPier) May 5, 2022

Pilot Flying J and Love’s, two of America’s largest truck stops, told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that they were not planning to restrict diesel purchases, but were monitoring low diesel inventory.

Not unlike every other supply chain crunch we’ve seen in the past few years, the cause of the Northeast’s diesel shortage is multifaceted. A yearslong degradation of refineries is rubbing against the Gulf Coast preferring to ship its oil to Europe and Latin America.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. The East Coast has lost half of its refineries.

As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas wrote on May 4 (emphasis ours):

In the past 15 years, the number of refineries on the U.S. East Coast has halved to just seven. The closures have reduced the region’s oil processing capacity to just 818,000 barrels per day, down from 1.64 million barrels per day in 2009. Regional oil demand, however, is stronger.

Rory Johnston, a managing director at Toronto-based research firm Price Street and writer of the newsletter Commodity Context, told FreightWaves that refining is a “thankless industry,” with intense regulations that have limited the opening of new refineries. The Great Recession of 2008 led to several East Coast refineries shuttering, but there have been more recent shutdowns too. One major Philadelphia refinery shuttered in 2019 after a giant fire (and it already had declared bankruptcy), and another refinery in Newfoundland shut down in 2020.

Billionaire John Catsimatidis owns a small oil refinery in the US East Coast and several hundred gas stations from Pennsylvania to New York:

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see diesel being rationed on the East Coast this summer.” #OOTT #DieselCrisis https://t.co/9g1e5UIf20
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) May 11, 2022

2. It’s a financial risk to bring diesel to the Northeast.

The Northeast has increasingly relied on diesel from the Gulf region. Much of that diesel travels to the Northeast through the famous and much-adored Colonial Pipeline. You may remember the 5,500-mile pipeline from last year, when a ransomware attack shuttered it for nearly a week!

It takes 18 days for oil to travel on the Colonial Pipeline from its source in Houston to New York City (or, more specifically, Linden, New Jersey), Kloza said.

That’s a long enough time to prioritize Colonial pipelines financially risky for traders — or, as Kloza said, “incredibly dangerous” — thanks to a concept called “backwardation.”

Backwardation refers to the market condition in which the spot price of a commodity like diesel is higher than its futures price. It’s only gotten stronger over time in the diesel market, Kloza said. So, a company could send off a shipment of diesel and find that it dropped by $1 per gallon in the time the diesel traveled from the Gulf Coast to New York — er, New Jersey. That could mean hundreds of thousands or more in lost profits, so traders often avoid such a fate.

“We’re not in an era where there are any U.S. refiners or big U.S. oil companies who would ‘take one for the team’ and bring cargo in where it’s needed,” Kloza said.

The desperation is showing in New England and the mid-Atlantic regions. New England diesel retail prices are up 75% from the beginning of 2022, per DOE data. In the mid-Atlantic, diesel is up 67%.

It’s not worth the risk, even amid ultra-high prices. As FreightWaves’ Kingston reported last week, the spread between a gallon of diesel in the Gulf Coast and its New York harbor price is usually a few cents. Last week, that swung up to 66 cents.

But that uptick still isn’t justifying moving oil to the Northeast — particularly when traders can make so much more money selling diesel abroad.

3. Of course, we can blame COVID and the crisis in Ukraine.

The catalyst for this diesel shortage, of course, is the ongoing conflict in Ukraine — particularly Europe’s desperation for diesel after weaning off Russian molecules.

As CNBC reported in March, Europe is a net importer of diesel. Europe consumed some 6.8 million barrels of diesel each day in 2019; Russia exported some 600,000 barrels per day of that. Today, Europe has only eliminated one-third of its Russian diesel, so prices are expected to continue to climb amid that transition. Latin America, too, has been clammoring for U.S. diesel.

The Gulf Coast has been happy to provide such diesel, amid “insane” prices for diesel abroad, said Johnston. Waterborne exports of diesel from the U.S. Gulf Coast hit record highs last month, according to oil analytics firm Vortexa. (The records only date back to 2016.)

Naturally, COVID is also to blame for the Northeast’s run on diesel. Those refineries still retained on the East Coast scaled back during the pandemic due to staffing issues. It takes six months to a year to reignite refineries that were previously shuttered, Kloza said.

The ‘everything shortage’ endures

It’s been a tale as old as, well, last year. An industry is quietly hampered by supply issues for years, or even decades, and COVID pulls back the curtains on its unsteady foundation. It’s particularly jarring for commodities we never thought about before, like shipping containers or pallets, but that quietly underpinned our livelihood all along.

Recall the Great Lumber Shortage of 2020? Big Lumber had unusually low stockpiles of wood by the summer of 2020, thanks to a vicious 2019 in the lumber industry shuttering sawmills and the spring of 2020 sparking staffing issues. (There was also a nasty beetle infestation.) Those in lumber expected the pandemic to slow the economy, not ignite online shopping, construction and housing mania. It meant lumber went from around $350 per thousand board feet pre-pandemic to a crushing $1,515 by the spring of 2021. The lumber price roller coaster persists today.

In diesel, there’s no beetle infestation, but there are plenty of other headaches. It all means higher fuel prices on the East Coast, particularly the Northeast, to lure molecules from the Gulf Coast. And, down the line, probably more expensive stuff for you.

Do you work in the trucking industry? Do you want to say that you hate or love MODES? Are you simply wanting to chitchat? Email the author at rpremack@www.freightwaves.com, and don’t forget to subscribe to MODES.

Updated on May 13 with the latest comments from truck stops.

Exclusive: Central Freight Lines to shut down after 96 years

Nearly, 2,100 employees will be laid off right before Christmas. Central Freight Lines is the largest trucking company to close since Celadon ceased operations in 2019.

Waco, Texas-based Central Freight Lines has notified drivers, employees and customers that the less-than-truckload carrier plans to wind down operations on Monday after 96 years, the company’s president told FreightWaves on Saturday.

“It’s just horrible,” said CFL President Bruce Kalem.

A source close to CFL told FreightWaves that CFL had “too much debt and too many unpaid bills” to continue operating, despite exploring all available options to keep its doors open.

Kalem agreed.

“Years of operating losses and struggles for many years sapped our liquidity, and we had no other place to go at this point,” Kalem told FreightWaves. “Nobody is going to make money on this closing, nobody.”

Central Freight will cease picking up new shipments effective Monday and expects to deliver substantially all freight in its system by Dec. 20, according to a company statement.

A source familiar with the company said he is unsure whether CFL will file Chapter 7 or “liquidate outside of bankruptcy,” but that the LTL carrier has no plans to reorganize.

The company reshuffled its executive team nearly a year ago in an effort to stay afloat, including adding the company’s owner, Jerry Moyes, as CFL’s interim president and chief executive officer. Moyes remained CEO after Kalem was elevated to president in July.

“I think it was surprising that there wasn’t a buyer for the entire company, but buyers were interested in certain pieces but not in the whole thing,” the source, who didn’t want to be identified, told FreightWaves. “Part of it could have been that just the network was so expansive that there was too much overlap with some of the buyers that they didn’t need locations or employees in the places where they already had strong operations.”

Third-party logistics provider GlobalTranz notified its customers that it had removed CFL as “a blanket and CSP carrier option immediately, to prevent any new bookings,” multiple sources told FreightWaves on Saturday.

CFL, which has over 2,100 employees, including 1,325 drivers, and 1,600 power units, is in discussions with “key customers and vendors and expects sufficient liquidity to complete deliveries over the next week in an orderly manner,” a CFL spokesperson said. Approximately 820 employees are based at the company headquarters in Waco.

Despite diligent efforts, CFL “was unable to gain commitments to fund ongoing operations, find a buyer of the entire business or fund a Chapter 11 reorganization,” another source familiar with the company told FreightWaves.

Kalem said the company had 65 terminals prior to its decision to shutter operations.

FreightWaves received a tip from a source nearly two weeks ago that CFL wasn’t renewing its East Coast terminal leases but was unable to confirm the information with CFL executives.

Another source told FreightWaves that some of the LTL carrier’s West Coast terminals had been sold recently, but that no reason was given for the transactions.

At that time, Kalem said the company was “working to find alternatives” and couldn’t speak because of nondisclosure agreements. He said executives at CFL, including Moyes, were trying to do everything to “save the company.”

“Jerry [Moyes] pumped a lot of money into the company, but it just wasn’t enough,” Kalem said.

Kalem said he’s aware that a large carrier is interested in hiring many of CFL’s drivers but isn’t able to name names at this point.

“Central Freight is in negotiations to sell a substantial portion of its equipment,” the company said in a statement. “Additionally, Central Freight is coordinating with other regional LTL carriers to afford its employees opportunities to apply for other LTL jobs in their area.”

As of late Saturday night, Kalem said fuel cards are working and drivers will be paid for freight they’ve hauled for the LTL carrier until all freight is delivered by the Dec. 20 target date.

“I’m going to work feverishly with the time I have left to get these good people jobs — I owe it to them,” Kalem told FreightWaves. “We are going to pay our drivers — that’s why we had to close it like we’re doing now. We are going to deliver all of the freight that’s in our system by next week, and we believe we can do that.”

During the outset of the pandemic, Central Freight Lines was one of four trucking-related companies that received the maximum award of $10 million through the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). This occurred around the time that CFL drivers and employees were forced to take pay cuts, a move that didn’t go over well with drivers.

“It all went to payroll,” Kalem said about the PPP funds. “Yes, our employees and drivers did take a pay cut over the past few years, and we gave most of it back, even raised pay over the past several months, but it just wasn’t enough to attract drivers.”

FreightWaves staffers Todd Maiden, Timothy Dooner and JP Hampstead contributed to this report.

Watch: Central Freight Lines’ impact on the LTL market

FreightWaves CEO and founder Craig Fuller reacts to the Central Freight Lines news:

“With Central struggling for many years and unable to reach profitability, it makes sense that they would want to liquidate while equipment and real estate are fetching record prices.”

Central Freight Lines statement

Here is the statement given by Central Freight Lines to FreightWaves late Saturday after reports surfaced of its impending closure:

“We make this announcement with a heavy heart and extreme regret that the Company cannot continue after nearly 100 years in operation. We would like to thank our outstanding workforce for persevering and for professionally completing the wind-down while supporting each other. Additionally, we thank our customers, vendors, equipment providers, and other stakeholders for their loyalty and support.

“The Company explored all available options to keep operations going. However, operating losses sapped all remaining sources of liquidity, and the Company’s liabilities far exceed its assets, all of which are subject to liens in favor of multiple creditors. Despite diligent efforts, the Company was unable to gain commitments to fund ongoing operations, find a buyer of the entire business, or fund a Chapter 11 reorganization. Given its limited remaining resources, the Company concluded that the best alternative was a safe and orderly wind-down. As we complete the wind-down process, our primary goal will be to offer the smoothest possible transition for all stakeholders while maximizing the amount available to apply toward the Company’s obligations.

“Central Freight is in negotiations to sell a substantial portion of its equipment. Additionally, Central Freight is coordinating with other regional LTL carriers to afford its employees opportunities to apply for other LTL jobs in their area. Discussions are ongoing and no purchase of assets or offer of employment is guaranteed.”

Brief history of Central Freight Lines

1925	Founded in Waco, Texas, by Woody Callan Sr.
1927	Institutes regular routes in Texas between Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin.
1938	Dallas facility opens as world’s largest freight facility.
1991	Receives 48-state interstate operating authority, expands into Oklahoma.
1993	Joins Roadway Regional Group and begins service in Louisiana.
1994	Expands into Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Mississippi.
1995	Consolidation of Central, Coles, Spartan and Viking Freight Systems into Viking Freight Inc. is announced. Central’s Waco corporate HQ starts closure.
1996	Becomes the Southwestern Division of Viking Freight Inc.
1997	Investment group led by senior Central management purchases assets of former CFL from Viking Freight and reopens as a new Central Freight Lines.
1999	Expands into California and Nevada.
2009	CFL Network provides service to Idaho, Utah, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
2013	Acquires Circle Delivery of Tennessee.
2014	Acquires DTI, a Georgia LTL carrier.
2017	Acquires Wilson; new division created with an increase of 80 terminals.
2020	Wins Carrier of the Year from GlobalTranz. Acquires Volunteer Express Inc. of Dresden, Tennessee.

Source: Central Freight Lines

Warehouse cramming is about to begin — Freightonomics

nVision Global, is a leading Global Freight Audit, Supply Chain Management Services company offering enterprise-wide supply chain solutions. With over 4,000 global business “Partners”, nVision Global not only provides prompt, accurate Freight Audit Solutions, but also providing industry-leading Supply Chain Information Management solutions and services necessary to help its clients maximize efficiencies within their supply chain. To learn more, visit www.nvisionglobal.com

Warehouse space is at a premium right now and with peak season right around the corner, shippers are starting to scramble for space.

Zach Strickland and Anthony Smith look into what shippers are doing to prepare for the end-of-year crunch. They welcome Zac Rogers from Colorado State University to the show to talk through the industry tightness.

The three also talk about the latest Logistics Managers Index results and what they mean for the fourth quarter of 2021.

You can find more Freightonomics episodes and recaps for all our live podcasts here.

Seasonality pushing rejections and rates higher ahead of the Fourth

This week’s DHL Supply Chain Pricing Power Index: 75 (Carriers)

Last week’s DHL Supply Chain Pricing Power Index: 70 (Carriers)

Three-month DHL Supply Chain Pricing Power Index Outlook: 70 (Carriers)

The DHL Supply Chain Pricing Power Index uses the analytics and data in FreightWaves SONAR to analyze the market and estimate the negotiating power for rates between shippers and carriers.

The Pricing Power Index is based on the following indicators:

Load volumes: Absolute levels positive for carriers, momentum neutral

The Outbound Tender Volume Index at 15,980 is nominally higher now than basically at any point in the past 12 months with the exception of the week prior to Thanksgiving/Black Friday last year. OTVI captures all electronic tenders, including rejected ones, so when accounting for the rejection rate, we can get an even more accurate look at volumes.

OTVI rose through the back half of May into the national holiday and has risen even further since. Throughout the back half of May and into the middle of June, tender rejections declined substantially. Meaning, current volume throughput is actually understated when comparing OTVI now to OTVI in November 2020. After adjusting for rejected tenders, the accepted outbound tender volume index is just 2.2% below the 2020 peak in November. At that time, OTVI surged towards 17,000, but the rejection rate moved in-kind towards its natural ceiling of 28%. So, the total accepted freight tenders in mid-June is comparable to the peakiest of peak seasons in 2020. Incredible.

However, since the middle of June, tender rejections have begun increasing again heading into Independence Day, a time when many drivers spend time off the road with their families. The move higher in OTVI this week has been driven primarily by higher rejection rates, rather than higher freight demand.

Over the past month, the drivers of freight volumes have continued to be imports and from just about every port. The west coast continues to provide seemingly non-stop container ships, while Houston, New Orleans, Miami and Savannah are seeing very strong throughput as well.

It is van volumes that are driving freight markets higher right now. The Reefer Outbound Tender Volume index has tumbled 25% since its all-time high in the weeks after the polar vortex in February. Since Memorial Day, ROTVI has fallen another 10.5%. This is likely a factor of declining grocery demand, but I would expect the trend to reverse course in the near future as summer festivities accelerate.

Dry van volumes pushed higher in the back half of May and into June while reefer volumes have declined significantly.

SONAR: VOTVI.USA (Blue); ROTVI.USA (Green)

The congestion at our nation’s ports has spread from Los Angeles and Long Beach to Oakland, California. The California coastline is a parking lot of container ships, most of which are full to the brim with imports, awaiting berth. As detailed in the economic section, there are some signs that the reversion is underway with Americans paring back spending on pandemic superstar categories in favor of airlines, lodging and entertainment. But spending remains strong despite the moderation, and low inventory levels offset much of the decline that will occur from slowing demand. Real inventories are 3% higher now than pre-pandemic, but real sales growth is far outpacing inventory growth, leading to the lowest inventory-to-sales ratio in decades.

On the manufacturing side, the ISM Manufacturing PMI expanded in May after declining in April. We’ve been in expansionary territory for 12 consecutive months. New orders, production, imports/exports and employment are all growing. The major issues should come as no surprise: Deliveries are slowing, backlogs are growing and inventories are too low.

In all, there are many, many catalysts to keep freight demand strong for the foreseeable future. Americans are traveling and spending on services at a high clip, but the high savings rate is enabling it to occur without a massive detriment to goods spending.

SONAR: OTVI.USA (2021 – Blue; 2020 – Green; 2019 – Orange; 2018 – Purple)

Tender rejections: Absolute level and momentum positive for carriers

After declining steadily from mid-March to mid-May, the Outbound Tender Reject Index has reversed course heading into Independence Day. This is typical for a national holiday as carriers selectively choose loads to bring drivers closer to home. OTRI now sits above 25% for the first time in June.

One of our newest indices in SONAR gives us the ability to compare markets on as close to an apples-to-apples basis as possible. FreightWaves’ Carrier Trend Market Score indices are divided into two perspectives – shipper/broker and carrier. The scores are positioned on a scale from 1-100 and have values measuring van and refrigerated (reefer) capacity. The higher values represent more favorable trends for whichever perspective. For instance, a value near the high-end of the range would suggest very favorable conditions for carriers in our carrier capacity trend score index.

For the past several weeks, capacity disparities have been driven by import volumes. The markets with the tightest carrier capacity coincide with the nation’s busiest ports. Ontario, California, Savannah, Georgia, and Atlanta all have carrier capacity trend market scores of 100.

SONAR: Capacity Trend Market Score (Carriers – VAN)

By mode. Reefer rejection rates tumbled from it’s all-time high in March to under 35% in mid-June before popping higher over the past two weeks. Reefer rejections are still quite high from a historical standpoint at 38%, but are significantly lower than just three months ago when reefer carriers were rejecting half of all electronically tendered loads.

SONAR: VOTRI.USA (Blue); ROTRI.USA (Orange)

Dry van tenders make up the majority of all tenders, so the van rejection rate mirrors the aggregate index closely. Van rejections have surged from ~23% to ~26% over the past two weeks.

Yes, one-in-four loads being rejected is not ideal, but it’s better than 30%. I am unaware of any meaningful signals that capacity is being added at a rate that would change my outlook. With so many catalysts for demand, and many constraints on drivers including the Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, driver training school closures and continued government unemployment benefits, the outlook is tight throughout this year and into 2022. That’s not to say we won’t see improvement as consumers revert to pre-pandemic spending habits and drivers enter or reenter the market. But I’m not expecting any quick reversal of this environment; there are simply too many catalysts driving volume and suppressing capacity.

SONAR: OTRI.USA (2020/21 – Blue; 2020 – Green; 2019 – Orange)

Freight rates: Absolute level and momentum positive for carriers

Throughout June, spot rates have moderated while contract rates have pushed higher. The Truckstop.com dry van rate per mile (incl. fuel) has fallen from $3.21 to $3.11 since the beginning of June, while FreightWaves van contract rates have risen from $2.50 to $2.59/mile, exclusive of fuel.

I still believe the Truckstop.com dry van national average will not retest the post-vortex surge pricing that brought spot rates up to an all-time high of $3.30. But, there aren’t many catalysts to bring spot rates down anytime soon either. Demand is unwavering with continued strong consumer goods demand, humming industrial recovery and a potentially cooling, yet still sizzling, hot housing market. And carriers can’t fill enough trucks to keep up with demand.

Prior to the seasonal movements we’re seeing in tender rejections, routing guides generally had been improving through Q2. We should continue to see a convergence between spot and contract rates, but spot rates will remain historically very elevated throughout the summer as demand simply outstrips capacity.

SONAR: TSTOPVRPM.USA (Blue); VCRPM1.USA (Green)

Economic stats: Momentum and absolute level neutral

Several economic releases this week are worth noting.

Weekly jobless claims were released Thursday and give us one of the best close-to-real-time indicators of the overall economy. This week, the data was again very promising as the labor market continues on a bumpy but trajectorially stable recovery path.

First-time filings totaled 411,000 for the week ended June 19, a slight decrease from the previous total of 418,000 but worse than the 380,000 Dow Jones estimate, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Initial claims have held above 400,000 for consecutive weeks after falling to a pandemic low of 374,000 three weeks ago. As things stand, the current level of initial claims is about double where it was prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The good news on the jobs front is that continuing claims are on the decline, falling to 3.39 million, a drop of 144,000. That number runs a week behind the headline claims total.

Initial jobless claims (weekly in May 2020-May 2021)

At the time of writing, the newest weekly data for the week ending May 29 had not been updated in SONAR. This week, claims fell from 405,000 to 385,000.

SONAR: IJC.USA

Consumer. Turning to consumer spending, as measured by Bank of America weekly card (both debit and credit) spending data, total card spending (TCS) in the latest week accelerated to 22% over 2019. This is the first time in June that TCS has topped 20% over 2019, but spending has been running up 16-19% consistently on a two-year comp for months. For contect, the average pre-pandemic two-year growth rate was about 8% (from 2012 to 2019).

The Bank of America team highlighted service spending in the nation’s two largest state economies, California and New York, which are now fully reopened. Spending at restaurants is now well above 2019 in both states, and the team believes there is more capacity for spending to accelerate in the states that were slower to reopen given pent-up demand.

There was also a notable acceleration in spending on clothing this week, according to Bank of America. It could be a reversal from some softening in the early weeks of June, or an indication of people refreshing wardrobes ahead of a return to work, more travel and vacations. One tepid statement for freight markets from this week;s report: Leisure spending is on the rise and durable goods spending is flatlining.

FreightWaves’ Flatbed Outbound Tender Reject Index, both a measure of relative demand and capacity, moves directionally with the ISM PMI.

SONAR: ISM.PMI (Blue); FOTRI.USA (Green)

Manufacturing. Over the past two weeks, regional manufacturing surveys have reported generally positive readings amid logistical challenges. The New York Fed’s Empire State business conditions index declined 6.9 points to 17.4 in June, retreating from strong readings the past two months. The Empire State Index is a diffusion index with a baseline of zero; any reading above zero indicates improving or expansionary conditions.

Delivery times lengthened to a new record during the month, new orders and shipments fell, and inventories entered negative territory. The supply chain and transportation challenges are as visible upstream as downstream, but overall the manufacturing sector is handling. Growth continued throughout the second quarter in both the Empire State and Philly Fed indices.

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s business activity index edged lower to a still robust 30.7 in June from 31.5 in the prior month. Unlike NY, the pace of shipments growth accelerated in the Philly region during June. The employment subcomponent rose to a very healthy 30.7 from 19.3 last month, the regional bank said.

Record-long lead times, wide-scale shortages of critical basic materials, rising commodities prices and difficulties in transporting products are continuing to affect all segments of the manufacturing economy, but demand remains strong.

For more information on the FreightWaves Freight Intel Group, please contact Kevin Hill at khill@www.freightwaves.com or Andrew Cox at acox@www.freightwaves.com.

Check out the newest episodes of our podcast, Great Quarter, Guys, here.

Project44 acquires ClearMetal to strengthen predictive tools

Project44, a leader in real-time visibility of the global supply chain, announced on Thursday it has acquired ClearMetal, a San Francisco-based supply chain planning software company that focuses on international freight visibility, predictive planning and overall customer experience. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

ClearMetal, founded by top software engineers and data scientists from Stanford, Google and other Silicon Valley elites, has created a “continuous delivery experience” that leverages proprietary machine learning algorithms that can forecast supply chain disruptions.

In an interview, Jason Duboe, chief growth officer at project44, explained that bringing in ClearMetal’s elite team is essential for the company’s future predictive solutions.

“Their team construct is fundamentally different. When you look at their data science, machine learning and computer science background, they are best in class,” he said. “Applying the team to solve really interesting challenges, starting with highly predictive ETA and deeper exception management to create more predictive analytics is really a key component here.”

Project44 recently acquired Ocean Insights to gain global supply chain vessel visibility and has announced it has expanded its truckload tracking services within Asia. Bringing on this new team of engineers will allow the company to capitalize on strong predictive tools, strengthening the supply chain of its customers.

“We’re going to be expanding deeper into Asia, and from a port perspective, getting data much earlier than competitors,” explained Duboe. “Our freight forwarder integrations will give us much deeper visibility from an end-to-end perspective in these regions.”

Along with the acquired skills the ClearMetal team will bring to project44, it brings a large book of customers, including large CPGs, retailers, manufacturers, distributors and chemical companies. These advanced use cases will strengthen the predictive planning tools, and project44 continues to expand into different customer markets.

“What we gain from ClearMetal is a holistic platform for anybody that joins the platform in the future,” said Duboe. “They have large customers with incredibly demanding and advanced use cases. So when it comes to order and inventory, functionality, supplier onboarding, and moving upstream into those processes, we can capture exceptions earlier on.”

Click here for more articles by Grace Sharkey.

Project44 expands real-time visibility into China

Project44 reels in Ocean Insights in ‘largest acquisition in visibility space’

‘Project44’s vision has always been global’

Nearshoring growth collides with tightening US-Mexico trucking capacity

SAN DIEGO — Nearshoring continues to drive freight between the U.S. and Mexico, but a shrinking pool of cross-border drivers, tougher customs enforcement and increasingly sophisticated cargo theft could make moving that freight more difficult and expensive, industry executives said Tuesday.

The challenges were discussed during “The Nearshoring Update: USA-Mexico Freight” at Trimble Insight 2026 in San Diego.

The panel featured Ben Enriquez of Transport Capacity Services; Carime Duck, a licensed customs broker and president of the San Diego Customs Broker Association; and Ricardo Malacara, sales director at cargo-security technology provider Overhaul.

Trimble Insight 2026 Conference was held Sunday through Tuesday, included 1,200 attendees and featured more than 200 information sessions and product demonstrations.

Enriquez said nearshoring hasn’t disappeared despite tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty that have dominated headlines over the past year.

“The reality is that nearshoring, the ball was already rolling,” Enriquez said. “There were already manufacturing plants and expansions being done, and they continue to happen.”

Enriquez pointed to continued growth in two-way U.S.-Mexico commerce as evidence of the integration between the countries’ manufacturing sectors. He said many products, particularly automotive components, can cross the border multiple times during production.

Companies are taking a more cautious approach because of uncertainty surrounding the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), he said, but “nearshoring is a reality.”

Driver enforcement puts pressure on cross-border capacity

At the same time that freight demand is growing, Enriquez said the supply of drivers capable of handling cross-border shipments is coming under pressure.

Enforcement involving Mexican B-1 visa drivers, non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses and English-language requirements has changed the economics and operating models of cross-border trucking companies, he said.

B-1 drivers generally can transport international freight into the U.S. and return with international cargo but cannot engage in domestic point-to-point transportation, known as cabotage.

Enriquez said stepped-up enforcement against drivers accused of improper domestic moves has removed drivers from the market. Combined with restrictions affecting non-domiciled CDL holders, that is reducing the pool of drivers available to both cross-border and domestic carriers.

Some Mexican trucking companies that established U.S. operations to provide door-to-door service are retreating to the traditional model of transferring trailers or freight to U.S. carriers at the border because they can no longer find enough drivers, Enriquez said.

“The market has changed in a lot of ways, and these issues are making it lose a lot of drivers,” he said.

Rising fuel expenses are putting additional pressure on small and midsize trucking companies, particularly those that must pay for fuel immediately but wait 30 to 45 days to receive payment from customers.

The result, Enriquez said, is that some fleets are reducing the number of trucks they operate because they lack either drivers or sufficient working capital.

“We are seeing that the volume is increasing,” Enriquez said, even as cross-border trucking supply contracts.

Duck said the capacity crunch is already showing up in Southern California during the fall peak shipping season.

Driver availability has become more difficult and trucking rates are increasing, she said, with fuel costs contributing to repeated price increases.

Malacara said reduced capacity can also create security vulnerabilities.

“The lack of capacity on drivers and trucks that can do cross-border increases the operation, increases the dwell times, increases the handoffs, which in turn increases the risk,” he said.

Freight waiting for drivers can end up at transfer locations that may not be secure, while companies under pressure to find capacity can take risks when hiring unfamiliar carriers or drivers.

Companies expanding production in Mexico must increasingly treat trucking capacity, customs compliance and cargo security as part of their nearshoring strategy rather than downstream logistics issues, cross-border panelists said at Trimble Insight 2026. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

Nearshoring concentrates cargo-theft risk

Nearshoring has also concentrated more freight on Mexico’s existing transportation infrastructure, particularly through the Bajío manufacturing region of central Mexico, Malacara said.

Road, rail, airport and port infrastructure haven’t expanded as quickly as manufacturing investment, resulting in greater volumes of valuable cargo traveling along many of the same corridors.

“Concentrating freight, concentrating high-value moving goods in the same highway has increased the risk for all the shippers and all the cargo owners,” Malacara said.

Malacara said cargo theft has shifted geographically, with theft decreasing in some traditional hot spots while increasing in the Bajío region. He cited an 11% year-over-year increase in theft there, with about 80% of incidents involving violence or threats of violence.

The thieves targeting commercial freight are increasingly organized and technologically capable, he said.

“This is not a casual activity,” Malacara said. “These are organized, or these are structured organizations that plan, that have technology.”

Criminal groups use GPS jammers, plan routes and operating times and can sometimes obtain inside information identifying valuable shipments, he said.

Food and beverages remain the most frequently stolen products because they are easy to resell and difficult to trace, followed by construction materials, auto parts and electronics. Pharmaceuticals are also becoming a more prominent target, Malacara said.

Simply putting a GPS device on a trailer isn’t enough protection, he said, because thieves equipped with signal jammers can defeat basic tracking systems within seconds.

Companies instead need plans specifying what happens when tracking is disrupted, which authorities should be contacted and how security partners should respond.

“You need to stop treating the GPS, the dot in the map, as your guide,” Malacara said.

Customs compliance becomes part of nearshoring strategy

Duck said companies considering manufacturing in Mexico also need to reconsider a basic assumption about USMCA: Making a product in Mexico doesn’t automatically make the product eligible for preferential tariff treatment.

“You need to look at your supply chain,” Duck said.

A manufacturer might assemble furniture in Mexico, for example, while sourcing materials from another country that prevent the finished product from qualifying under USMCA rules of origin.

Duck said customs specialists should therefore be involved much earlier in sourcing, engineering and manufacturing decisions — a process she described as “classification engineering.”

“There needs to be someone who understands the customs side or the supply chain aspect of it and be in the conversations of engineering and manufacturing of these products,” she said.

Record keeping is becoming increasingly important as customs authorities demand more information about classifications, sourcing decisions and transactions, she added.

Carime Duck, president of the San Diego Customs Broker Association, discusses U.S.-Mexico trade and customs issues during a panel at Trimble Insight 2026 in San Diego. Also pictured are Ricardo Malacara of Overhaul, left, and Ben Enriquez of Transport Capacity Services. (Photo: Trimble)

AI moves from reaction to prevention

Technology and artificial intelligence are increasingly being deployed to manage that growing complexity.

Duck said Customs is using AI as part of enforcement efforts, while customs brokers are adopting the technology as a secondary compliance check to identify missing information and clerical mistakes.

Transportation providers are also automating shipment updates, providing brokers with nearly instantaneous notifications when trucks leave ports or cross the border.

“I don’t see like it’s taking jobs,” Duck said. “I think it’s giving us more visibility.”

Malacara said Overhaul uses AI to analyze millions of data points to identify higher-risk lanes, times, commodities and shipments.

The technology can trigger warnings to drivers entering high-risk locations, detect possible GPS jamming and identify potential fraud involving DOT numbers, bills of lading and invoices.

For cargo security, Malacara said the objective should increasingly be prevention rather than recovering freight after it has already disappeared.

“For us, a recovered load, it’s a sign of our job not being well done,” he said.

Shippers urged to secure capacity now

Enriquez said shippers should use the current environment to diversify their carrier networks rather than depending on a single transportation provider.

With trucking companies reducing capacity and nearshoring continuing to expand, carriers and shippers should begin strengthening relationships before freight demand accelerates again, he said.

“I think right now, the name of the game is secure capacity and form partnerships,” Enriquez said.

He said the emergence of more mini-bids over the past several months suggests shippers are already reassessing their transportation networks.

“As a shipper, I would recommend you to get more arrows on your quiver and make sure that you have all your capacity covered,” Enriquez said.

Duck offered a similar recommendation on the compliance side: Companies should understand every participant in their supply chains before a disruption occurs and maintain regular communication with brokers, shippers, receivers and transportation providers.

Malacara’s advice centered on security.

“Do not leave your security plan for last,” he said.

Security plans should be tailored by lane, commodity, day and time and continually updated as criminal tactics and geographic risks change.

“It has to be a recurring event where somebody at your organization is thinking about the risk of moving cargo within Mexico, within the U.S., and crossing the border,” Malacara said.

Why it matters: Nearshoring may be generating more cross-border freight just as carriers face tighter driver availability, higher operating costs and security risks, increasing the importance of securing transportation capacity before demand accelerates.

LA jury convicts 2 in $2M nationwide cargo theft ring using purchased trucking companies

A cargo theft scheme used established trucking companies to secure real loads before freight disappeared. Prosecutors tied the operation to at least $2 million in losses across the United States. High-value electronics, appliances, solar panels, shoes and tires became targets during the conspiracy. A federal jury in Los Angeles convicted two men Tuesday for participating in the operation.

Arshpreet Singh, 28, of Sacramento, and Vikramjeet Singh, 31, of Fontana, California, participated in the scheme. Evidence showed conspirators purchased or fraudulently used real carriers to bid on authentic shipping contracts. After securing transportation jobs, participants collected merchandise from warehouses but never completed the deliveries. The criminal activity covered March 2024 through June 2025, according to federal prosecutors.

The stolen products included televisions, laptops, vacuums, LED lights and other consumer goods. Authorities also identified appliances, footwear and tires among the missing merchandise. Theft locations stretched throughout Southern California and reached Grand Prairie, Texas. Prosecutors documented activity in Fontana, Long Beach, Compton, Chino, Commerce and several surrounding cities.

Established carriers became part of the scheme

One transaction shows how the operation gained access to freight. Arshpreet Singh met the owner of Texas-based Z&F Transportation LLC during March 2024. He purchased the established carrier for approximately $22,000, according to trial evidence. Later that month, a co-conspirator collected televisions in Fontana under the company’s name.

That shipment should have traveled from California to its intended destination in Florida. Instead, the televisions never arrived, according to the Justice Department. The transaction gave conspirators access through an existing transportation business rather than a newly created operation. Trial evidence showed the group repeated that strategy with another carrier shortly afterward.

Co-conspirators purchased Skyways Trucking LLC in May 2024. They then used that business to steal laptops, televisions, solar panels and additional merchandise. Participants booked shipments through brokers including Uber Freight before taking possession of those loads. The freight never reached the destinations listed on those transportation agreements.

Jury returns guilty verdicts

Jurors heard evidence during a seven-day federal trial in Los Angeles. They convicted both defendants of conspiracy to commit theft from interstate or foreign shipments. Arshpreet Singh also received a guilty verdict for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Jurors acquitted Vikramjeet Singh on the separate wire fraud conspiracy count.

U.S. District Judge Anne Hwang scheduled sentencing hearings for Jan. 20, 2027. Arshpreet Singh faces a statutory maximum of 20 years in federal prison. Vikramjeet Singh faces a statutory maximum sentence of five years. Those figures represent legal maximums, not the prison terms the court will necessarily impose.

Several agencies investigated the case across California and Texas. Participants included the FBI’s Inland Violent Crime Suppression Task Force and IRS Criminal Investigation. Local partners included police departments in Fontana and Fort Worth, Texas. Sheriff’s departments from San Bernardino, Riverside and Los Angeles counties also assisted investigators.

Why it matters

Cargo thieves do not always need fake companies to reach valuable freight. This case shows how established carrier identities can provide access to legitimate shipping contracts and high-value loads.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phil Brink.

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National cargo theft blitz leads to arrests, $635K in recovered freight – FreightWaves

Arkansas I-40 truck inspections uncover $5.1M in cocaine plus meth and stolen UTV – FreightWaves

Harbinger lands $300M-plus FedEx order for 2,000 EV trucks

FedEx-branded Harbinger electric step van on display at ACT Expo. FedEx has ordered 2,000 Harbinger electric trucks.

Harbinger has received an order from FedEx for 2,000 all-electric trucks, a deal valued at more than $300 million, the Garden Grove, Calif.-based manufacturer announced Wednesday. The trucks are scheduled for delivery by the end of 2027 and will run in FedEx pickup and delivery operations across the United States and Canada.

Harbinger calls the purchase one of the largest binding orders for electric medium- or heavy-duty trucks in history. All 2,000 are due in about 18 months. Co-founder and CEO John Harris told Bloomberg News, via a syndicated Transport Topics article that the company recently finished building its 1,000th vehicle.

FedEx placed an initial order for 53 Harbinger electric trucks in November 2025, a mix of Class 5 and Class 6 models, while co-leading Harbinger’s $160 million Series C. One FedEx executive also sits on Harbinger’s board: Paul Melander, FedEx’s senior vice president of safety and transportation.

“FedEx is demonstrating that the business case for incorporating electric vehicles into real-world fleet operations at scale makes sense,” Harris said. “Our previous work together gave FedEx firsthand experience with the performance and economic advantages Harbinger vehicles can deliver.”

The new trucks will replace conventional vehicles one for one. The order covers a mix of models from Harbinger’s all-electric lineup, though the announcement did not say how many of each FedEx bought. FedEx is working toward an all-electric parcel pickup and delivery fleet by 2040.

“Electrifying a fleet at this scale requires vehicles that can perform the work our robust operations demand while also delivering meaningful economic benefits,” Melander said.

Harbinger estimates each of its trucks cuts fuel costs by an average of $20,000 a year compared with the diesel vehicle it replaces. The company engineers its trucks for a 20-year service life, matching the typical life of Class 5 and Class 6 medium-duty trucks.

On those assumptions, 2,000 trucks in a single North American fleet would save about $40 million in fuel a year, according to Harbinger, or $800 million over 20 years.

Using published Department of Energy data, Harbinger also estimates that replacing 2,000 diesel trucks will avoid more than 1.7 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the vehicles’ operating lives.

The trucks have improved suspension and handling to reduce fatigue, along with advanced driver assistance technology, according to Harbinger. The company lists a 42-foot turning diameter, which it says makes the trucks easier to maneuver on tight city and residential streets.

Kaizen Automotive Group, Harbinger’s Canadian dealer, will support the Canadian portion of the deployment.

“Expanding our deployment of Harbinger vehicles gives us an opportunity to continue making progress toward our fleet electrification goals while reducing fuel and operating costs,” Melander said.

Ocean rates highest in a year amid US-China trade truce

A two-month extension of the U.S.-China trade truce could postpone planned U.S. port fees on China-linked vessels, offering carriers and importers a temporary measure of policy certainty as trans-Pacific spot rates reach new annual highs, says an analyst.

The agreement reached last week at a Washington meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping extends the countries’ existing trade truce, which had been due to expire Nov. 10. The sides agreed to reduce tariffs on selected imports and plan two additional leader-level meetings before year-end.

The U.S. Trade Representative had not formally announced a deferral of port-call fees targeting China-linked ships as of this week. But the broader deescalation makes a delay more likely, according to the market update from SONAR data contributor Freightos (NASDAQ: CRGO). The fees had emerged as a potentially significant new cost and operational consideration for carriers deploying Chinese-built or Chinese-operated tonnage into U.S. trades.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s comments around the summit suggest the short duration of the extension reflects unresolved Chinese commitments to buy U.S. agricultural products. China’s progress on those purchases could set the stage for another extension, Freightos said.

Targeted tariff relief

Washington and Beijing will reduce tariffs on about $30 billion in counterpart imports to most-favored-nation levels, subject to required legal procedures.

The changes cover nearly 80 U.S. product entries, with toys representing the biggest category by value in what some analysts see as an attempt by the Trump administration to shore up cratering polling with holiday-shopping voters ahead of the midterm elections. China’s list includes more than 1,600 entries, concentrated largely in agricultural products and commodities.

The tariff relief is modest against the more than $400 billion in annual China-U.S. trade, but it should provide some benefit for importers, retailers and consumers of the affected products. More broadly, the truce extension removes, at least temporarily, the threat of another sharp trade-policy escalation ahead of the year-end shipping and retail cycle.

Trans-Pacific rates remain elevated

Trans-Pacific container prices climbed again this past week despite expectations that demand will ease after China’s Golden Week holiday and the traditional peak-season period.

Spot rates from Asia to the U.S. West Coast rose to $8,400 per forty foot equivalent unit, a new high for the year. East Coast spot rates held at about $9,600 per FEU, roughly $200 below their late-August peak.

The persistence of high pricing reflects a capacity market shaped by blank sailings, port delays and carrier allocation controls rather than demand alone, Freightos noted. Ocean carriers have expanded blanked sailings through the holiday period and into late October, while some have reportedly reduced allocations to contracted forwarders.

Far East congestion a major factor

Sea-Intelligence estimates port delays are absorbing more than 8% of global vessel capacity and could take as long as 10 months to fully unwind. That constraint, along with higher bunker costs associated with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, could establish a firmer floor under container rates even during periods of weaker seasonal demand.

The effect could be especially apparent in the run-up to Lunar New Year, when a higher rate baseline would leave carriers with more room to push prices upward if bookings accelerate.

Panama Canal conditions improve

Improved rainfall and water levels are providing a partial offset for shippers moving cargo from Asia to the U.S. East Coast through the Panama Canal.

The Panama Canal Authority plans to restore daily Neopanamax transits to the normal level of 10 and raise the maximum authorized draft to 49 feet in mid-October. The action reverses restrictions imposed in late August, when the authority removed one daily transit slot and reduced allowable draft by one foot.

The improvement reduces the immediate risk of additional diversions, delays and higher costs for Asia-East Coast cargo. But it may not be permanent, as an expected El Niño pattern could still weaken rainfall during the wet season, which usually continues into January, potentially requiring new operating restrictions in the coming months.

Europe prices ease, but remain well above 2025

Asia-Europe container spot rates continued to decline as demand softened and carriers gradually restored effective capacity through increased Red Sea transits.

Rates from Asia to North Europe fell 9% to about $3,400 per FEU, while Asia-Mediterranean pricing declined 7% to $3,600 per FEU. Several carriers are nevertheless seeking late-October general rate increases, an indication that lines are trying to slow the market’s downward movement.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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DoorDash launches retail returns service, self-designed drones

View from above a six-propeller DoorDash drone.

DoorDash is entering the reverse logistics market and leaning heavily into drone delivery, announcing on Wednesday that it has launched a new retail returns service and a custom-built drone delivery system for time-sensitive orders in another modal expansion of its last-mile logistics network.

They were among a series of product releases and enhancements, unveiled at a big user event, aimed at making shopping and ordering food, grocery and retail items more convenient.

The returns program is live in select cities and is expected to roll out nationwide in November using the same gig driver pool that delivers from stores to homes, the tech platform said. Consumers pay a flat $7.99 for Dasher Returns — no box or label required. DoorDash (NASDAQ: DASH) said drivers will pick up return orders in as fast as 30 minutes and return them to the store, which will process the return and issue a refund within days.

By offering returns, DoorDash is moving into a space that offers higher margins than store-to-door delivery and taking on parcel shipping incumbents like FedEx and UPS that are focusing more on returns than short-distance delivery in the B2C e-commerce market. FedEx last year began offering a lower cost version of its no-box, no-label returns to make it easier for customers to return unwanted merchandise, but the service requires consumers to drop off the goods at outlets such as FedEx Office and Kohl’s store locations.

Earlier this year, Uber Eats introduced a service that allows customers to return goods ordered through its app for a fee.

But it’s an open question whether consumers are willing to pay for returns when there is less urgency than with an inbound order and they can wait to drop it off at a store themselves for free.

“For retailers, it means turning the stores they already have into a growth channel, not a warehouse three states away,” said Chief Revenue Officer Shanna Prevé in a news release.

Meanwhile, DoorDash has added to the growing number of retailers who have linked their product catalogs to its marketplace. Shoppers can now use the DoorDash app to order goods from Macy’s, Anthropologie, The North Face, Vans and Timberland and receive fast delivery. Costco and Skims began delivery partnerships with DoorDash earlier this month.

DoorDash calls its retail product “Mall-in-Your-Pocket” because consumers can shop for apparel, beauty and home goods with fast delivery from hundreds of stores nationwide on one platform.

DoorDash also recently introduced new ways for retailers and brands to grow. Brand Center gives participating brands real-time visibility into inventory on store shelves and shopper substitution trends, helping them understand how their products are showing up in stores and what shoppers choose when an item is unavailable.

DoorDash takes to the skies

DoorDash also said it is investing in its own drone delivery operation, offering customers a faster delivery option from local restaurants and convenience stores.

The delivery platform’s in-house robotics and automation division, DoorDash Labs, made the six-rotor drones on its own. Until now, DoorDash has relied on outside drone operators like Alphabet’s Wing and Flytrex to conduct the actual aerial deliveries. Lowe’s, for example, this month began a pilo t program for drone delivery in North Carolina enabled by the DoorDash marketplace and Wing’s small, unmanned aerial vehicles.

“We’ll continue our partnership with third parties like Wing and Flytrex, but in the same way we use multiple delivery methods, having multiple drone delivery options adds resilience to our network and helps us better serve merchants and bring the benefits of drone delivery to more communities faster,” said spokesman Eli Scheinholtz in an email exchange.

DoorDash said it closely consulted with businesses to design everything from packaging, to loading systems and ground handoffs. It is building an array of loading options designed to fit into existing business operations and make drone delivery feasible for local businesses of all sizes.

About 80% of typical DoorDash restaurant orders are light and small enough for the aircraft to carry safely.

“Any local business should be able to reach consumers by air. We built the whole system so that they can deliver by air without being disruptive to how they run their business,” said Harrison Shih, head of DoorDash Air, in the announcement.

Trial flights are underway in Northern California with national brands Chipotle and Popeyes, and local restaurants. Delivery times have averaged less than five minutes so far, DoorDash said.

Customers can choose on the app whether their order is delivered by a driver, its self-designed small robot or a drone. An autonomous system uses smart routing, incorporating factors like weather, flight range, and ground traffic to narrow down which orders actually make sense to send by air. Using the app, customers can select whether a driver, a Dot robot or a drone is the best delivery option.

The drone’s cruising noise is similar to that of a passing car. Orders are picked up and lowered to the ground with a winch, with a backup option to safely lower the aircraft to the ground in rare events, DoorDash said. Amazon drones, by contrast, drop boxes at their destination from about 13 feet in the air.

In other news, DoorDash also introduced text ordering, allowing customers to simply send a text describing what they want from a restaurant or grocery store without the need to fiddle with an app or browser.

Why It Matters: DoorDash is a giant platform that is leveraging its technology to push more and more into retail parcel delivery and becoming a competitor to other courier companies.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

Lowe’s test drives drone delivery

Costco expands ultra-fast delivery with DoorDash

FedEx offers lower cost no-box, no-labels returns

DoorDash offers fulfillment service for retailers

Daimler Truck’s bet on owning the entire autonomous truck system

Daimler Truck CEO Karin Rådström presents Torc autonomous trucking plans at IAA Transportation 2026 in Hanover

HANNOVER, Germany — Daimler Truck CEO Karin Rådström broke driverless trucking into two requirements: a chassis with redundancy built into steering and braking, and software that can replace the driver. Daimler Truck North America (DTNA) builds the first. Torc Robotics, Daimler Truck’s independent autonomous-driving subsidiary, builds the second.

“This setup differentiates us from any other player in the industry,” Rådström said at Daimler Truck’s Media Night, ahead of IAA Transportation 2026. “We’re building the entire autonomous trucking system, from the truck platform and vehicle architecture to the hardware integration and also the autonomous driving software.”

Torc aims to run trucks on public roads with no safety driver in the cab before the end of the year, with first commercial freight operations in 2027 and plans to scale beginning in 2028.

Torc has previously demonstrated driver-out capability: In November 2024, it completed driver-out validation on a multi-lane closed course in Texas at speeds up to 65 mph, according to Torc. Rådström called the public-road run “a major step towards commercialization.”

“For the first time, a Torc truck will be able to drive itself on public roads — not on a test track — and without a safety driver in the cab,” she said.

Why Daimler Is Starting in North America

The first driverless freight will run on long-haul lanes in North America.

“Why North America? Why not Europe? Because trucks in the U.S. typically travel more than twice the distance every day compared to trucks in Europe, and believe it or not, driver shortages are even more difficult in the U.S. than they are in Europe,” Rådström said.

With Freightliner, the company is “the clear number one” in North American heavy-duty trucks, she said. Its Freightliner and Western Star brands held 37.8% of the North American Class 8 market through June, according to Daimler Truck’s second-quarter investor presentation, which bases the figure on internal analysis. The company has sold more than 1 million Cascadias in the U.S. since the model’s 2007 introduction, Rådström said.

How DTNA and Torc Split the Work

“At Daimler Truck North America, we’re developing the autonomous-ready truck platform with built-in redundancy for critical systems like steering and braking,” Rådström said. “At Torc, we’re developing the AI-driven autonomous system, including the perception, planning and driving capabilities that will operate the truck safely and efficiently within its intended operating domain.”

The split carries into the supply chain, Rådström said in a sideline interview with media in Hanover: Torc specifies the sensors and what it needs, and DTNA’s global purchasing organization supports purchasing, supplier management and setting up the industrial flow.

“It’s a collaboration, actually,” she said.

Factory-Fit Hardware for Autonomous Trucks

Daimler wants the autonomy hardware installed when the truck is built.

“It’s really adding the sensor suite and the compute, which we want to be able to do factory-fit,” Rådström said. “We think that’s one of our strong points compared to some competitors.”

That work will start in plants Daimler already runs. DTNA announced plans on Aug. 6 for a new U.S. manufacturing plant, with construction set to begin in late 2026 and production in 2029. Torc’s scaling target lands a year earlier.

“We’ve actually prepared some of our existing network to do that, because the SOP and when we start scaling, it could be that that happens even before the new plant is actually fully operational,” Rådström said.

Torc’s Three-Phase Path to Driver-Out

“The big target right now, and what the team is fully focused on, is getting to driver-out on public roads,” Rådström said.

The program begins with a three-phase crawl-walk-run approach, she said. Through the end of the year, Torc plans to expand that step by step to more hours of operation and more road conditions.˜

“If that works, we are obviously even more confident that we have a good path to start production and really scaling,” she said.

DTNA supplies the trucks for Torc’s test fleets, Rådström said.

“Provided that works, I think during 2027 it’s really about closing all those edge cases that aren’t covered by the crawl-walk-run, getting everything production-ready, and starting with a small number of trucks to do commercial freight, and then going into ’28 to be really ready to scale the operation,” she said.

Another strong week for industrial rail freight

U.S. weekly rail traffic totaled 537,397 carloads and intermodal units, up 4.85 compared with the same week a year ago, the Association of American Railroads (AAR) said.

Traffic for the week ending September 26 totaled 235,787 carloads, up 3% compared with the same week in 2025, while intermodal volume of 301,610 containers and trailers was 6.3% higher compared to the same week in 2025.

Seven of the 10 specific carload commodity groups posted an increase compared with the same week in 2025. They were led by metallic ores and metals, 9.5%; petroleum and related products, 9.4%; and chemicals, 7.2%.

Shipments of farm products excluding grain and food fell by 3.3%, followed by coal, 2.1%, and motor vehicles and parts, 1.8%. Coal inventories are up 1.4 million tons since the end of 2025, while domestic consumption was down 11.4% y/y. The runup to winter has been a slow go for rail; U.S. coal production is down 2.4% through Sept. 5.

For the first 38 weeks of 2026, U.S. railroads reported cumulative volume of 8,679,882 carloads, up 2.7% y/y, and 10,778,696 intermodal units, up 4.1%. Total combined traffic was 19,458,578 carloads and intermodal units, better by 3.5%.

North American rail volume for the week on nine reporting U.S., Canadian and Mexican railroads totaled 344,004 carloads, up 1.5% from the year-ago week. Intermodal reached 389,606 units, up 5.3%. Total combined weekly traffic was 733,610 carloads and intermodal units, ahead 3.5%. Volume was 26,678,211 carloads and intermodal units, a gain of 3.1% compared with 2025.

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Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

STB tabs former BNSF exec as economics director, adds senior adviser

Union Pacific begins battery-electric locomotive testing in Southern California

Intermodal rail powers up with 7% gain for latest week

Next phase for autonomous railcar technology in commercial service testing

Port Houston container volumes edge higher as steel imports surge 54%

Port Houston’s container volumes edged higher in August as loaded imports continued to grow and steel imports surged more than 50% from a year ago.

The port’s public terminals handled 373,756 twenty-foot equivalent units in August, a 1% increase from 370,430 TEUs during the same month last year. Through the first eight months of 2026, container volumes totaled nearly 2.97 million TEUs, also up 1% year over year.

Loaded imports totaled 176,016 TEUs during August, increasing 4% from 169,631 TEUs a year earlier. Loaded exports slipped 2% to 136,070 TEUs.

Year to date, loaded imports increased 5% to nearly 1.39 million TEUs, while loaded exports declined 1% to about 1.06 million TEUs. Overall loaded container activity was up 2% through August to 2.45 million TEUs.

Port Houston said machinery and electronics, retail consumer goods, furniture, automotive products and apparel were among the commodities contributing to higher loaded imports.

The port attributed some of the activity to seasonal demand and businesses front-loading cargo ahead of the holiday season.

East Asia remained the primary source of the growth, with imports from the region increasing 12% and accounting for 57% of Port Houston’s loaded container imports.

Steel was one of Port Houston’s strongest cargo segments during August.

Steel imports reached 502,965 tons, a 54% increase from 327,258 tons in August 2025. Total steel tonnage, including imports and exports, climbed 49% to 529,084 tons, making August the port’s strongest steel month since August 2025.

Despite the monthly surge, steel volumes remained below last year’s levels on a year-to-date basis. Total steel tonnage through August was approximately 2.87 million tons, down 10%, while steel imports were down 11% at 2.71 million tons

General cargo moved in the opposite direction during the month, falling 26% year over year to 116,881 tons. However, general cargo remained up 22% year to date at 913,863 tons, including a 27% increase in imports.

Total revenue tonnage across Port Houston’s public facilities was essentially flat compared with August 2025 at approximately 4.68 million tons. Through August, total tonnage stood at roughly 37.49 million tons, also virtually unchanged year over year.

Vessel activity across the broader Houston Ship Channel increased during August. Deep-draft transits rose 9% year over year to 1,607, while barge transits increased 10% to 19,712. Both categories were up 7% year to date.

The August numbers were presented as Port Houston commissioners met Sept. 22 to consider infrastructure, Houston Ship Channel and trade-development initiatives.

Commissioners approved additional design work for refrigerated container infrastructure at the future Bayport Container Yard 9. Once built and fully equipped, the yard is expected to accommodate more than 1,800 refrigerated containers, providing additional capacity for temperature-controlled imports and exports.

Port Houston said it has completed 10 new Foreign Trade Zone site authorizations so far this year, matching its annual record set in 2024, with another 11 applications under review.

The port also recently welcomed the first vessel in Crowley Maritime’s new weekly container service connecting Houston with Central America.

Why it matters: Houston’s August results show import demand holding up heading into the fall shipping season, while investments in refrigerated container capacity and the Houston Ship Channel position the gateway for longer-term freight growth.

Cargo thieves are ‘laundering freight’ through the supply chain, Cornell warns

Cargo thieves can steal a load, change its identity on paper and move it back into legitimate commerce. Scott Cornell, EVP, Crime and Theft Specialist at SPG Cargo & Logistics and chair of TAPA Americas, describes the process as “laundering freight.” Cross-docks, warehouses, even a parking lot or side street where a load can be transferred, and replacement shipping documents can help disguise where merchandise originated. In some cases, those products can reach overseas markets within days.

Cornell worked a case involving a popular headphone brand that showed how quickly stolen merchandise can move. About one week after the theft, the devices began pinging in Europe. That timeline suggested little room between the initial crime and international movement. “They stole it, took it right to the port,” Cornell explained.

A warehouse could also provide another stop before products enter a container. Workers can transfer merchandise, create different paperwork and apply another seal. Each move creates additional distance from the original shipment. Once documentation changes, identifying stolen goods becomes increasingly difficult.

‘They’re laundering freight’

Cornell used a hypothetical load of televisions to explain how criminals can disguise cargo. Thieves could move televisions through a cross-dock and create another bill of lading. The new paperwork might describe those products simply as electronics. Another transfer could eventually identify the shipment as FAK, or freight of all kinds.

“You have a new bill of lading,” Cornell said. “All the players on the transaction have been changed.” A new bolt seal adds another barrier to inspection. That combination can make stolen merchandise appear legitimate during later movements.

Cornell sees a major weakness in that system. Transportation companies continue investing in technology, yet paper documents still carry enormous authority. “Bill of lading and bolt seal trump it all,” he said. Criminals can exploit that trust after changing shipment information.

Cornell has also encountered warehouses where stolen merchandise moved through sophisticated operations. Some groups prepared products for export while simultaneously filling online orders. “They’re hiding in plain sight in a lot of these cases,” he said. “It’s kind of a shadow economy that operates within the supply chain.” When the average person thinks of this kind of theft activity they often picture a dark grungy warehouse in an offbeat location. But more often than not it’s just the opposite. They’re right in the thick of the transportation areas in a warehouse surrounded by similar businesses.

Buyers may never know

Not every business purchasing those products necessarily knows their origin, according to Cornell. Repeated transfers can make an illicit shipment appear increasingly legitimate. Professional websites and clean paperwork can strengthen that appearance. Overseas buyers may eventually believe they are dealing with an ordinary supplier.

“You could literally think that you’re dealing with a legitimate supplier,” Cornell said. That creates another challenge when investigators follow stolen property across borders. Criminal organizations can disguise merchandise before it reaches an unsuspecting retailer. The original theft may become difficult to recognize from the final transaction.

Cornell believes digital bills of lading could help close that gap. A scannable record could allow law enforcement to verify shipment information during a traffic stop. Changes to commodity descriptions could also create an auditable trail. Investigators could then determine who altered specific details during transit.

“This isn’t that hard to do with the technology,” Cornell said. The bigger challenge involves getting the entire supply chain onto compatible systems. He compared that transition with trucking’s move toward electronic logging devices. A phased requirement could eventually bring companies onto the same digital standard.

Why it matters

Cargo theft does not end when a load disappears. Stolen freight can reenter legitimate commerce, making its origin harder to identify with every move.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phil Brink.

Feds charge semi-truck business owner in $105M investment fraud scheme – FreightWaves

FBI’s Memphis Cargo Theft Task Force warns cyber schemes put millions in freight at risk – FreightWaves

Federal indictments target nearly $600K in interstate cargo theft tied to Memphis – FreightWaves

St. Louis delivery companies Flanagan-White, Zipp Express merge operations

Regional expedited delivery companies Flanagan-White and Zipp Express have merged, combining platforms and resources to provide an expanded Midwest footprint.

Financial terms of the transaction were not provided.

Flanagan-White has specialized in expedited delivery across the Midwest for nearly 50 years. It also focuses on hazmat and specialized transportation. The transaction is in conjunction with the retirement of Flanagan-White President Matt Carswell.

“Flanagan-White has a storied history in St. Louis transportation, built on nearly five decades of unwavering reliability, driver dedication, and exceptional customer service,” said Beth Sprenger, President of Zipp Express. “We are deeply honored that Matt chose Zipp Express to carry on that legacy.”

The deal gives Flanagan-White customers access to Zipp Express’ fleet of cargo vans, box trucks and heavy-duty tractor-trailers. Zipp Express also operates a 50,000-square-foot warehouse in Earth City, Missouri.

Both companies are headquartered in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Carswell will join Zipp Express on an interim basis to facilitate the transition.

Zipp Express offers traditional trucking, courier and logistics solutions. It focuses on expedited and final-mile delivery with scheduled routes. Its sister-company, Zipp Logistics, provides less-than-truckload transportation and other services through regional carrier partnerships.

“Beth has assembled an outstanding team and implemented forward-looking technology and logistics systems that will ensure high-quality, seamless service for our customers well into the future,” Carswell said. “I could not be more comfortable with this transition.”

Why it matters? This merger highlights regional consolidation and capacity expansion, combining Flanagan-White’s five decades of expedited and hazmat experience with Zipp Express’s diverse fleet and Missouri warehouse. Industry consolidation demonstrates how regional carriers are scaling their operations to enhance service coverage and market competitiveness.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

Roadcheck Week doesn’t catch all truck drivers, but it has a long-lasting benefit to safety

Owner-operators can evade Roadcheck Week. Big carriers, not so much.

A convenient time for a vacation, indeed

How a truck driver gets stopped for inspection

A $10 million-plus expense to trucking companies every year … but it’s worth it if just one fatal crash is avoided

Time to start inspecting in the winter

1. The East Coast has lost half of its refineries.

2. It’s a financial risk to bring diesel to the Northeast.

3. Of course, we can blame COVID and the crisis in Ukraine.

The ‘everything shortage’ endures

Watch: Central Freight Lines’ impact on the LTL market

Central Freight Lines statement

Brief history of Central Freight Lines

Related: Trimble keeps freight business sale on the table while unveiling new AI tools

Driver enforcement puts pressure on cross-border capacity

Nearshoring concentrates cargo-theft risk

Customs compliance becomes part of nearshoring strategy

AI moves from reaction to prevention

Related: AI’s buzz in trucking is justified: Trimble panel

Shippers urged to secure capacity now

Established carriers became part of the scheme

Jury returns guilty verdicts

Why it matters

DoorDash takes to the skies

RELATED STORIES:

Why Daimler Is Starting in North America

How DTNA and Torc Split the Work

Factory-Fit Hardware for Autonomous Trucks

Torc’s Three-Phase Path to Driver-Out

‘They’re laundering freight’

Buyers may never know

Why it matters