Rig Load Report

June 19, 2026

Freight is running back to the railroads. The railroads have seen this before.

Truckload spot is double the intermodal rate on paper. Door to door the gap is smaller, it is slow to capture and the last cycle says it is rente...

June 13, 2026

The one-legged freight recovery

Spot rates are at multiyear highs, but the rally is supply- rather than demand-driven, and reaccelerating inflation will decide whether the deman...

June 6, 2026

Flatbed has been the freight market's bright spot. It's also the narrowest.

Flatbed spot rates are running near $3.77 a mile while van and reefer lag, on a demand base that is narrower, and more cyclical, than it looks.

May 29, 2026

FMCSA pulled 12 ELDs in a day. Who gets stranded?

FMCSA pulled 12 logging devices off its registered list on May 20. Carriers running them have until July 20 to switch or risk being placed out of...

May 23, 2026

Where the freight cycle actually is, in four indicators

Spot rates are at multi-year highs. Tender rejections, contract and tonnage agree. The Cass Freight Index, a broader multi-modal read, has not ye...

May 16, 2026

Who pays for trucking accidents now?

A unanimous Supreme Court just changed who pays for trucking accidents. The money can now move toward brokers, and the market will adjust around...

May 9, 2026

The order book in front of EPA 2027

Class 8 orders ran hot for four straight months of 2026. The orders are borrowed from 2027. The cliff is already on the schedule.

May 2, 2026

What a single-line transcontinental does to trucking

Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern's amended merger application projects 2.1 million truckloads a year shifting modes and $3.5 billion in annual...

April 24, 2026

The freight downstream of a refund wave

While tariff refunds are more news article than real money, for a freight market already running tight, they still matter.

April 18, 2026

What to do when your freight bid stops working

If you're a shipper or broker staring at a rejection report that looks nothing like the bid you submitted last fall, you have company. The 2026 R...

April 11, 2026

The federal contractor rule is back. For most of trucking, that won't matter.

Washington is rewriting the independent contractor test for the third time in five years. In California, New Jersey and Massachusetts, nobody is...

April 4, 2026

The other fluid problem

Diesel gets the headlines. The urea supply chain behind every truck's exhaust system is under the same pressure — and the cost exposure is harder...

March 28, 2026

Trucking spot rates just hit a cycle high. Diesel got them there.

The SONAR NTI.USA index is at $3 a mile, but the linehaul rate — what carriers actually get paid for the truck — hasn't yet recovered to where it...

March 21, 2026

The USMCA review just started. Trucking is struggling to pay attention.

The first formal review of the trade deal governing $354 billion in cross-border freight kicked off this week. The industry has bigger problems r...

March 14, 2026

The Dalilah Law and the capacity crunch not yet priced in

The proposed CDL restrictions could pull hundreds of thousands of drivers off the road, but the recertification bottleneck may be the bigger stor...

March 7, 2026

What war in Iran means for diesel and domestic freight

The Strait of Hormuz closure is rewriting the fuel outlook for U.S. trucking just as the industry claws its way out of a three-year downturn.

February 28, 2026

FedEx wants its tariff money back. Will it actually get it?

FedEx filed suit seeking tariff refunds under IEEPA. The outcome could reshape carrier costs and shipper freight economics.

Rig Load Report

Rig Load Report

The freight market tightened. So did the fraud.

Short reads, faster signal

Is the Freight Market Finally Turning?

Freight analysis in one place

Records on an empty stomach