It's called "the Amazon effect," after the e-commerce giant's ability to remake the internet, then industry, and then the world in its own image, and it's been eating away at the long-haul segment of the trucking industry for years. But even as Amazon builds more warehouses and distribution centers, and consultants, tech leaders and some politicians imagine a world with more regional, short haul trucking, the over-the-road segment has stood its ground, Overdrive's reporting finds.
Over the past decade, Overdrive has tracked a decline in the length between pickup and delivery of the average owner-operator's load. With the last update, in 2018, the decrease in miles seemed tied to the growing uptake of electronic logging devices preceding the then-new ELD mandate. Yet the trend has in some ways continued into 2022, with a new survey indicating that, yet again, average length of haul seems to Overdrive readers to be dropping.
Compare the chart above -- which shows 52% of recent survey respondents seeing no change, 31% seeing shorter hauls, 12% longer -- to the 2018 Overdrive report that found 47% of haulers reporting similar haul length, 48% reporting shorter trips, and just 5% seeing longer runs.
The strong trend through these surveys depicts a shrinking length of haul, and the graphic below exhibits exactly where operator sentiment lies in regard to that phenomenon.
Today's owner-operators show only a slim plurality of preference for hauls between 250 and 450 miles, a trip within whose range sit runs that can be completed in a day (some with the return included). From there, preferences swing between short and long, with the shortest and longest ranges -- 1-100 miles and more than 1,000 miles -- ending up dead last in ranked preferences.
