Though it’s aimed at shippers to a large extent, I imagine many of you will find DAT’s new white paper, “Truckload Capacity in 2014: What’s Causing the Capacity Crunch and What Can Shippers Do About It,” an interesting read through a multifaceted set of circumstances that’s led to conditions in the spot market that a broker I spoke to recently noted were unprecedentedly favorable for carriers in a lot of ways. Here were his words: “I don’t think I’ve seen a more favorable climate for carriers,” and particularly the “small carriers we use,” he said.
The high-level analysis in some ways follows the results of the following poll, which ran in the July issue of Overdrive in the Voices section, attendant to reader views on the resulting rate improvements:
In any case, below’s a brief summation DAT sent along about the paper, and you can download it via this link.
Aimed at logistics managers, the paper examines truckload capacity trends from July 2013 onward and responds to a number of questions:
**What caused the shortage of trucks (including severe weather, HOS regulations, fleet bankruptcies, and driver shortages).
**How the shortage of capacity affected spot and contract rates.
**Which market indictors shippers can use to better understand future supply and demand conditions.
The paper also outlines how shippers can harness “big data” to prepare for volatility in the transportation market and forecast truckload capacity and rates on North American lanes. …
