Double-brokered loads, ELD issues, pausing that 14-hour clock already: Friday podcast round-up

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Updated Mar 18, 2018
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Not everybody’s missing their paper logs, but clearly there’s a sizable amount of that among Overdrive‘s audience of late — the picture you see with the SoundCloud podcast player up top is among many similar such photos and memes shared around social media these past months.

This week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast picks up where we left off last week talking with Leander Richmond about the mismatch of expectations around proof of delivery when it comes to brokers and their trucking service providers. More of our conversation follows a mini-mailbag round continuing along themes of the potential for hours of service revisions for the better in this “ELD era,” for lack of a better term – you’ll hear more voices calling for variations of a return to more liberal options to split sleeper berth and on-duty periods.

Richmond also ponders the hours regs now that ELDs are here, business conditions, an up-close-and-personal experience with double brokering and more. Take a listen:

Richmond also lauds many a good broker, too. Particularly: the one who, realizing he’d contracted with a guy who’d misrepresented himself as a trucker and then brokered the load to Richmond with no plans to pay him, then in fact actually paid Richmond, ultimately. It’s another reminder of something Truckstop.com’s Brent Hutto said to me recently in conversation about some of the expectations mismatch that goes on between carriers and brokers. Ultimately, the sentiment runs, carriers and brokers need one another in an existential kind of way a lot of the time. Without one or the other, the freight-movement system as it exists crashes and burns.

And while brokers’ day-in-day-out negotiating and easy access to freight-market information might give them the natural edge in one-on-one negotiations, companies like Hutto’s “give all the same data to everybody – why a carrier may not be using that data is beyond me. … If they’d use that data” when negotiating, expectations might come in line with reality and smooth the process.

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The whole conversation reminded me of our negotiation-day/regional cycle analysis feature from a few years back now — a lot of the points therein remain true, regardless of the age of the piece. If you missed it back then or have forgotten it, you can dig back in at the following link:

If anyone here’s going to be at MATS next week and wants to put a name to a face, you know how to find me … Safe weekend to all!