So just how did Daniel and Phyllis Snow’s 1996 Freightliner Classic XL come to be called ‘The Goose’? Here in this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, the independent owner-operators tell that story, which involves their son Jayme Snow’s 1999 Classic “The Duck,” too.
Catch a variety of views of ‘The Goose’ Freightliner via my post earlier this week and a video showing plenty exterior and — perhaps most impressive — interior views here.Also: A bit of stumping for the importance of small business in trucking from none other than the top motor carrier safety regulator in the nation, FMCSA Adminstrator Ray Martinez, with part of his address at the annual meeting of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Nashville November 1.
His emphatic repetition of a statistic beloved of small-business trucking participants, and one regular readers have heard me mention in recent memory — Companies of fewer than 10 trucks control more than 90 percent of the industry — to my mind may well represent something more than what it seems like on its face. Martinez seems to have gone out of his way to take a particular view of U.S. trucking and where its power lies. It’s one that’s suggestive, to me, of primacy granted to owners of businesses with authority, not to the economic power that comes with scale, to big businesses with lots of trucks. If that continues to be the case, well, we could be in for some changes independents actually like, within the constraints of what the regulators do. (Congress is a different story.) Take a listen:
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