
The collection above shows progress toward new opportunity. It's just one among many things a variety of owner-operators and small fleet owners in Overdrive's audience are in the process of building to make good on optimism for this year 2025. In that particular case, the pictures came from the duo of brothers, Daryl and Nelson, behind Zimmerman Ag in Belgrade, Minnesota, among three finalists for Overdrive's Trucker of the Year award.
The new climate-controlled shop they're working on at the headquarters property will enable the mechanically-inclined owner-operators to not only keep more of their own work in-house comfortably -- their current shop is pretty well open to the elements but for at least a roof over their heads, Daryl's noted -- but should also enhance income opportunities in future. The elder Zimmerman, Daryl, who got his start in trucking not as an operator but a mechanic well more than a decade ago, is looking forward to taking on other repair jobs in the two-truck business' slow period for ag freight.
Namely, that's right now, in the depths of winter, and Nelson Zimmerman noted the structure you see in the shots up top rose recently despite getting "hit with a little bit of a snowstorm in the middle of it."

Progress, nonetheless, for an industrious pair hopeful for bigger and better things to come throughout the year. In that sentiment, they're certainly not alone among owner-operators. Overdrive's annual business-conditions snap polling showed views trending decidedly optimistic compared to the staunch pessimism we saw last year, when more than a fourth of owners expected conditions to just get worse.
[Related: Truckers' New Year's Resolutions: Get closer to the freight source, and back to basics on costs]
A big part of the at least increased optimism headed into this year is on display in the headlines as we speak, with what most readers, I'd wager, will view as a big regulatory win in the space between the California Air Resources Board and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in D.C.
[Related: CARB backs away from ACF emissions rule, withdrawing EPA waiver request]
We've surveyed owner-operators since Donald Trump's election win in November about priorities for the incoming government, with both houses of Congress featuring slim Republican majorities and a new president bent on shaking up regulatory approach. The results are in, and emissions regs figure into some of the hoped-for priorities readers earmarked in the widely-participated-in survey, sitting at No. 5, with about 1 in every four truckers putting a revisit of the EPA's aggressive Phase 3 heavy-duty greenhouse-gas regulations in their top three highest priorities for the government.
One owner who put the EPA's rule No. 2 on his list echoed many others in concerns over further emissions regs' impact on cost for small business, already having been exacerbated in recent years by inflation, especially during the immediate post-pandemic period. "The EPA's [Phase 3] regulations are unfair and unrealistic in timeline, when there are so many issues with not having the resources or considering expense to smaller carriers," the owner-operator said, adding that new equipment costs have skyrocketed in recent years.
[Related: How high will Class 8 truck prices go with EPA 2027 emissions?]
A prominent expectation for the incoming administration is rollbacks of regulatory changes currently in pursuit, like the top vote-getter among priorities in our survey: ending the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's pursuit of a speed-limiter mandate. It ought not to be a heavy lift for Trump II, given with the current mandate proposal FMCSA's not acting on any specific Congressional directive to craft a rule. And it wouldn't be the first time a Trump administration has slowed down such an effort, stopping it temporarily in its tracks in 2017.
Yet with the Biden Department of Transportation, the speed-limiter mandate was resurrected with various notices and proposals. Keeping it out of the regulatory conversation long-term will probably necessitate an act of Congress like the proposed DRIVE Act of this past session.
[Related: New bill would block FMCSA from mandating speed limiters]
Accompanying all the regs-rollback focus, at once, is an acknowledgement that, well, the U.S. government is us, fundamentally, and owner-operators want it to work for them. Extension of tax cuts delivered to small business owners with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the No. 4 most-earmarked priority in the survey, but with the taxes otherwise collected truckers expect dedicated funding for more truck parking along the highway network (the No. 3 most-selected priority).
And No. 2 is a regulatory-change effort to add regs responsibilities to the brokerage side of the independent trucking equation: the FMCSA's broker-transparency-related proposal to make the sharing of transaction records a duty of brokers when requested by other parties to the transaction, whether owner-operators or shippers.
For the respondent who commented on the increased cost delivered by "unfair and unrealistic" EPA emissions regs, the broker-transparency change was the No. 1 priority. "Brokers have increased their footprint and have used unfair contracts to bully carriers, with no recourse for carriers," the owner said. "They hide behind NDAs and utilize loopholes, and it’s created a lot of distrust and frustration for carriers." Ultimately, greater transparency, the trucker felt, "would help lead to better relationships" among parties.
Potentially better rates, too, others noted. Another owner-operator felt greater transparency in the form of shared transaction records would inform negotiations for the better "to prevent huge percentage cuts taken by either side, and ensure that fuel surcharge and additional pays are passed through to the rightful parties."
[Related: Broker transparency: About boosting rates? Or rights]
Donald Trump's appetite for this kind of rulemaking proposal is anybody's guess. A lot, I'll wager, will depend on just who ends up at the head of the Department of Transportation -- a Senate hearing for nom Sean Duffy is ongoing today as I write this -- and how much that person is willing to go to bat for it, likewise the ultimate Administrator of the FMCSA.
As I've written before, though, this isn't Trump's first tour through the transparency maze. As OOIDA President Todd Spencer said in the edition of Overdrive Radio embedded below, from our talk late in November, Trump personally "heard the horns" of demonstrators outside the White House in 2020, when the seeds of the FMCSA's current transparency proposal were sown.
Here's hoping the optimism in the air bears out, and that freight-market watchers are correct to see growth on the horizon. The folks at FTR Transportation Intelligence, among others, predict at least some volume growth, if measured, across freight segments: in FTR's case 2.9% year-over-year for reefers, 2.4% for flatbed, and a percentage point or so for vans.
With any luck, owner-operators can get some rates growth out of it, too, and ongoing efforts to contain costs better pay off through the months ahead.
[Related: Time to put an owner-operator behind the wheel of FMCSA?]