According to a recent SONAR Sitrep report, van volumes are currently 6.4% above the six-month average, and flatbed demand volumes have skyrocketed +77% compared to the prior period.

When freight volumes are robust, drivers prioritize higher-paying, higher-quality roles.

At the same time, the April 2026 Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report delivered a headline gain of 4,300 truck transportation jobs –the largest single-month increase in nearly three years. 

This is tilting the scales of power back toward the drivers, who now have more employment choices than in years prior. The competition is especially fierce for large fleets who are increasingly forced to pay a premium to maintain their headcount as capacity signals tighten organization-wide.

Don’t get caught off guard

Understanding the granular breakdown of demand by mode, the mode-specific pressures on flatbed capacity, and the multi-trillion dollar investment trajectories is critical for any transportation professional.

Discover the full ground-level logistics impact of the driver recruitment race. Sign up for SONAR today or request a demo here to read the full Sitrep and access our library of freight intelligence reports.

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California is rolling out yet another program to incentivize the purchase of zero emission vehicles (ZEVs), this one with $1 billion in backing funded by a state clean fuel program.

The program will be funded by income from the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). The LCFS is a system of credits and mandates to incentivize the use of lower-carbon transportation fuels, like renewable diesel. Companies with low carbon mandates can reach their targets either by generating credits by consuming a low carbon fuel or by purchasing credits from those who have generated them through their own applications. 

The latest sales incentive program is called California Clean Fuel Rewards (CCFR). It is described as a “point of sale” initiative for electric medium and heavy duty trucks. It is expected to begin at the end of June.

Key role for dealers

Under CCFR, the state grants truck dealerships the status and then the funding of an authorized retailer that can provide the rebates for new truck purchases.

In response to questions from FreightWaves, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, which will operate the program, said retailers now can apply to be granted the ability to offer the point-of-sale rebates under CCFR. 

Only a handful have applied so far, the spokesman said, owing to the fact that the program only recently launched. 

“An authorized retailer is one that has enrolled to participate in the program, meets the requirements, and signed all the agreements,” he said. “They will be specifically authorized for CCFR, but it is not a pre-existing list of retailers.”

He said the process to become an authorized dealer is “open to any that want to participate and meet the criteria.”

History of LCFS

The LCFS program has been in effect since 2011 when it made a limited launch. Since that time, the buying and selling of credits has become an active market. Credit prices are now about $65-$70 per metric ton, but they’ve been close to $200/mt. 

LCFS backers would say the lower current prices are a sign that the program is working, that credit generation from activities such as the consumption of renewable diesel has risen so much that the price of LCFS credits is under downward pressure.

“Funded with revenue utilities generate from the state’s LCFS, the program is expected to become the largest utility-administered rebate program for electric trucks in the country, with $250 million available this year and over $1 billion in total rebate funding expected through 2030,” CARB said of the CCFR program. 

Top payout: $120k

The size of the rebates are based on gross vehicle weights. A commercial truck between 8,501-10,000 pounds can get a rebate of $7,500. One in excess of 33,000 pounds, which would include class 8 vehicles, can get $120,000.

CARB’s list of the vehicles eligible for the program includes drayage trucks, electric semis, box trucks, delivery vans “and other fleet vehicles.” 

Public fleets can use the CCFR program to purchase smaller vehicles, with pickup trucks cited as an example.

IN 2024, CARB said sales of ZEV trucks, big and small, totaled about 23% of all sales. 

ZEV trucks used in drayage at Long Beach, a figure that is disclosed by the port every month, have been rising steadily in outright numbers. In most months, the percentage of “moves” within the ports accomplished by a ZEV, have tended to rise as well.

But the California Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule, now sidelined, was going to require all new drayage vehicles working in the state’s ports to be ZEVs starting at the beginning of 2024. 

Data published by the port of Long Beach each month on ZEV adoption would almost certainly show higher numbers if the state hadn’t scrapped the ACF in September 2025 in the face of federal opposition to its implementation. 

The total number of ZEV vehicles continues to rise regardless, though the monthly increase is generally in the low single digits.

California has had a series of incentive programs over the years to help spur the sale of ZEV trucks.

They each approach the goal–more ZEV sales–with different funding or ways of incentivizing purchases.

CARB’s Truck Loan Assistance program is closed. 

But various types of funding are still available under the Goods Movement Emission Reduction Program, the Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program, or the On-Road Heavy-Duty Voucher Incentive Program. 

More articles by John Kingston

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The post New pot of money available to buy ZEV trucks in California appeared first on FreightWaves.

Coupa is a cloud-based, AI-native platform designed for total spend management and supply chain optimization. The company is headquartered in Foster City, California with offices throughout Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia.

The conference, held Monday through Wednesday at ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, brought together hundreds of procurement, finance and supply chain executives focused on spend management, sourcing and supply chain technology.

During the opening keynote on Tuesday, CEO Leagh Turner unveiled new AI-focused products, including the launch of Coupa Compose and Coupa Catalyst, while also announcing the acquisition of AI-based intelligent document processing company Rossum. 

‘AI is the new UI’ for supply chain software

Dean Bain, Coupa’s general manager and senior vice president of supply chain, said companies are moving beyond simple generative AI chatbots toward “agentic AI” systems capable of automating operational tasks and making complex supply chain decisions.

“AI is the new UI,” Bain said during an interview Wednesday with FreightWaves. “As a software company, as an innovator in the space, if that’s not the direction we head, we will be behind.”

Coupa executives said the company has developed more than 20 AI agents and plans to expand that number significantly over the next year as it embeds automation directly into procurement and supply chain workflows.

Bain said Coupa’s AI “prescriptions” technology combines agentic AI with mathematical optimization to quickly evaluate transportation networks, warehouse capacity, supplier constraints and logistics scenarios.

“What we’re seeing is work that was taking four to six weeks is now being conducted in four to six hours,” Bain said.

Bain said digital twin technology is becoming increasingly important as manufacturers and retailers navigate tariffs, port congestion and geopolitical disruptions. Coupa’s digital twins create virtual representations of supply chains that allow companies to model sourcing shifts, transportation delays and inventory-balancing scenarios in real time.

“Tariffs is obviously a huge challenge for everyone right now,” Bain said. “Digital twins are allowing our customers to model those tariff scenarios.”

The systems also incorporate real-time news, social media and operational data feeds to evaluate potential disruptions across global trade networks, Bain said.

Sonepar redesigns fleet, delivery networks

A breakout session at Coupa Inspire 2026, led by Sundara Maddala, director of analytics at Sonepar USA, focused on how the electrical distributor is embedding transportation and logistics decisions directly into network design across its U.S. operations.

Sonepar USA operates roughly 600 facilities nationwide, including distribution centers and cross-docks, while relying heavily on private fleet operations to support tight delivery windows for construction customers.

Maddala detailed several optimization projects involving route redesigns, fleet right-sizing and hub-and-spoke distribution strategies following acquisitions in Florida and the Northeast. One project reduced the number of 26-foot box trucks from 68 to 43 while cutting weekly mileage and generating roughly $3.4 million in lease-cost savings, according to Maddala.

Another network redesign in U.S. Carolinas consolidated inventory into centralized distribution centers while improving delivery-service performance to as high as 95%-96%, Maddala said.

“There’s a big shift from how they operated to how they have to operate,” Maddala said. “Now the customer walks into the branch, places an order, and the branch manager has no say … He just has to trust that CDC will do all that work and then deliver it on time.”

Coupa, Celonis team up on AI-driven procurement

Coupa also announced Wednesday that it is collaborating with Celonis to integrate process intelligence tools into Coupa’s autonomous spend management platform. The companies said the integration will provide Coupa’s Navi AI agents with operational context designed to automate procurement workflows, reduce “value leakage” and improve spend visibility across enterprise systems.

The partnership allows customers to deploy Celonis Process Intelligence through the Coupa App Marketplace while combining Coupa’s spend-management data with Celonis’ operational analytics. The companies said the integration is aimed at reducing maverick buying, accelerating touchless invoicing and improving working capital management.

“AI Agents are only effective if they are fed the best data, intelligence and context,” Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa’s chief product and technology officer, said in a statement announcing the partnership.

Coupa honors partners for supply chain innovation

Coupa also recognized 16 partners during its Inspire 2026 Partner Summit for helping customers improve procurement operations and supply chain resilience. Awards included Global Partner of the Year for Accenture, Supply Chain Partner of the Year for Miebach Consulting and AI Partner of the Year for PwC.

“Our partners are the backbone of the Coupa community, helping our mutual customers drive margin growth and future-proof their operations,” Greg Harbor, Coupa’s chief partner officer, said in a statement.

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After spending years advising brokers, building carrier vetting technology, analyzing carrier risk data, and serving as an expert witness in negligent selection litigation, one thing has become increasingly clear: the industry is rapidly moving toward a measurable broker standard of care.

The question is no longer whether brokers have responsibilities when selecting carriers. The question is what courts, juries, insurers, and the industry itself will consider reasonable in a modern transportation environment where enormous amounts of safety data are publicly available. The reality is that most brokers are already doing a very good job.

Many of today’s sophisticated brokers have evolved far beyond simply checking FMCSA authority and insurance. They utilize carrier onboarding teams, continuous monitoring platforms, insurance verification tools, inspection analysis, fraud prevention controls, and internal escalation procedures that did not exist at scale even a decade ago.

In my work reviewing broker operations and carrier selection practices across the industry, I regularly see brokers implementing meaningful and defensible vetting procedures that demonstrate just how much the industry has matured.

But there remains a very small segment of the market still operating under an outdated philosophy: if the carrier has active FMCSA authority and insurance, the load can move. That approach is out of date and difficult to defend.

One of the biggest misconceptions in transportation litigation is the belief that FMCSA authority somehow represents a government safety endorsement. It does not. Operating authority simply means a carrier is authorized to operate in interstate commerce. It does not mean the carrier has acceptable inspection history, strong safety management controls, reasonable out of service percentages, or a satisfactory operational profile.

Yet in negligent selection cases across the country, a handful of brokers still defend claims by arguing they relied primarily on authority status without meaningfully evaluating available DOT safety data. That becomes problematic when publicly available information reveals warning signs that were either ignored or never reviewed at all.

Today, brokers have access to unprecedented amounts of operational and safety information through FMCSA databases, CSA scores, inspection histories, crash indicators, insurance monitoring systems, and third party risk platforms. Plaintiffs’ attorneys know this. Courts know this. Insurers know this. And increasingly, juries understand it as well.

In expert witness work involving catastrophic crashes, a recurring issue emerges repeatedly: many brokers already conduct sophisticated safety analysis before tendering freight. They review inspection history. They monitor unsafe driving indicators. They analyze out of service percentages. They examine crash trends. They implement fraud prevention controls. They continuously monitor carrier status changes and document exceptions. Those practices matter because they establish what is operationally realistic and commercially achievable within the brokerage industry today.

In other words, the standard is no longer theoretical. When large portions of the industry are already implementing meaningful carrier vetting controls, it becomes increasingly difficult for another broker to argue that reviewing publicly available safety data is unreasonable or impractical. This is how standards of care evolve in every industry. What begins as a best practice gradually becomes an expected practice. Eventually, expected practice becomes the benchmark against which negligence is measured.

Transportation brokerage is now moving through that transition. Importantly, reasonable vetting does not require perfection. No broker can eliminate every transportation risk. No vetting system can predict every crash. The issue is not whether a broker failed to foresee an accident with perfect accuracy. The issue is whether the broker exercised reasonable judgment using the safety information already available to them. There is a substantial difference between evaluating operational risk, documenting a decision, and exercising professional judgment versus simply verifying authority and dispatching freight without further analysis. That distinction increasingly defines modern negligent selection litigation.

Another major shift occurring in transportation litigation is the sophistication of modern juries. Jurors today live in a data driven world. They understand risk scoring, analytics, monitoring systems, and operational oversight in virtually every aspect of life. When plaintiffs’ attorneys present evidence showing publicly available warning signs that were ignored during carrier selection, jurors increasingly understand the significance of that omission. The defense argument that “the carrier had authority” can sound incomplete when contrasted against extensive safety indicators suggesting deeper operational concerns.

Insurers are paying attention as well. Underwriters and excess carriers increasingly recognize that broker vetting practices directly impact litigation exposure and claim severity. Brokers with documented vetting procedures, continuous monitoring protocols, fraud prevention controls, and formalized safety review processes are often in a far stronger position during both underwriting and litigation. This trend will only continue.

The future of broker liability will center on documentation, consistency, measurable safety analysis, and defensible operational decision making. The industry already possesses the tools. The data already exists. And most brokers are already adapting appropriately.

The brokers who continue relying solely on FMCSA authority while ignoring available DOT safety data may eventually find themselves defending practices that much of the industry abandoned years ago. That is ultimately where the broker standard of care conversation is heading. Not toward impossible perfection. But toward reasonable, measurable, and defensible carrier selection practices grounded in the operational realities of modern transportation safety data.

Cassandra Gaines is the founder and CEO of Carrier Assure and a nationally recognized transportation attorney and expert witness specializing in broker liability, carrier vetting, and transportation risk management. She advises brokers, shippers, insurers, and law firms on negligent selection exposure, FMCSA safety data, cargo theft prevention, and defensible carrier selection practices. Gaines previously held legal and leadership roles at large brokerages and trucking companies and has become a leading voice on transportation safety analytics and broker standard of care issues. She has spoken at more than 100 industry conferences nationwide and was named one of Business Insider’s “100 People Transforming Business in North America.” Cassandra can be reached at cassandra@carrierassure.com.

The post The broker standard of care after Montgomery appeared first on FreightWaves.

In the plan released this week, the Navy envisions a 450-ship fleet by 2031, including 299 warships, 68 auxiliary ships, and 83 unmanned vessels.

The larger, more capable fleet would project more global power, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said in the plan.

Three of 15 new “Trump-class” nuclear-powered battleships are to be ordered within the next five years, at an estimated cost of approximately $43.5 billion.

The plan would distribute orders across multiple domestic builders and extend to foreign shipyards. The U.S. and South Korea this week agreed to a formal shipbuilding partnership.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

Houston gains cargo share as volumes soften at West Coast ports 

Trans-Pacific ocean rates remain above pre-war levels despite muted outlook

Lower revenue, higher costs drive Hapag-Lloyd to loss 

U.S. charges ship operators in fatal Baltimore bridge collapse

The post The U.S. Navy wants to build 15 nuclear-powered battleships   appeared first on FreightWaves.

The practical question that every broker, shipper, and 3PL should be asking right now is not a legal question. It is an operational one. How do you build a carrier selection process that meets the standard of ordinary care, and how do you prove to a jury three years from now that you followed it?

The answer is technology. Not in the abstract. Not as a concept. As a procurement decision, you need to make this month.

Before Montgomery, carrier selection was a business decision. You picked a carrier based on rate, availability, equipment, lane familiarity, and whatever level of due diligence your operation felt like performing. Some brokers checked SAFER. Some checked SMS scores. Some checked nothing at all and booked the cheapest truck. The FAAAA preemption defense meant that even if you put a load on a carrier with a conditional safety rating and a driver who had not slept in 20 hours, a plaintiff’s attorney in most jurisdictions could not touch you. The federal shield blocked the claim before it ever reached a jury.

That shield is gone. Every carrier selection decision you make from this point forward is a potential exhibit in a future lawsuit. The carrier you chose, the data that was available about that carrier at the time you chose them, the process you used to evaluate that data, and whether you followed your own criteria. All of it is discoverable. All of it is admissible. All of it will be presented to twelve people who do not know the difference between a BASIC score and a batting average but who do understand the concept of someone not doing their job.

The legal standard is ordinary care. That is not a high bar in the abstract. It is a devastating bar when you have no documentation, no process, and no technology to support the claim that you exercised it.

Every piece of data a broker needs to vet a carrier is publicly available. SAFER gives you authority status, census data, and safety ratings. SMS gives you BASIC percentile scores, crash rates, and inspection history. The Licensing and Insurance system gives you insurance filing status, the insurer’s identity, and coverage amounts. The Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse tracks driver substance abuse violations. All of it is free. All of it is accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

The problem is not access. The problem is operationalizing it.

A broker handling 50 loads a day cannot manually check six federal databases for every carrier on every load and document every finding in a timestamped record with a reviewer’s name attached. That is not a workflow. That is a fantasy. The data exists but the manual process of gathering it, interpreting it, applying consistent criteria, making a documented decision, and retaining the record at scale does not work without technology.

That is where carrier intelligence and vetting platforms come into play. And this is no longer a nice-to-have conversation. This is a procurement decision with direct litigation implications.

The carrier vetting technology space has matured significantly over the past several years and the platforms available today take meaningfully different approaches to the same fundamental problem. There is no single tool that does everything. There are several tools that do specific things well, and the right answer for any given operation depends on what you need, who you are, and how your carrier selection process is structured.

Tea Technologies provides a carrier scoring engine that generates a 0-to-100 numeric risk score built from crashes, out-of-service rates, BASIC percentiles, violation history, revocation history, authority age, and insurer quality. The platform is designed for brokers, shippers, insurers, and investigators who need a single defensible number that summarizes carrier risk and a documented audit trail showing how that number was derived. The scoring methodology is distinct from other platforms in the space and incorporates insurer intelligence as a risk factor, which matters because the quality of the insurance company backing a carrier’s policy is a material consideration that most vetting tools ignore.

SearchCarriers takes a different approach. Garrett Allen built the platform to aggregate nearly 30 FMCSA data sets into a single searchable index and present them in plain language. SearchCarriers is strong on entity discovery, mapping ownership structures, parent-subsidiary relationships, and historical connections between carriers. That capability is critical for identifying chameleon carriers that operate under new DOT numbers after enforcement action. Their Watch feature sends inspection alerts within hours, sometimes days before that data appears on government sites. Their Search Map visualizes carrier density. SearchCarriers is built with all users in mind, particularly small carriers who may be underrepresented in scoring systems that rely on large statistical samples.

Steve Bryan is the goat of FMCSA data aggregators. The pioneer of this tool. Bluewire approaches the problem from the litigation defense perspective. Steve Bryan built the platform to score severity risk for over 750,000 motor carriers using a GAP Score that evaluates nine critical severity categories. Bluewire’s reports run over 100 pages and benchmark carriers against industry peers across more than 30 KPIs. The platform is tailored for carriers, defense attorneys, and insurers who need to identify the specific vulnerabilities that plaintiff’s counsel will exploit under the reptile theory before a crash happens, not after. Bluewire does not just tell you whether a carrier is safe. It tells you what a plaintiff’s attorney will say about them in front of a jury.

Highway focuses on the carrier identity and authentication layer. Their platform verifies that the carrier on the other end of the transaction is who they claim to be, that their credentials are valid, and that their insurance is active. In an environment where double-brokering, identity theft, and carrier impersonation are epidemic, the authentication problem is a vetting problem. You cannot evaluate a carrier’s safety record if you are not actually dealing with that carrier.

Carrier411 is one of the longest-running carrier monitoring and screening platforms in the freight industry. The platform provides carrier safety profiles, authority monitoring, insurance tracking, and a watchlist system that alerts subscribers to changes in a carrier’s status. Carrier411 has built a large user base among brokers and 3PLs over many years and their monitoring tools provide ongoing surveillance of carrier safety data rather than just point-in-time vetting. In a post-Montgomery environment where ongoing monitoring of existing carrier relationships is just as important as initial vetting, a platform that alerts you when a carrier’s safety profile deteriorates between loads is a meaningful layer of due diligence.

GenLogs is doing something nobody else in this space is doing. Ryan Joyce, who came out of the CIA, built a Truck Intelligence platform that uses a nationwide network of over 1,000 roadside sensors and cameras, processing 15 million truck images per day to visually verify that carriers are actually on the road. Every other platform in this space works from digital records. FMCSA filings, insurance databases, and inspection histories. GenLogs works from the physical world. Has the carrier actually been seen operating on the highway recently? Are the trucks displaying the markings that match their registration? Is the equipment consistent across sightings, or are you seeing plate swaps, logo changes, and ghost trucks that appear in the database but never on a sensor? That is a data source that no federal filing can replicate. GenLogs closed a $60 million Series B in February 2026, bringing total funding to $81 million, and serves Fortune 500 customers, including J.B. Hunt and Werner. As they continue building out the sensor network, the platform is becoming a richer, more comprehensive data tool each month. For the carrier vetting use case specifically, GenLogs answers a question that no other platform can: is this carrier real, and are they actually running trucks? In a post-Montgomery environment, where a broker needs to demonstrate that the carrier they selected is a legitimate, operating transportation company, physical verification is a powerful layer of due diligence that digital-only tools cannot provide. 

These platforms differ significantly in tenure, methodology, target audience, scope, and pricing. Some are built primarily for brokers. Some are built primarily for carriers and their defense teams. Some focus on raw data transparency, letting you make the decision. Some focus on scoring and risk quantification and give you a number. Some focus on fraud prevention and identity verification. The differences matter and they are worth evaluating based on your specific operation.

The bottom line is this: carrier vetting technology is now a must-have. Not a differentiator. Not a competitive advantage. A baseline requirement for operating in the post-Montgomery legal environment.

Technology alone does not meet the standard of ordinary care. A platform subscription is not a compliance program. What meets the standard is a written policy that defines your vetting criteria, consistent application of that policy to every carrier on every load, and documented evidence that the criteria were applied. Technology is the tool that makes all three of those things possible at scale.

Here is what a defensible carrier vetting program looks like. You have a written policy that says: these are our minimum eligibility requirements, these are our disqualifying conditions, these are the data sources we consult, this is who is responsible for the vetting, this is how we document the decision, and this is how long we retain the records. Then you use a carrier intelligence platform to execute that policy on every load. The platform generates the data. Your policy defines the criteria. Your people apply the criteria. The system timestamps the record.

When plaintiff’s counsel deposes your compliance manager three years after a crash and asks what your carrier vetting process was, you hand them the policy document and three years of timestamped vetting records showing that the policy was applied to every carrier you engaged, including the one involved in the incident. If the carrier met your criteria at the time of tender and the documentation proves it, you have a defensible position. If the carrier did not meet your criteria and you tendered the load anyway without a documented risk acceptance and justification, you have a problem. If you had no criteria, no documentation, and no technology to generate either, you have a catastrophe.

The platform you use matters less than the fact that you use one and that your use of it is consistent, documented, and tied to a written standard.

I hear the same resistance to carrier vetting technology that I hear from carriers about dashcams. The argument against the dashcam is that if you are at fault, the camera turns on you. But that argument misses the point entirely. When you are at fault, the goal is to mitigate your exposure so that you are obligated to make the victim whole, not to make the victim rich. Making someone whole when you caused their harm is accountability. That is what the legal system is designed to do. What a dashcam does is show a jury that you had safety systems in place, that you were managing your operation, and that the incident was an exception to your standard practice, not a predictable consequence of your indifference. That is the difference between compensatory damages and a nuclear verdict. The distance between those two outcomes is not the severity of the crash. It is the severity of the jury’s belief that you did not care.

Carrier vetting technology works the same way. When a carrier you selected is involved in a catastrophic crash, the question is not whether you owe the victim. You do. The question is whether the jury believes you exercised reasonable care in selecting that carrier. A documented vetting record showing that you checked the carrier’s authority, reviewed their safety data, evaluated their insurance, applied consistent criteria, and made a defensible decision at the time of tender is the evidence that constrains the outcome. It does not eliminate liability. It constrains it to the obligation of making someone whole rather than the punishment of making someone rich.

The issue with technology is never that it tells on you. The issue is that when you implement it, you fail to manage what it provides. If you subscribe to a carrier intelligence platform and it flags a carrier as high risk and you tender the load anyway with no documentation and no justification, the platform’s own data becomes the plaintiff’s best exhibit. You had the information. You had the tools. You chose not to act. That is worse than not having the technology at all.

The technology works when you follow the policy it supports. When the data says stop, you stop. When the data says proceed with caution, you document the caution. When the data says this carrier meets your criteria, you retain the record that proves it. That is ordinary care. That is what Montgomery requires. And that is what these platforms are built to help you do.

If you do not have a carrier vetting policy or a technology platform to support it, the time to fix that is now. Not next quarter. Not at your next compliance review. Now. The first wave of post-Montgomery negligent-hiring suits will be filed within the next few weeks. If you are named in one and you have no documented vetting process, you are defending a $36 million claim with nothing but your word that you generally try to pick good carriers.

Tea Technologies provides a free carrier vetting policy template and broker due diligence guide at carrierverifi.com that covers the six-step post-Montgomery framework, sample policy language, documentation requirements, and red-flag criteria. It is not legal advice and it does not replace counsel. It is a starting point.

If you need legal guidance in building your program, there are transportation attorneys who specialize in this. Firms like Childress Law, their sister entity, Trucksafe Consulting, and others in the trucking defense bar have been advising carriers on safety culture and litigation defense for decades. Post-Montgomery, that expertise is equally critical for brokers.

If you need operational guidance, there are compliance consultants like TruckSafe Consulting that work with carriers and brokers to build documented, defensible programs from scratch. The resources exist. The expertise exists. The platforms exist.

Montgomery told the industry that ordinary care is the standard. Technology is how you meet it. Policy is how you define it. Documentation is how you prove it. The carriers and brokers who had these systems in place before May 14 are in a defensible position today. The ones who did not have a window to build them before the first subpoena arrives.

That window is closing.

The post The carrier vetting tech stack is the new line of defense in freight appeared first on FreightWaves.

The U.S. Department of Commerce and the South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources this week signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing the Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Initiative (KUSPI).

The new platform strengthens bilateral cooperation in commercial shipbuilding, workforce development, industrial modernization, and maritime manufacturing investment, the International Trade Administration said in a release.

The initiative establishes the Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Center, staffed and funded by Seoul, to be opened later this year in Washington. It will support expanded collaboration between government, industry, and research institutions from both countries, and include facilitating foreign direct investment in the U.S. maritime industrial base, workforce training initiatives, shipyard productivity improvement projects, and technical exchanges.

The Trump administration earlier this year released a Maritime Action Plan to revitalize domestic shipbuilding. South Korea is the world’s second-largest builder of commercial vessels after China; Seoul-based industrial giant Hanwha (000880.KS) currently operates a shipyard in Philadelphia.

Commerce, under the agreement, will help facilitate the center’s interactions with U.S. shipbuilding companies, suppliers, universities, and research institutes and act as its federal government-wide point of contact. Seoul will coordinate cooperation across its government and other shipbuilding stakeholders.

The ITA said that the signing builds on ongoing U.S.-Korea cooperation in strategic industries and reflects continued efforts to strengthen allied industrial capacity, promote investment, and expand collaboration in advanced manufacturing sectors.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

U.S. Navy wants to build 15 nuclear-powered battleships  

Houston gains cargo share as volumes soften at West Coast ports 

Trans-Pacific ocean rates remain above pre-war levels despite muted outlook

Lower revenue, higher costs drive Hapag-Lloyd to loss 

The post U.S. in partnership with leading shipbuilding nation appeared first on FreightWaves.

The world’s seventh-largest liner (2603.TW) reported consolidated revenue fell more than 21% to $2.75 billion, while net profit after tax of $264 million was off 70% from the same quarter a year ago.

Global carriers have struggled with weaker rates even as container volumes post solid results, amid unbalanced capacity in the face of shipper uncertainty and higher operating costs as the Iran conflict pushes up the price of fuel.

Evergreen was hopeful that the approaching peak shipping season will boost rates and tariff issues drive shipper frontloading.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

The U.S. Navy wants to build 15 nuclear-powered battleships  

Houston gains cargo share as volumes soften at West Coast ports 

Trans-Pacific ocean rates remain above pre-war levels despite muted outlook

Lower revenue, higher costs drive Hapag-Lloyd to loss 

The post Evergreen profit sank 70% in Q1 appeared first on FreightWaves.

The webinar featured Nathan Strang, Kyle Beaulieu and David Grinevald, who discussed shifting import patterns, tighter vessel deployment, fuel surcharges and ongoing disruptions tied to Middle East tensions and global trade uncertainty.

Flexport, founded in 2013 by Ryan Petersen and based in San Francisco, provides global logistics solutions.

Strang said U.S. import volumes have softened at several major gateways following a strong 2025, with the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach both seeing declines of roughly 1.5% year over year.

“Houston’s growth continues,” Strang said during the webinar. “We’ve seen a lot of containerized cargo going into Houston. Improvements to the ship canal have really allowed larger vessels to get in there and heavier vessels to go into the port of Houston.”

Strang said cargo is increasingly shifting toward East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, particularly Virginia and Houston, driven by changes in warehousing strategies, direct-to-consumer fulfillment and trans-Pacific service adjustments.

“The overall trend is that we’re still seeing a little bit of cargo slipping over to the East Coast for various reasons,” Strang said. “Houston is still very popular.”

SONAR’s Inbound Ocean Shipments Index measures freight booking activity for shipments entering the U.S. at the port level based on estimated departure dates. Port Houston recently saw a huge spike in bookings in mid-March just after the U.S.-Iran conflict began on February 28. 

Strang also highlighted persistent operational disruptions across global trade lanes, including vessel congestion in Europe, soybean-export bottlenecks in South America and continued instability in the Middle East.

“The Strait of Hormuz is still very much non-operational,” Strang said. “It is closed so the Jebel Ali port is not available.”

Beaulieu said carriers tightened trans-Pacific eastbound capacity during May by blanking sailings around China’s May Day holiday, creating a firmer supply-demand environment entering the second half of the month.

“Supply is tighter now than it’s been for most of 2026,” Beaulieu said.

Beaulieu said deployment levels are expected to improve into late May and early June, although service disruptions could still constrain effective capacity.

“The open question is whether there will be a demand increase that would keep utilization up throughout June and in essence be an early peak,” Beaulieu said.

Beaulieu added that rising operating costs and fuel surcharges continue to pressure ocean freight pricing globally.

“Everyone should expect elevated rate levels to continue through the end of the month,” Beaulieu said.

On the air cargo side, Grinevald said the market has entered a “wait-and-see mode” after several weeks of rising rates, with global airfreight pricing stabilizing around $3.29 per kilogram despite weakening tonnage volumes.

“The main phenomenon at play here is that we’re seeing a decoupling between rates and volume,” Grinevald said. “Rates kept on rising even though tonnage fell.”

Grinevald said geopolitical tensions in the Middle East continue to disrupt airline operations and fuel markets globally, even as some airspace restrictions ease.

“The repercussions of the Middle East situation are global,” Grinevald said.

Grinevald said airlines continue to face operational uncertainty tied to insurance restrictions, rerouted flight paths and volatile fuel prices.

“We are now standing at 23-year highs,” Grinevald said of jet fuel prices.

Executives also fielded questions about congestion at the ports of Savannah and Vancouver, rail service into inland hubs and the likelihood of additional general rate increases, or GRIs, during the summer shipping season.

Beaulieu said current trans-Pacific market conditions suggest carriers are likely to hold mid-May GRIs as tighter vessel supply supports higher pricing.

“Capacity has tightened very much as a result of some of the blanks that were in market for May and then tightening of the supply-demand balance,” Beaulieu said.

The post Houston gains cargo share as volumes soften at West Coast ports  appeared first on FreightWaves.

Within an hour of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Montgomery vs. Caribe II, opening the door to bringing in brokers as defendants when a carrier they hire is involved in an incident that leads to a lawsuit, the reactions began to pour in.

Nobody moves faster than Wall Street. And on a day when leading equity indices were up strongly, and trucking stocks were as well, the few brokerage-specific stocks trading on exchanges were all lower.

Even though C.H. Robinson was the company that led the charge trying to keep 3PLs protected under the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (F4A), among three pure play brokerage companies (albeit a slightly altered model at Landstar), its stock had declined the least at approximately 1:30 p.m.

C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) was down 1.92% to $160.12, a drop of $3.14 when the S&P 500 was up 

Meanwhile, RXO (NYSE: RXO) had dropped 8.83% to $18.07, a slide of $1.74, while Landstar (NASDAQ: LSTR) was down 1.72%, or $3.01, to $171.98.

Meanwhile, for reasons that are not necessarily related–carriers have brokerage units as well, and they can no longer cite F4A should those segments find themselves in a lawsuit–the truckload carriers were riding along with higher equity markets. 

At about 1:30 p.m. EDT, Knight Swift (NYSE: KNX) was up 3.38%, J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT) had risen 6.42%, and Schneider National (NYSE: SNDR)  was up 11.07%. At about that time, the S&P 500 had risen just under 0.7%.

A surprising upside

The irony in the brokerage stocks getting hit is that large 3PLs can be seen to benefit from the Montgomery decision. They are the ones that will have the resources to better handle any higher insurance premiums; they will have more tools to vet carriers; and they’re the ones in the best position to prove the old adage that regulation is great for large incumbents and an absolute barrier to entry for smaller players.

RXO, in a prepared statement supplied to FreightWaves, suggested that it understood that roadmap.

“RXO does not expect this ruling to have a negative material impact on our business,” it said in the statement. “In fact, it underscores the importance of choosing a brokerage partner with rigorous carrier vetting processes and financial stability. We believe this ruling will accelerate industry consolidation, reinforcing the long-term competitive advantage of scaled players like RXO.”

In its statement, C.H. Robinson said it was “disappointed with the outcome.” But it also cited the statements by Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh in their separate concurring opinion. 

“Importantly, the Court’s decision today should not be read to mean that brokers will routinely be subject to state tort liability in the wake of truck accidents,” the justices said. “As even plaintiff ’s counsel stressed, brokers should be able to successfully defend against state tort suits if the brokers have acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable trucking companies.”

Reaction in the states won’t be consistent

In a brief commentary, the trucking-focused law firm of Scopelitis looked to the concurring opinion of the two justices and said it shows that “state tort law can be unpredictable with litigation and insurance costs being passed on to consumers. Nevertheless, the decision underscores the importance to brokers of a sound and reasonable carrier vetting procedure that is faithfully followed.” 

As an attorney involved in the case noted, being able to be found negligent or liable under Montgomery doesn’t mean such a finding is automatic.

C.H. Robinson’s statement also seemed to suggest it might come out stronger after this, much like RXO said.

“This ruling underscores the importance of working with a broker that offers the scale, technology and compliance processes needed to navigate this new freight landscape,” the company said. “C.H. Robinson will continue to select only carriers licensed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) as required by law, support strong federal oversight, serve customers without disruption, and remain a trusted partner for shippers.”

The company’s prepared statement said the shipments it arranges “overwhelmingly move without incident, with just one serious accident claim filed for every 500 million miles driven on our customers’ loads. But even one accident is one too many.”

Wall Street bank surveys the wreckage

In a report that did not mince words, the transportation team at Deutsche Bank led by Richa Harnain, said its estimate was that 20% of the trucking industry “could face grave financial consequences on the back of this Supreme Court decision.”

But that’s not an estimate on the impact for brokerages; that’s the industry as a whole. Deutsche Bank got to that estimate by multiplying about 60% of the brokerage industry that is in peril, which in turn accounts for about 30% of the total market. 

And as a result, in a statement that echoed what some of the bigger brokerages were saying, “That should therefore create more share gain opportunities for the larger, more insulated players.”

Deutsche Bank looked at the stock price selloff at C.H. Robinson and said it was “knee-jerk.” “We think the company already retains higher amounts of insurance than the average brokerage community,” it said. The analyst added that with 40% EBIT net margins in its truck brokerage arm, “the impact to profitability from additional insurance is relatively low. Hence, we think it is best positioned in the brokerage community.“

In its commentary, Deutsche Bank said it expected the impact of the Montgomery case to have long-term impact.

“We think this Supreme Court decision could create much more lasting discipline in the industry,” it said. “Brokers will be more diligent in terms of who they hire, showing a selectivity bias towards quality-operators, to avoid costly risk.  Effectively this would further increase the barriers to entry for the industry, aside from just the added cost of insurance from doing business.”

And it asked a question that has been floating around in the industry for awhile as it awaited the Montgomery case to be settled. 

“If brokers can be held liable when carriers they hire get into accidents….what’s to stop shippers from being held liable for brokers and/or carriers they hire next?,” Deutsche Bank said. “We think today’s decision makes this a fair question, which could further increase the quality-bias in the industry.”

Trade group “deeply disappointed”

Even as big brokerages may benefit, a lot of small ones likely won’t. And that is likely on the mind of the Transportation Intermediaries Association, the 3PL trade group which represents small and large brokers alike. 

“We are deeply disappointed with the decision as the law and legal precedent for decades has given the federal government, not states, the responsibility for setting safety standards for motor carriers,” the TIA said in a prepared statement. “To date, carriers, not brokers, have been responsible for complying with these standards.”

Montgomery, TIA said, “imposes an impossible task on brokers — effectively asking them to evaluate the safety of a given motor carrier despite having been deemed safe to operate on public roads by the federal government. This is like asking travel agents to evaluate the safety of a given airline despite the fact that the airline has been licensed to fly by the federal government.”

The trade group knows it has its work cut out for it. “We are working with our members to assess potential next steps to mitigate the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision,” the TIA statement said. 

More articles by John Kingston

Montgomery broker case before SCOTUS featured topic in Robinson’s earnings call

At TIA meeting, freight brokers brace for Supreme Court decision
Strange bedfellows as states say brokers not protected under ‘safety exception’.

The post What’s next after Montgomery? Likely a boost to the bigger 3PLs appeared first on FreightWaves.

The shipments component of the Cass Freight Index was down 4.4% year over year but increased 0.4% from March (up 0.6% seasonally adjusted). That was a third straight sequential increase in volumes, and “an encouraging signal for a potential second-half recovery,” the Thursday report said.

Normal seasonal trends moving forward would result in a 1.7% y/y increase in the shipments index during the back half of the year. The dataset is expected to decline just 1% y/y in May.

A two-year-stacked decline of 7.9% was tied for the smallest over the past year.

At an investor conference held this week, J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT) reported that shipper demand exceeded expectations throughout the first quarter and has remained steady since. It sees a path to raise truckload rates materially over the next two years.

“LTL tonnage trends are improving for some fleets, which bodes well for continued improvement in shipment trends in the coming months,” the Cass report said. “Tightness in the dry van TL market is starting to radiate to other modes, so far mainly reefer and flatbed TL, but eventually this tightness will drive demand in LTL and intermodal as well.”

Cass’ (NASDAQ: CASS) expenditures index, which measures total freight spend including fuel, was up 3.5% y/y and 2.6% higher than March (1.2% higher seasonally adjusted). Higher diesel prices and core freight rates were the drivers of the increase.

Cass’ TL linehaul index , which tracks rates excluding fuel and accessorial surcharges, surged 5.6% y/y, registering the largest y/y increase since August 2022. The dataset was 3.2% higher sequentially, which was the biggest jump since March 2022. However, the index was basically flat sequentially in February and March.

The dataset, which includes for-hire spot and contract rates, has been up y/y in 16 straight months.

The report concluded that the freight cycle is being led by the supply side as noncompliant drivers are being forced out of service. It cautioned that “higher fuel prices sapping consumer spending, and rising interest rates sapping the housing market” are weighing on demand, which will be required at some point to carry the recovery.

“New FMCSA regulations have acted as a catalyst, and seem likely to result in tighter capacity and higher rates from here,” the report said.

Data used in the indexes comes from freight bills paid by Cass, a provider of payment management solutions. Cass processes $37 billion in freight payables annually on behalf of customers.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• J.B. Hunt sees TL rates climbing 20% over next 2 years
• FedEx board approves spinoff of LTL unit
• Hub Group’s accounting error causes further reporting delays

The post TL linehaul rates surge in April, Cass says appeared first on FreightWaves.

As one of Dollar Tree’s (NASDAQ: DLTR) largest distribution centers, the climate-controlled facility will service about 700 stores in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The company now has 19 distribution centers that support more than 9,240 stores across North America.

“This facility will help us move product closer to our stores and serve customers more quickly,” said Roxanne Weng, chief supply chain officer, in a news release.

The new facility is part of a broad investment strategy to optimize Dollar Tree’s distribution network. The company is expanding and modernizing DCs and replacing legacy warehouse and yard management systems with cloud-based platforms that will enable better inventory planning, visibility and execution, Weng said at an Investor Day presentation last October. The addition of temperature-controlled storage in all DCs was completed last year. The upgrades are helping to even out product flow to stores so back rooms aren’t overcrowded, improve throughput per facility, reduce out-of-stock items, and strengthen the company’s cost structure, she added.

Dollar Tree plans to open its next distribution center in Marietta, Oklahoma, in spring 2027, after it finishes rebuilding a facility that was destroyed by a tornado in April 2024. The enhanced Marietta facility will also have one million-square feet of capacity and serve about 700 Dollar Tree stories in the Southwest and West. 

The post New Dollar Tree distribution center to support 700 Southwest stores appeared first on FreightWaves.

So…what’s next? Well, insurance of course. Anytime liability and exposure rear their heads, insurance becomes a necessity to protect the rest of society.  

The only federal financial responsibility requirement for a freight broker in the United States is a $75,000 surety bond. That bond does not cover tort liability. It does not respond to a personal injury judgment. It does not pay out when a jury decides that a broker was negligent in selecting a carrier whose truck killed someone. It exists for one purpose only: to ensure that motor carriers and shippers get paid when a broker defaults on its freight payment obligations. Notice I said “United States” because many overseas brokers remain largely shielded from accountability. 

Seventy-five thousand dollars. A surety bond. Against a legal landscape where the median nuclear verdict in trucking cases is $36 million and climbing.

The broker surety bond requirement lives in 49 U.S.C. Section 13906 and 49 CFR 387.307. MAP-21 set the current $75,000 floor in 2012, replacing the previous $10,000 requirement that had been in place since the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. FMCSA tightened enforcement of the bond requirement with a final rule that took full effect January 16, 2026, closing loopholes around BMC-85 trust funds that had allowed some brokers to operate with junk assets and no real liquidity.

Those reforms were necessary and overdue. Carriers had been getting burned for years by brokers who defaulted on payments while operating on paper-thin financial backing. The tighter bond enforcement protects carriers from non-payment. It does nothing to protect the public from the consequences of a broker’s negligent selection of a carrier.

The bond “shall ensure the financial responsibility of the broker by providing for payments to shippers or motor carriers if the broker fails to carry out its contracts, agreements, or arrangements for the supplying of transportation by authorized motor carriers.” Contracts. Agreements. Arrangements. Payment obligations. Not tort liability. Not negligent hiring. Not the $36 million judgment a jury just handed down because the broker put a load on a carrier with a conditional safety rating and a driver who had not slept in 22 hours.

There is no federal requirement for a freight broker to carry bodily injury liability insurance. None. Not a dollar.

Some brokers carry contingent auto liability and contingent cargo insurance. I did when I brokered freight. Many of the larger operations do. These are policies that respond when a carrier’s own insurance is exhausted, disputed, or nonexistent, and the broker faces a claim arising from the carrier’s operations. Contingent auto, in particular, is the policy that would respond to a negligent-hiring claim post-Montgomery.

Contingent auto has never been a federal requirement. It has been a business decision. A risk management choice. Something the sophisticated brokers carried because they understood the exposure, and something the unsophisticated brokers skipped because nobody made them buy it and the FAAAA preemption defense meant they probably would never need it.

That calculation just changed. Permanently.

The brokers who already carry contingent auto and cargo coverage are sitting in a defensible position. They have a policy that responds. They have documentation that they took the exposure seriously. They can tell a jury that they not only vetted the carrier but also carried insurance against the possibility that their vetting was insufficient. That is a powerful litigation posture.

The brokers who do not carry those policies, and that is a lot of brokers, are now exposed in a way they have never been. They have $75,000 in surety bond coverage that does not respond to tort claims, no liability insurance, and a Supreme Court opinion that says state courts can hold them accountable for negligent carrier selection. The first time one of those brokers gets named in a catastrophic crash case, the math will become very clear very fast.

Here is why the insurance gap matters more now than ever. The American Transportation Research Institute published its updated trucking litigation analysis in late 2025. The findings should scare every broker, carrier, and insurer in the freight industry. Truck-tractor tort case filings grew at an average annual rate of 3.7 percent between 2014 and 2023. The median nuclear verdict, defined as a jury award exceeding $10 million, reached $36 million in 2022. That is approximately 50 percent higher than the median nuclear verdict in 2013. The share of verdicts exceeding $50 million increased by 6.4 percentage points over that same period.

The average trucking verdict between 2020 and 2023 was $27.5 million. Thermonuclear verdicts and awards exceeding $100 million have grown exponentially. In 2024, a St. Louis jury awarded $462 million against trailer manufacturer Wabash National in a fatal underride crash case, including $450 million in punitive damages. In 2021, a Florida jury returned a $1 billion verdict against a carrier in a fatal crash, the largest single trucking verdict in American history.

ATRI found that in more than 80 percent of verdicts exceeding $1 million, non-medical damages such as pain and suffering were up to 10 times higher than the actual medical bills. The average verdict above $1 million grew from $2.3 million in 2010 to $22.3 million in 2018. That is a 967 percent increase in eight years.

These are the numbers that now apply to freight brokers.

Geography matters enormously. ATRI’s report singles out California, Georgia, and Florida as the states with the highest median awards. Texas and Louisiana are consistently identified as nuclear verdict hotspots. The American Tort Reform Association has designated specific jurisdictions within these states as “judicial hellholes” where plaintiff-friendly procedural rules, expansive discovery, aggressive plaintiff’s bar tactics, and anti-corporate jury sentiment combine to produce outsized verdicts.

State courts are significantly more expensive for trucking defendants than federal courts. ATRI found that, for cases with verdicts over $1 million, the median award in state court was $3.6 million, compared with $2.5 million in federal court. The Institute estimated that in 2022 alone, the trucking industry lost upwards of $102.8 million in excess jury awards because eligible cases were not removed from state courts. That is pure forum-shopping exposure.

The FAIR Trucking Act, introduced in September 2025 by three Republican members of Congress, would give federal courts jurisdiction over large interstate trucking cases to reduce venue shopping. ATA has endorsed it. But the bill has not passed. Even if it does, it addresses where the case is heard, not how much insurance the broker must carry.

Two forces are converging on brokers simultaneously. The plaintiff’s bar is becoming more aggressive and more sophisticated in its approach to trucking cases. The reptile theory, third-party litigation funding, social inflation, and anti-corporate jury sentiment are all driving verdicts higher. And now, thanks to Montgomery, the defendant pool just expanded to include every freight broker who selected the carrier involved in a catastrophic crash.

The federal minimum insurance requirement for interstate motor carriers hauling general freight is $750,000. Congress set that number in the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 as part of deregulation. The specific regulation was finalized in 1985. It has not been adjusted once in the 45 years since.

If the $750,000 minimum had tracked core inflation since 1985, it would be approximately $2.2 million today. Adjusted for the actual increase in medical costs and wrongful-death awards, it would be roughly $3.7 million. FMCSA’s 2026 quadrennial filing shows that the $750,000 minimum now covers under 1.5 percent of the median nuclear verdict.

On April 9, 2026, Representatives Jesús García of Illinois and Derek Tran of California reintroduced the Fair Compensation for Truck Crash Victims Act, which would raise the carrier minimum from $750,000 to $5 million and index it to inflation going forward. This is the fourth time García has introduced this legislation. It has been endorsed by the Institute for Safer Trucking, the American Association for Justice, the Truck Safety Coalition, and several highway safety advocacy groups.

FMCSA has signaled it expects to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would raise the minimum to $2 million or more. Some industry analysts expect the final number could reach $5 million for general freight. Implementation, if it happens, would come in late 2026 or 2027 at the earliest.

The carrier minimum debate has been running for over a decade. The Trucking Alliance, led by carriers like Knight Transportation and J.B. Hunt, favors an increase. ATA has generally opposed it, arguing that the current minimum still meets its intended purpose for the vast majority of claims. The Trucking Alliance’s counter is direct: if all crash settlements in the available data were covered by a $750,000 limit, 42 percent of the monetary exposure would represent an uninsured liability of the trucking company.

That is the carrier side. The broker side is worse. The carrier at least has $750,000. The broker has nothing. Zero federal liability insurance requirement.

Freight brokerage in the United States has historically been one of the easiest transportation businesses to enter. The total cost to become a licensed freight broker is under $2,000. You can arrange loads within three weeks of filing your application. The requirements are a BOC-3 process agent designation, a $75,000 surety bond (which costs roughly $938 per year in annual premium for a BMC-84 bond with good credit), and a completed OP-1 application. That is the federal barrier to entry for an industry that arranges approximately one-third of all freight shipped in the United States by more than 780,000 carriers.

There are roughly 28,000 licensed freight brokers in the United States. Many are sophisticated operations with robust carrier vetting processes, experienced compliance teams, and insurance portfolios that include contingent auto, contingent cargo, general liability, errors and omissions, and excess coverage. Many others are small operations, some run from a laptop and a cell phone, that have never purchased a contingent auto policy and would not know what one was if you asked them.

Post-Montgomery, both categories are equally exposed to state tort law for negligent carrier selection. The difference is that one category has insurance that responds and the other does not.

The conversation about broker insurance requirements has been theoretical for decades. Montgomery just made it urgent.

Congress should mandate minimum liability insurance for freight brokers. The surety bond serves its purpose for carrier payment protection. It is not and has never been a substitute for liability coverage. A broker who selects a carrier that causes a catastrophic crash should have a financial backstop to cover the resulting claim. That is not a radical proposition. It is the same principle behind the carrier insurance requirement that has existed since 1935.

What should the minimum be? Setting it at $750,000 to match the current carrier minimum is a starting point, but the carrier minimum itself is almost certainly going to be raised. A broker minimum that matches whatever the new carrier minimum becomes would create parity between the party that operates the truck and the party that selected the operator. If the carrier minimum goes to $2 million, the broker minimum should match it.

The insurance industry will need to develop products for this market. Contingent auto and contingent cargo policies exist, but they have been voluntary niche products. If broker liability insurance becomes mandatory, the market will need to scale those products to 28,000 brokerages of varying size, sophistication, and risk profile. Underwriters will need data on broker-carrier selection practices, and brokers with documented, data-driven vetting processes will receive better rates than those without any process at all. That is how it should work. The insurance market should reward brokers who take carrier selection seriously and penalize those who do not.

For brokers operating today, the action item is immediate. If you do not carry contingent auto liability insurance, call your insurance broker today. Not tomorrow. Today. The Montgomery opinion was published 48 hours ago. The plaintiff’s bar has been preparing for this moment for years. The first negligent-hiring suits against brokers will be filed within the next few weeks. If you are named in one of those suits without liability coverage, you will be defending a claim with a $75,000 surety bond that does not respond to tort liability and whatever personal or corporate assets you have.

That is not a defensible position. That is a business extinction event.

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport settled the preemption question. It did not settle the question of financial responsibility. The court said brokers can be sued. It did not say brokers are required to carry insurance that would pay the judgment. That gap between liability and financial responsibility is where the next crisis is building.

The carrier insurance minimum has been $750,000 since 1980 and it covers less than 1.5 percent of the median nuclear verdict. The broker insurance minimum is zero. The median trucking verdict is $36 million. The surety bond is $75,000 and it does not even respond to tort claims.

Something has to give. Either Congress mandates broker insurance, FMCSA includes brokers in the pending carrier insurance rulemaking, or the market eventually forces it through premium structures that make operating without coverage economically irrational. One way or another, the era of brokering freight with no financial responsibility for the consequences of your carrier selection is over. Montgomery told the industry that brokers owe a duty of care. The question that remains is whether they will be required to back that duty with real money.

The post The freight Broker insurance gap is now real appeared first on FreightWaves.

The weekly Freightos Baltic Index shows trans-Pacific rates around $1,000 higher per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU) than before the start of the Iran war in late February.

Asia-U.S. West Coast prices increased 4% to $2,828 per FEU for the week ended May 8. Asia-U.S. East Coast prices were just 1% higher, at $4,340 per FEU.

“Asia-Europe prices that climbed by a few hundred dollars per FEU in March have mostly slipped back to pre-war levels,” said Freightos (NASDAQ: CRGO) analyst Judah Levine, in a research note. Asia-North Europe spot rates this past week were 10% higher at $2,850 per FEU, but so far this week are trending down, similar to rate behavior to the Mediterranean earlier this month.

“Carriers are planning additional, likely modest, increases for mid-month,” Levine said, stepping up blanked sailings amid reports of east-west service space tightening and some scheduled containers being rolled –  or bumped – to a later voyage, to shore up higher spot rates during a period of low demand, in the hope that peak season demand picks up later in the year. 

Levine noted that Washington and Tehran resumed attacks in the Strait of Hormuz after the U.S. paused Operation Freedom escorts of merchant ships less than two days after its launch. Iran says it has formed the Persian Gulf Strait Authority to coordinate traffic it approves through the disputed waterway. It’s unclear what effect this week’s talks in Beijing between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping might have on the conflict.

Levine noted that Maersk (OTC: AMKBY) in its first quarter earnings call said the closure of the strait is adding about $500 million per month in costs that it has so far passed on in freight rates. Other analysts want that availability of fuel, and not prices, could become the top priority for carriers in the coming months.

The U.S.-based National Retail Federation outlook predicts a muted trans-Pacific peak season, Levine said, “with June volumes projected 2% below May and July only 4% higher before easing again, suggesting importer caution and a potentially weak second half for carriers still facing high fuel costs.”

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post Trans-Pacific ocean rates remain above pre-war levels despite muted outlook appeared first on FreightWaves.

A negligent-hiring claim against a freight broker is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. The FAAAA’s safety exception, 49 U.S.C. Section 14501(c)(2)(A), saves it. States retain authority to regulate safety “with respect to motor vehicles,” and require a broker to exercise ordinary care when selecting a carrier that concerns motor vehicles. That is the whole thing. Eight pages. No dissent.

The Seventh Circuit is reversed. The case goes back for proceedings consistent with the opinion. Shawn Montgomery, the driver who lost his leg when Yosniel Varela-Mojena veered off course in a Mack Truck hauling plastic pots through Illinois, can now pursue his negligent-hiring claim against C.H. Robinson.

The freight brokerage industry’s federal preemption defense is over.

Barrett’s opinion is remarkably short for a case this consequential. The analytical framework fits on a napkin. The FAAAA preempts state laws “related to a price, route, or service” of a motor carrier or broker “with respect to the transportation of property.” Section 14501(c)(1). But the safety exception preserves “the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” Section 14501(c)(2)(A).

The court asked one question. Is a negligent-hiring claim against a broker a claim “with respect to motor vehicles”? The FAAAA does not define “with respect to.” The court relied on dictionary definitions and its prior construction in Dan’s City Used Cars, Inc. v. Pelkey (2013), where it said the phrase means “concerns.” The FAAAA defines “motor vehicle” as a vehicle propelled by mechanical power and used on a highway in transportation. Section 13102(16).

Put it together. A claim is “with respect to motor vehicles” if it concerns the vehicles used in transportation. Requiring C.H. Robinson to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles. Most obviously, Barrett wrote, the trucks that will transport the goods.

The three counterarguments C.H. Robinson raised all failed.

C.H. Robinson argued that reading the safety exception this way would swallow the preemption clause whole. Barrett said no. The safety exception saves only claims involving motor vehicle safety. State laws related to prices, routes, and services that have nothing to do with safety remain preempted. The clause still does work. It just does not protect brokers from accountability when their carrier selection puts dangerous trucks on the road.

C.H. Robinson argued that Montgomery’s reading creates surplusage. Barrett said the surplusage exists regardless of how you define “with respect to motor vehicles” because the overlap comes from the word “safety,” not from the breadth of the phrase.

C.H. Robinson pointed to subsection (b) of the FAAAA, which preempts state regulation of intrastate broker activities and contains no safety exception. The argument was that Congress must have intended brokers to be fully shielded from safety claims; why leave the safety exception out of subsection (b)? Barrett acknowledged that it is “not obvious” why Congress included a safety exception in subsection (c) but not in subsection (b). Then she wrote the line that will be quoted in every brief filed in this area for the next decade: “Better to live with the mystery than to rewrite the statute.”

Barrett wrote the holding. Kavanaugh wrote the roadmap for what comes next.

Kavanaugh, joined by Alito, said this case was closer than the majority opinion suggested. He walked through the contextual considerations on both sides, and his analysis is the most honest accounting of the competing interests that any federal judge has put on paper in this area.

In favor of the brokers, Kavanaugh noted two things. First, the FAAAA mandates minimum insurance coverage for trucking companies but not for brokers. Section 13906(a)(1) versus (b)(2)(A). That gap suggests Congress did not anticipate tort suits against brokers for carrier selection. If it had, it presumably would have mandated insurance for them too. Second, the subsection (b) anomaly. Everyone agrees that the FAAAA preempts state tort suits against brokers for arranging intrastate transportation. Montgomery’s reading means state tort suits are permitted for interstate transportation but are preempted for intrastate transportation. That is, as Kavanaugh wrote, “exactly backward” from what ordinary preemption doctrine rooted in federalism would predict. Then Kavanaugh laid out why those points do not carry the day.

The FAA Authorization Act was an economic deregulation statute. It was not a safety deregulation statute. Congress left state tort suits against trucking companies fully intact. It is hard to read the statute as written and conclude that Congress “subtly sliced and diced state tort law” so that trucking companies face liability for accidents but brokers get complete immunity from the consequences of selecting the carrier that caused the accident.

Then the killer paragraph. There is no meaningful federal safety regulation of brokers’ carrier selection practices. FMCSA requires brokers to select a federally registered carrier but does not otherwise impose safety standards on broker hiring decisions. If Congress preempted state tort law and simultaneously failed to impose any federal safety requirements on broker selection, brokers would operate in a “black hole with no meaningful safety-related regulation.” Kavanaugh was not willing to read that result into “such indirect language in an economic-deregulation statute.”

He closed with this: truck safety is a matter of life and death. In 2022, approximately 500,000 reported truck accidents resulted in about 5,000 deaths and 114,000 injuries. Not all can be prevented. But some can. Some carriers are known to be less safe. Some truck drivers are known to be unfit.

If brokers can be held liable for disregarding poor safety records, Kavanaugh wrote, “they have a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable motor carriers.”

This opinion does not say that every broker who touches a load that ends in a crash is liable. Kavanaugh went out of his way to make that point. The plaintiff’s own counsel told the justices at oral argument that brokers should be able to successfully defend against tort suits if they have acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable carriers. The broker, counsel said, “is not going to have a problem if it’s asking the hard questions of the carrier.”

The operative word is “asking.”

The legal standard is ordinary care. The question a jury will now be permitted to ask in every state in America is whether the broker exercised reasonable care in selecting the carrier. That means: Did you check the carrier’s safety record? Was the carrier’s FMCSA data available to you? Did the data show elevated crash rates, conditional safety ratings, high out-of-service percentages, or prior enforcement history? Did you have a documented process for evaluating carrier safety? Or did you book the cheapest truck and move on?

If you are a freight broker operating in the United States today, the preemption defense you have been relying on since 2023, when the Seventh Circuit decided Ye v. GlobalTranz, is gone. You are now subject to state tort law in every jurisdiction where you arrange transportation. The carrier you select, the safety record you ignore, the data you decline to check, all of it is discoverable. All of it is admissible. All of it can be presented to a jury.

This decision removes the federal shield that was blocking an old theory. Negligent hiring is a tort theory that has existed for generations. The Restatement (Second) of Torts, Section 411, imposes a duty of reasonable care in employing a contractor for work carrying a risk of physical harm. Barrett cited it in the opinion.

Plaintiff’s attorneys who handle commercial motor vehicle crash cases have been building these case files for years, waiting for the preemption question to resolve. The dockets are ready. The carrier safety data is public. FMCSA’s SAFER system is free. A broker’s carrier selection history is discoverable in litigation. The inspection records showing which carriers a broker habitually dispatched, and what those carriers’ safety profiles looked like at the time of dispatch, are all federal records.

The first wave of post-Montgomery negligent-hiring suits against brokers will be filed within the next few weeks. They will name brokers who selected carriers with known safety deficiencies, conditional ratings, elevated BASIC percentile scores, prior out-of-service orders, and authority less than 18 months old. The discovery requests will seek the broker’s carrier vetting policies, internal screening criteria, communications with the carrier prior to dispatch, and any safety data the broker reviewed or failed to review.

If a broker has no documented carrier vetting process, that absence is itself evidence.

Kavanaugh flagged this in his concurrence, and it deserves its own discussion. The FAAAA mandates minimum insurance coverage for motor carriers. It does not mandate comparable coverage for brokers. The existing broker surety bond requirement under 49 U.S.C. Section 13906 is $75,000. That is not liability insurance. That is a financial responsibility bond intended to ensure payment to carriers and shippers. It does not cover tort claims.

Most freight brokers carry some form of general liability and contingent cargo coverage. Very few carry the kind of excess liability coverage that would respond to a catastrophic negligent-hiring verdict. The nuclear verdict environment in trucking litigation has produced eight-figure and nine-figure outcomes against motor carriers. Those same jury dynamics now apply to brokers.

The insurance industry has not yet priced this exposure. When it does, freight broker premiums will adjust. The adjustment will be significant for brokers who cannot demonstrate a documented, data-driven carrier selection process. The adjustment will be less severe for brokers who can show that their vetting methodology is systematic, repeatable, and grounded in publicly available safety data.

The carriers a broker habitually selects, their safety profiles, their authority ages, their crash histories, their inspection outcomes, all of that is now part of the risk profile that an underwriter will evaluate.

This is not complicated. The court did not rewrite the rules of physics. It removed a procedural shield. The underlying obligation to exercise reasonable care in selecting a carrier is the same standard every other industry participant already operates under. Shippers exercise care in selecting carriers. Carriers exercise care in hiring drivers. Brokers are now held to the same standard.

Document your carrier selection process. If you do not have one, build one. If you have one that checks whether the carrier has active authority and a pulse, that won’t hold up.

Check the safety data. FMCSA’s SAFER system, SMS BASIC percentile scores, crash rates, out-of-service rates, and inspection history are all public and free. If a carrier’s data shows elevated risk and you book them anyway, a plaintiff’s attorney will ask you why. Have an answer.

Keep records. The vetting you did, the data you reviewed, the criteria you applied, the decision you made. Timestamp it. Store it. When the subpoena arrives three years from now asking what you knew about the carrier you dispatched on the load that ended in a fatality, you want a file, not a shrug.

Talk to your insurance broker. Today. Ask whether your current coverage responds to a negligent-hiring tort claim. Ask what your exposure looks like under the post-Montgomery landscape. If you are an insurance broker who writes freight broker accounts, you should already be drafting the coverage review letter.

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is not just a broker case. Kavanaugh acknowledged this implicitly when he discussed 3PLs, freight forwarders, and digital freight platforms that make carrier selection decisions. The opinion is written about brokers because C.H. Robinson is a broker. But the logic applies to anyone in the supply chain who selects a carrier and has access to publicly available safety data showing that the carrier presents an elevated risk.

The court said that requiring a party to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles. That is a principle. It does not stop at licensed broker authority holders.

Shippers who select carriers directly are not preempted and never were. But shippers who relied on the assumption that their broker’s preemption defense would insulate the entire transaction from negligent-selection liability need to rethink that assumption. The broker can now be sued. The broker’s defense will include evidence of what the shipper knew, what the shipper required, and the shipper’s own carrier-selection criteria.

The liability does not disappear. It redistributes. It redistributes to the parties who had the data and could have made a different decision but chose not to.

The Supreme Court told the freight industry something today that it should have already known. If you pick the carrier, you own the choice. Document it. Defend it. Or answer for it.

The post The Supreme Court just told every freight broker that they can be sued appeared first on FreightWaves.

The so-called safety exception of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (F4A) includes the freight brokerage industry in its umbrella, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in the closely-watched case of Montgomery vs. Caribe Transport II.

The decision of the court was unanimous.

Its immediate impact is that the Supreme Court decision clears up conflicting circuit court cases about whether a 3PL can be sued in state court for damages resulting from a crash involving a carrier the broker hired. With this decision, the circuit conflicts are essentially settled and the question has been answered: yes, they can.

At issue was the phrase “with respect to motor vehicles” in F4A. That wording in the safety exception allowed state action on issues of safety to proceed even where F4A otherwise barred state actions that might impact a “price, route or service.” Does “respect to motor vehicles” include the broker that hired the carrier driving that vehicle?

The 9-0 vote, stunning not necessarily in its outcome but in its unanimity, emphatically answers that brokers are subject to tort action in a state court for incidents involving carriers they hired.

The decision remands the Montgomery case back to the Seventh Circuit. It is that court, and a lower Illinois federal court before that, which had ruled that brokers were not covered by F4A and its “with respect to motor vehicles” decision, and therefore state action against a broker was blocked by the rest of the law.

With that action, presumably C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) will return to the case as a defendant. It was C.H. Robinson that booked Caribe Transport II and was one of the defendants in the original case filed by Shawn Montgomery, the truck driver who was on the side of the road when struck by a Caribe truck. His leg needed to be amputated and Montgomery suffered other injuries as well.

C.H. Robinson led the defense of the case before the Supreme Court in early March oral arguments. The timing of Thursday’s decision took some attorneys by surprise, as they had assumed the decision might not come down until late June.

In the opinion penned by Amy Comey Barrett, who some attorneys, based on her questioning during oral arguments, assumed might be a swing vote in the decision, the summation passage said “the preemption question thus boils down to whether negligent-hiring claims of the type Montgomery presses are claims ‘with respect to motor vehicles.’ We conclude that they are.”

Defining ‘with respect to’

After reviewing dictionary definitions of “with respect to,” Judge Barrett then notes that F4A says a motor vehicle is a “machine, tractor, trailer, or semitrailer propelled or drawn by mechanical power and used on a highway in transportation.”

“Putting the pieces together, a claim is ‘with respect to motor vehicles’ if it ‘concerns’ or ‘regards’ the vehicles used in transportation,” Justice Barrett writes.

“Applying that interpretation here is straightforward,” Justice Barrett adds. “Montgomery alleges that C.H. Robinson failed to exercise reasonable care when it hired Caribe Transport, which had a subpar safety rating from federal regulators, to transport goods via truck. Based on that safety rating, Montgomery claims that C.H. Robinson knew (or should have known) that choosing Caribe Transport to move goods was reasonably likely to cause an accident. Requiring C.H. Robinson to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier therefore ‘concerns’ motor vehicles—most obviously, the trucks that will transport the goods. So Montgomery’s negligent-hiring claim falls within the FAAAA’s safety exception, which saves it from preemption.”

Rebutting C.H. Robinson’s arguments

Justice Barrett’s decision tackled several of C.H. Robinson’s arguments.

She dismissed the brokerage’s claim that allowing the safety exception to bring in brokerages would by extension bring in other activity as well.

“The safety exception saves only a subset of preempted claims: those involving regulations concerning motor vehicle safety,” Justice Barrett wrote in response.

There were also C.H. Robinson arguments about language within F4A regarding intrastate versus interstate transportation. Justice Barrett conceded there was a lack of logical consistency in some section of F4A.

But she then wrote: “Better to live with the mystery than to rewrite the statute.”

In a separate opinion that concurs with the decision by Justice Barrett, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, said the two justices believed “this case is closer than the Court’s opinion might suggest.”

The justices say the answer to the question of broker liability “depends on how expansively to read the key statutory phrase ‘with respect to motor vehicles.’ That inquiry is complicated because the phrase “with respect to”—like similar statutory phrases such as “related to” or ‘relating to’—is a somewhat elastic phrase whose breadth is determined by context.”

Even in concurring with the decision, the two separate justices support the brokerage industry’s argument that minimum insurance coverage mandates “suggests to at least some extent that Congress did not anticipate state tort suites against brokers for negligent selection. Otherwise, Congress presumably would have mandated insurance coverage for brokers as well.”

The two justices also discuss the intrastate-interstate dichotomy also raised by Justice Barrett.

The points raised by Justices Alito and Kavanaugh “favor the brokers and point toward a narrower construction of ‘with respect to motor vehicles’ such that state tort suits against brokers would be preempted,” the concurring opinion says. “But other contextual points decisively tilt in the opposite direction and point toward a broader construction of ‘with respect to motor vehicles’ such that state tort suits against brokers would be permitted.”

Montgomery broker case before SCOTUS featured topic in Robinson’s earnings call

At TIA meeting, freight brokers brace for Supreme Court decision

Strange bedfellows as states say brokers not protected under ‘safety exception’

The post SCOTUS rules 9-0 against brokers in Montgomery case appeared first on FreightWaves.

While most TL upcycles are driven by demand, the ongoing recovery has primarily been a supply-side phenomenon. During the Bank of America industrials conference in New York on Tuesday, leadership from J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT) said that first-quarter demand exceeded expectations and conditions have remained steady since. While the food and industrial segments are performing well, the housing sector continues to be a challenge.

Even without significant demand catalysts, it’s “steady as she goes, rates are going up,” said Brad Hicks, president of dedicated contract services.

During the first-quarter earnings season, most truckload carriers raised bid season rate expectations from a range of low- to mid-single-digit increases to mid- to high-single digits. Some carriers said that certain accounts, especially transactional-oriented customers, will likely see double-digit rate hikes. 

J.B. Hunt’s outlook for a 20% two-year-stacked rate increase includes a double-digit run rate by the back half of this year. It is currently seeing “a lot of bid activity” outside of the typical annual rate cycle as customers look to lock down capacity.

Its dedicated contracts have consumer-price escalators that run between 2% and 4% annually. This year’s run rate is likely to be 3% to 3.5%. However, radical shifts in costs (like driver wages) can result in higher rate increases.

J.B. Hunt has seen an earnings turnaround over the past three quarters, largely due to internal initiatives. It has been taking market share in intermodal and truckload, and in brokerage more recently. It also has a large cost-reduction initiative in place.

It has significantly outgrown the Eastern intermodal market, where its volumes are up 20% on a two-year-stacked comp. Pricing was modestly positive in the last bid season, but the mix shift East, where lengths of haul are shorter, has been a headwind to yields. It has been successful taking rate on headhaul lanes but it has had to cede ground on backhaul moves.

Management said it will likely be the next bid cycle before it can meaningfully increase rates, but noted very good modal conversion opportunities as intermodal is running at a 20% to 25% discount to TL. (FreightWaves data shows the mode is 25% cheaper.)

The company’s dedicated pipeline remains at record levels and the unit is expected to add 800 to 1,000 trucks on a net basis annually. Sign-on bonuses are now required in some markets (Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Texas) but it expects to recoup the cost increases through higher yields.

Management noted “a lot of momentum” at its brokerage unit, where volumes were up 10% year over year in the first quarter. The segment again booked an operating loss in the period as gross margins were squeezed by higher purchased transportation costs. However, revenue per load stepped 9% higher, and the company expects improved results as contracts are repriced to reflect current market rates. It also said that operating costs haven’t really changed even though volumes are up.

J.B. Hunt recently upped its cost takeout initiative to a $130 million annual run rate (on approximately $900 million in operating income). General belt-tightening along with AI-led and other automation initiatives are driving down its cost to serve.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• FedEx board approves spinoff of LTL unit
• Hub Group’s accounting error causes further reporting delays
• Forward Air flags customer loss, stock plummets

The post J.B. Hunt sees TL rates climbing 20% over next 2 years appeared first on FreightWaves.

Through two days of the 2026 International Roadcheck, FMCSA inspection records show 6,406 total inspections conducted, 11,010 violations logged, 2,055 out-of-service orders issued, and 5,217 distinct carriers inspected. Data via searchcarriers.com/blitz, which aggregates live FMCSA inspection records and refreshes daily during the event at no cost.

Isolating Day 2 from the cumulative totals: Tuesday’s enforcement added approximately 4,826 inspections, 8,373 violations, and 1,559 OOS orders to the running count. That puts Day 2’s OOS rate at approximately 32.3% — slightly higher than Day 1’s 31.4% — and the daily violations-per-inspection rate at approximately 1.73. The daily inspection chart shows Tuesday volume came in slightly above Monday, with roughly 3,350 inspections on Day 2 compared to approximately 3,050 on Day 1.

The scale of Day 2 enforcement matters for a specific reason: the 2025 full-event vehicle OOS rate across all 56,178 inspections was 18.1%. Two days into 2026, the OOS rate is running nearly double that benchmark. That gap cannot be explained by enforcement concentration alone. It reflects the condition of trucks on the road.

Pennsylvania Is Running the Event

The state-level data through two days tells a story that every operator running the Northeast corridor needs to understand. Pennsylvania led all states in Day 1 inspections with 217. Through Day 2, Pennsylvania’s cumulative inspection count stands at 1,156 — meaning the state ran approximately 939 inspections on Tuesday alone, nearly 20% of the entire national Day 2 volume. No other state is close. Oklahoma is second at 533 cumulative. Kentucky is third at 399. New Jersey is fourth at 359. Alabama is fifth at 327.

The full top ten through two days: PA (1,156), OK (533), KY (399), NJ (359), AL (327), MI (294), NM (184), NE (179), SD (178), LA (174).

Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Kentucky together account for 2,088 of the 6,406 cumulative inspections — 32.6% of all inspections in three states. The geographic concentration of enforcement in the Northeast and through the mid-South is not random. These are high-volume freight corridors, and enforcement personnel are deployed where freight moves. If your loads are running I-78, I-76, I-81, or I-40 through Oklahoma, the inspection probability on Day 3 is at least as high as it was on Day 2.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania also dominate the worst individual inspection lists across both days, which is a separate signal from volume. High inspection counts in a state produce high violation counts by volume. But NJ and PA are generating the highest per-inspection violation totals as well, which suggests the inspection intensity in those corridors is finding more violations per truck, not just more trucks.

The Worst Individual Inspections From Day 2

The cumulative worst inspections list through two days shows how significantly Day 2 raised the severity bar on the vehicle side. The single worst inspection by total violations remains the Day 1 NJ inspection SPEPI02245, which logged 30 total violations including 28 vehicle violations. But Day 2 added four new entries to the top five.

Pennsylvania inspection C208613208 from May 12 came in second with 27 total violations. Kansas inspection PD83971978 logged 26. New Jersey’s SPSHI00417 and Pennsylvania’s E953613227 each logged 24.

The worst OOS list has shifted more significantly. New Jersey’s SPPSI04143 from May 12 logged 9 OOS conditions out of 14 total violations — a 64% OOS rate within a single inspection. Wyoming’s PTLP000665 from Day 1 holds second with 9 OOS from 20 violations. Texas inspection V262347853 from Day 1 and New Jersey’s SPSSI01091 from Day 1 each produced 8 OOS. Pennsylvania’s C208613208 from Day 2 also logged 8 OOS out of its 27 total violations.

The driver violation totals from Day 2 are the most significant numbers in the dataset. Alabama inspection 1440004561 from May 12 logged 17 driver violations out of 18 total — the highest single-inspection driver violation count across both days by a wide margin. Pennsylvania’s E953613226 logged 16 driver violations out of 23 total. Those numbers are not the product of one missed annotation or an expired document. An inspection that produces 16 or 17 driver violations found comprehensive driver compliance failure: credential problems, HOS violations, ELD documentation failures, and regulatory violations stacked within a single cab.

Which Carriers Are Generating the Most Inspection Activity

The most inspected carriers through two days reflect the scale of large national fleets moving freight through high-inspection-density corridors. United Parcel Service Inc (DOT #21800) leads all carriers with 29 inspections, 11 violations, and a 3% OOS rate. New Prime Inc (DOT #3706) has 27 inspections, 22 violations, and a 7% OOS rate. Federal Express Corporation (DOT #86876) has logged 23 inspections, 31 violations, and a 9% OOS rate. Central Transport LLC (DOT #661173) is at 22 inspections with a 14% OOS rate. Tornado Bus Company (DOT #565859) has completed 21 inspections with only 3 total violations and a 0% OOS rate.

The worst carriers list by OOS rate — minimum 10 inspections — surfaces names that are not household brands. Annett Holdings Inc (DOT #87409) leads at 27% OOS rate: 3 of 11 inspections resulted in OOS orders with 6 total violations. Western Express Inc (DOT #511412) is at 21% with 4 of 19 inspections OOS and 36 total violations. Swift Transportation Co of Arizona LLC (DOT #54283) is at 15% with 2 of 13 OOS and 16 violations. Central Transport LLC at 14% and Schneider National Carriers Inc (DOT #264184) at 13% round out the five.

Western Express’s 36 violations across 19 inspections — nearly 1.9 violations per inspection — combined with a 21% OOS rate is the worst overall compliance profile among carriers with significant inspection volume through Day 2. That combination of high violation density and high OOS rate reflects systemic maintenance and compliance gaps, not a run of bad luck in inspection lanes.

The best carriers list shows what compliance looks like under sustained inspection pressure. Autobuses Ejecutivos LLC (DOT #1044521) has completed 18 inspections with 0 violations — a perfect record through two days. Gemini Motor Transport LP (DOT #913300) is at 0.13 violations per inspection across 15 inspections. Tornado Bus Company holds at 0.14 violations per inspection across 21 inspections. Wal-Mart Transportation LLC (DOT #63585) is at 0.27 across 11 inspections. Krise Transportation Inc (DOT #550782) is at 0.30 across 10 inspections.

Eighteen inspections with zero violations is not a result that happens to compliant operators by accident. It is the output of a maintenance and compliance program that runs the same way every day, regardless of whether blitz week is on the calendar.

The 2026 Focus Areas: What Day 2 Confirms

The ELD tampering and cargo securement focus areas designated by CVSA for 2026 are being validated by the violation data coming out of both days. The driver violation totals from Day 2’s worst inspections — 17 driver violations in Alabama, 16 in Pennsylvania — reflect the kind of compounded HOS and ELD compliance failures that the focus area was designed to surface. A 17-driver-violation inspection in a single stop is not an inspector finding one falsified log. It is an inspector working through an ELD record with multiple edit anomalies, HOS patterns that don’t align with supporting documents, and credential issues that compound the underlying records problems.

On the vehicle side, the inspection results that produced 27 and 26 vehicle violations in single stops in Pennsylvania and Kansas are almost entirely mechanical: brake systems, tires, lighting, and coupling devices. Those numbers confirm what the 2025 Roadcheck data showed and what the 2026 data is continuing to show — cargo securement is not generating the extreme per-inspection violation totals that show up in the worst inspection lists. The highest-severity single inspections are dominated by brake, tire, and lighting failures. Cargo securement violations are consistent and widespread, but the catastrophic per-inspection totals are coming from mechanical maintenance failures.

That distinction matters for small carriers setting maintenance priorities heading into Day 3 and beyond: cargo securement is the named focus, but brake and tire condition is what is producing the worst individual inspection outcomes in the data.

What to Do on Day 3: The Owner-Operator

Day 3 closes out tonight. The enforcement posture does not drop until the event ends. Pennsylvania ran nearly 940 inspections on Tuesday. If your truck is moving through I-78, I-81, I-76, or the Oklahoma turnpike system today, the inspection density has not changed since yesterday.

The pre-trip process is the compliance program. Brake hoses for visible air leaks. Tires for inflation, tread depth, and sidewall damage. Lights front to rear on both the tractor and trailer. These are not Roadcheck preparations — they are the pre-trip requirements under 49 CFR 396.13 that apply every dispatch. A tire violation found at a Pennsylvania scale on Day 3 was a tire problem that existed before the truck left the yard.

On the ELD side: the Alabama inspection that produced 17 driver violations on Day 2 is the data point every owner-operator should understand going into the last day. Seventeen driver violations in a single stop represents a record so compromised that an inspector spent significant time working through it. The most common way an ELD record gets into that condition is not deliberate fraud — it is accumulated documentation errors: unassigned driving events that were never resolved, edits made without annotations, gaps that don’t align with supporting documents. Open your 8-day log before you roll today. If there are unassigned events, resolve them before you reach a scale.

What to Do on Day 3: The Small Fleet

If you have trucks moving today, the state data tells you where to focus driver communication. Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and New Jersey are the four highest-volume enforcement states through two days. If any of your trucks are running those corridors on Day 3, those are the drivers who need a specific pre-dispatch conversation about ELD record cleanliness and cargo securement — not a general reminder, a specific one.

The carrier data through two days also provides a benchmark worth internalizing. The best carriers on the list — Autobuses Ejecutivos at 0.00 violations per inspection across 18 stops, Gemini Motor Transport at 0.13 — are not exempt from scrutiny. They are passing inspections at volume. A small fleet with 5 to 15 trucks does not have the inspection volume of a UPS or New Prime, but the compliance posture that produces a 0.00 violation rate is available at any fleet size. It is a maintenance program, a driver training program, and a pre-trip discipline that runs the same way on Day 3 of blitz week as it does on a Tuesday in September.

On the shipper data: if any of your trucks are currently hauling USPS, Lowe’s, or Amazon freight, flag those drivers specifically for a pre-dispatch compliance check. Not because the freight creates the violation — it doesn’t — but because those shipper lanes are producing the highest OOS rates in the current data, which means inspectors processing freight in those lanes are finding compliance problems at elevated rates across the carrier pool. Your truck’s compliance is your responsibility regardless of whose freight is on it.

Three Questions Operators Are Actually Asking

Q: My truck got placed OOS on Day 2 for a brake violation. The inspector cited 20% defective brakes. What does that actually mean and how do I get back on the road?

The 20% defective brakes standard means that at least 20% of the vehicle’s total braking capacity has been found in an OOS condition — a brake out of adjustment, a brake with a cracked or broken component, or a brake that is otherwise inoperable. For a standard 18-wheel combination vehicle, that typically means two or more brakes are defective. The truck is parked at the inspection location until a qualified brake technician certifies that the violation has been corrected. You cannot simply adjust the brakes yourself and release the truck — the correction needs to be documented and the truck released by the officer or through a process the officer specifies. Call a mobile heavy-duty brake service that can come to the location, document the repair, and get the truck cleared. Keep the repair invoice. It is your evidence that the violation was corrected properly, and you will need it if the inspection record is ever questioned.

Q: Western Express has a 21% OOS rate and 36 violations across 19 inspections. Does that kind of carrier performance data affect the loads I can get from brokers?

Not directly from this data — brokers and shippers primarily use FMCSA CSA BASIC scores and safety ratings, not real-time Roadcheck dashboards, for carrier vetting decisions. But the Roadcheck violation data feeds directly into CSA scores, which brokers do check. The violations being generated during blitz week are entering FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System right now and will be reflected in BASIC scores within the next reporting cycle. A carrier whose HOS Compliance or Vehicle Maintenance BASIC score climbs above 65% as a result of Roadcheck violations will see that reflected in broker load board visibility and shipper tender acceptance. The connection between this week’s inspections and next month’s freight access is direct — it just runs through the CSA scoring system rather than a real-time feed.

Q: Day 3 is the last day. Is there any reason to think enforcement will be lighter today than it was Tuesday?

No. CVSA and its partner agencies staff the full 72-hour event window. There is no documented pattern of Day 3 enforcement being lighter than Days 1 or 2. The Pennsylvania data is the most relevant indicator here — the state ran 217 inspections on Day 1 and approximately 939 on Day 2. Day 3 deployment follows the same assignment structure. The trucks that cleared Days 1 and 2 without an incident did so because they were compliant on those days. The same compliance posture that produced a clean Day 1 and a clean Day 2 is what produces a clean Day 3. If your pre-trip was complete this morning, roll. If it wasn’t, do it before you leave the yard.

The post Roadcheck Day 2 Nearly Tripled Day 1 Volume. The Violation Data Shows Where Trucks Are Failing. appeared first on FreightWaves.

The world’s fifth-largest ocean container line said liner revenue fell 8% to $4.8 billion year-over year on volume that was narrowly off 1% at 3.2 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs). 

That compared to global volume that increased 4.4%, according to Container Trade Statistics.

Liner earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation (EBIT) dropped to a loss of $174 million. 

The average freight rate of $1,330 per TEU was weaker by 9.5% from the year-ago quarter. That was in line with CTS data showing a 9.7% decline.

“The first quarter of 2026 was unsatisfactory for us, with weather-related supply chain disruptions [in the Atlantic] and pressure on freight rates leading to significantly lower results,” said Rolf Habben Jansen, chief executive of Hapag-Lloyd AG, in an earnings release.

Hapag-Lloyd maintained full-year 2026 guidance of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $1.1 billion–$3.1 billion; and EBIT of a loss of $1.5 billion to a profit of $500 million.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post Lower revenue, higher costs drive Hapag-Lloyd to loss  appeared first on FreightWaves.

Changes in the New Jersey independent contractor rule, revealed last week, are taking some of the edge off earlier hostility to the proposal when it was first introduced.

But what remains is still being viewed by those who hire independent contractors as an ABC test that will be one of the most stringent in the country.

The rule was released by the New Jersey Department of Labor (NJDOL) in order to codify regulatory precedents that have built up over the years and put into the regulatory framework. The new IC rule will be used by agencies interpreting such laws as New Jersey’s Wage & Hour law and its Wage Payment law, according to the NJDOL in its announcement of the rule.

New Jersey’s ABC rule on its surface is similar to ABC tests in other states. It is not a law, unlike California’s AB5, but rather a product drawn from earlier regulatory and court rulings. 

It says for a worker to be independent, that person must meet all three of these criteria:

• A) Worker has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of services, both under the worker’s contract of service and in fact; 
• B) Work performed is either outside the usual course of the business for which the work is being performed, or the work is performed outside of all the places of business of the enterprise; and 
• C) Worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession or business. 

The details in further defining those three was at the heart of the recent process.

Legal commentary that surrounded the recently-announced changes mostly were in agreement on what were the most significant shifts from the initial proposal, with one of the biggest seemingly being the most simple.

Complying with the law no longer a trigger

In what was seen as the most radical change in the original proposal, New Jersey’s A prong would have established that a worker was more likely to be found to be an employee rather than an IC if the employer required compliance with laws or regulations. 

As the initial proposal put it, “There is nothing in New Jersey statute…to indicate that control or direction exercised by a putative employer to ensure compliance with a law or rule should be excluded from consideration when evaluating the facts of a potential employment relationship under Prong A of the ABC test.”

In other words, requiring a worker to follow the law could be interpreted as “control” of the employee, which is core to Prong A.

That regulation regarding compliance with the law is now out of the revised proposal. The new language reads: “Actions taken by a putative employer solely to comply with federal, state, or local, laws or regulations shall not, standing alone, be considered evidence of control or direction under Prong A.” 

Greg Feary, a partner at the trucking-focused law firm of Scopelitis, described the impact of that change on trucking as “big.” “The rules, regulations and laws are big in any industry that’s heavily regulated,” Feary said in an interview with FreightWaves. “Safety in trucking is heavily regulated, as well as federal leasing regulations.” 

Having a trucking company require its ICs to follow those laws is standard practice, Feary noted. And under the New Jersey law, a company requiring adherence to the law could be viewed as establishing an employee relationship, rather than a truly independent status.

It would have been a big problem

In its submitted comments to the state on the rule, attorney Richard Reibstein of the law firm of Troutman Pepper Locke, who specializes in IC law, was more stark on what the impact would have been had that rule stayed in.  

“Unless this part of the regulation is corrected, it will foster the elimination of almost all independent contractors in this state,” Reibstein wrote. 

Feary said a second change that can be viewed as having an impact on transportation specifically was the proposal that the use of proprietary apps could be seen as also exerting employer control under the A prong. 

“The proposed rule mentions proprietary apps as evidence of control,” Feary said. The apps could be anything from a dispatch app or a scanner app, he said.

“But they deleted all of that from the final rule,” Feary said. “That’s a good thing.”

Another change Feary said was positive for the trucking sector is a definition of a company’s place of business that could have been wide enough to bring in the cab of a truck as a place of business.

In his comments, Reibstein said that proposal regarding the definition of a place of business “takes an extraordinarily expansive view of the second part of the B Prong. It states that a hiring party’s ‘places of business’ not only include ‘locations where the enterprise has a physical plant or conducts an integral part of its business,’ but may also include ‘locations outside of the putative employer’s physical plant, where the services performed by the individual [worker] are an essential component of, rather than ancillary to, the putative employer’s business.’”

He added that the definition of “essential” and “ancillary” were vague. But it did not make it through to the final rule.

State business group still has objections

Even with those changes, not everybody is happy. 

The New Jersey Business & Industry Association, in testimony submitted Tuesday to a hearing held by the Senate Labor Committee, spelled out some of its concerns with the regulation even after the changes have been implemented.

The organization backed several of the changes in Prong A regarding control. But it objected to various parts of the B and C prongs regarding the definition of an “independently established business.”

As the law firm of Morgan Lewis said in an online commentary, “under Prong C, the final regulations still specify that holding a professional license, having multiple employers, registering a business entity, receiving a 1099 tax form, or carrying insurance are not individually sufficient to establish an independently established business.” 

In the testimony delivered by Jack Kelly, a policy analyst with NJBIA, the organization said the new rule, even after the amendments, are “a sweeping and unilateral redefinition of settled legal standards, one that would dramatically narrow the pathways to independent work in the State.”

In bundling up the precedents set by earlier court cases in New Jersey on independent contractor law–a 1991 case known as Carpet Remnant Warehouse comes up frequently in discussion of the state’s IC regulation–NJBIA said the new rules still apply too strict a standard to determine whether a business serving a third party can be classified as an IC.

“Proving independent contractor status is nearly impossible in many industries,” Kelly testified. 

Kelly and his organization are urging the Senate and Assembly to approve “concurrent resolutions…to void these regulations.”

“Alternatively, the State should use the next 120 days to work collaboratively on statutory remedies that allow these rules to be interpreted in a way that acknowledges the realities of the modern gig economy and does not infringe upon legitimate independent contractors and their right to maintain that status,” Kelly said in his testimony.

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The post Crucial changes in latest NJ independent contractor rule impacting truckers appeared first on FreightWaves.

Cornell, Chief Risk Officer at SPG Cargo & Logistics, joined me recently on the Fraud Watch podcast to discuss what the industry is now calling the Trojan Driver scam. What stood out most was not just the method itself, but how he described uncovering it. There was no dramatic breakthrough. It started with small inconsistencies across cases that almost made sense on the surface.

the case that didn’t quite add up

The first incident did not immediately raise alarms. At first glance, it looked like a standard theft. But Cornell noticed details that did not fit. The truck was parked somewhere the driver could not explain. The stop did not match the route. Basic identifying information came back inconsistent. Communication became difficult. None of those issues alone proved anything. Together, they painted a very different picture.

At the time, it still looked isolated. What changed everything was when Cornell started discussing it with others in the industry. First in smaller groups, then publicly at a conference. Within days, more companies began reporting similar situations. Different freight. Different carriers. Same types of inconsistencies. That was the moment it stopped looking random. It became a method.

The idea behind the Trojan Driver is not entirely new. Organized theft groups have spent years trying to place insiders inside warehouses, brokerages, and distribution centers to gain access to shipment information and target intel. What changed was the role of the insider.

In older schemes, the insider gathered information while someone else handled the theft. There was separation between intelligence and execution. That separation created risk for the people running the operation. The Trojan Driver removes that separation completely. The insider is the driver. They do not just know what freight is moving. They control where it goes and when control changes hands.

Cornell believes this shift happened because the industry improved at detecting traditional fraud methods. As onboarding and carrier vetting became more sophisticated, organized theft groups lost easy access through fake carriers and identity manipulation. Instead, they adapted by targeting the hiring process of legitimate trucking companies.

why it spreads slowly

Cornell does not believe this will become the industry’s dominant theft method overnight. Unlike phishing or identity fraud, the Trojan Driver model takes time. Drivers have to get hired. They have to build trust. They have to wait for the right load assignment and the right opportunity. Ironically, that patience is part of what makes the method difficult to stop.

Cornell describes it as an opportunity-based tactic. Theft groups keep it available and use it when conditions align, while continuing to rely on other fraud methods in between. The strategy is intentional. A diversified approach keeps the industry from adapting too quickly to one specific threat.

The comparison to phishing attacks is hard to ignore. Early social engineering scams were easy to detect and difficult to scale. Over time, they evolved into one of the most common forms of cybercrime. The Trojan Driver scam appears to be much earlier in that cycle, which means the industry still has a chance to get ahead of it.

the structural problem

This is where Cornell points to the larger issue. From a broker’s perspective, the responsibility is usually limited to vetting the trucking company itself. If the carrier passes every check, there is often no practical way for a broker to identify a compromised driver in real time. The exposure exists inside the carrier’s hiring and screening process. That creates a major gap.

Shippers, brokers, and carriers all operate within separate responsibilities. That structure made sense when threats stayed within clear boundaries. It becomes far less effective against a method specifically designed to move between those gaps.

Cornell compares the problem to the evolution of safety standards in trucking. Real progress did not happen because one part of the industry decided to address it alone. It improved when the entire industry recognized it as a shared responsibility through shared standards, shared information, and shared accountability. Cargo theft may require the same shift.

what this means going forward

The Trojan Driver scam will not be the last evolution of cargo theft. Organized theft groups constantly test new methods, refine what works, and abandon what does not. Successful tactics spread quickly once they prove effective.

The question was never whether cargo theft would evolve. It always has. The real question is whether the industry can adapt faster than the threat itself.

Scott Cornell is Chief Risk Officer at SPG Cargo & Logistics. This article is based on his appearance on the Fraud Watch podcast.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phillip Brink.

RELATED STORIES:

Trojan Driver scam infiltrates legitimate trucking companies – FreightWaves

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The post Cargo theft is changing, and the risk is now inside the truck appeared first on FreightWaves.

Carload and intermodal traffic both continued to show modest gains over last year in U.S. rail traffic figures for the week ending May 9.

Figures from the Association of American Railroads show total traffic for the week was 513,755 carloads and intermodal units, up 3.7% from the same week a year ago. That includes 229,592 carloads, an increase of 3.3%, and 284,163 containers and trailers, up 4%.

Grain, up 16.7%, has been a solid performer most of this year, while chemicals, better by 6%, are usually an indicator of downstream industrial output.

Through 18 weeks of 2026, total combined traffic is 9,049,326 carloads and intermodal units, a gain of 1.9% from the same period in 2025. The overall figure includes 4,067,235 carloads, up 3.6%, and 4,982,091 intermodal units, up 0.6%.

North American figures for the week, from nine reporting U.S., Canadian, and Mexican railroads, include 336,095 carloads, an increase of 2% from the corresponding week a year ago, and 371,416 intermodal units, a gain of 2.3%. The total figure of 707,511 carloads and intermodal units is a gain of 2.1%. For the year to date, North American railroads report handling 12,468,690 carloads and intermodal units, a 2% increase over the first 18 weeks of 2025.

Canadian traffic for the week included 92,948 carloads, down 1.4% from the same week a year ago, and 874,677 intermodal units, down 6.4%. The year-to-date figure of 2,940,777 carloads and intermodal units is a 0.2% increase over the first 18 weeks of 2025.

In Mexico, railroads reported 13,555 carloads for the week, up 2.8% from the corresponding week in 2025, and 12,576 intermodal units, up 27%. The cumulative volume of 478,587 carloads and intermodal units is a 16.3% gain from the same period in 2025.

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The post U.S. weekly rail traffic again beats 2025 levels appeared first on FreightWaves.

Those questions exist because something real is happening. Aurora Innovation is running driverless Class 8 trucks commercially between Dallas and Houston. Kodiak Robotics is operating driverless trucks in the Permian Basin. Both companies have logged real commercial miles, reported real safety data, and announced scaling plans that extend to hundreds of trucks by the end of 2026 and thousands beyond that. This is not a press release. It is operational.

And the people who have spent careers behind the wheel of a truck, who understand what it actually takes to move freight safely across this country, deserve to have this conversation on their terms — not on the terms of a venture-backed company’s investor presentation.

What a Professional Driver Does That Nobody Is Talking About

Start with the thing that gets left out of every autonomous trucking announcement: what a professional driver actually does for highway safety that has nothing to do with steering and braking.

An experienced driver hears the tire that is losing pressure before the monitoring system registers it. They feel the brake pulling to one side before the alignment is measurably off on any sensor. They smell an electrical component beginning to fail before it generates a fault code. They notice the shimmy at 65 miles per hour that the ECM has not translated into a diagnostic event. They see the passenger car drifting in the next lane and recognize — before any algorithm has processed the trajectory — that the driver is asleep.

That is not just intuition. It is years of accumulated pattern recognition built through thousands of hours in a moving vehicle, learning what that specific truck sounds like on that specific road at that specific load weight. No autonomous system in commercial deployment today replicates that. Not because the technology does not exist in theory — but because that kind of contextual, experiential awareness is what a professional brings to the job, and it is exactly what disappears when the cab is empty.

This is not an argument that autonomous trucks cannot be safe. It is an argument that replacing that layer of awareness requires deliberately engineering something to fill the gap — and the question of whether the industry has done that adequately at scale has not been answered. The data set is too small and too controlled to know yet.

The Maintenance Problem Nobody Has Solved at Scale

When an autonomous truck breaks down, who figured out it was breaking down?

In a conventional truck, the answer is usually the driver — who noticed something was wrong before a sensor said so, pulled to a safe location with professional judgment about where and how, and then managed the situation with their presence, their training, and their physical ability to act. They placed the reflective triangles. They flagged approaching traffic. They called for help and communicated the specific nature of the problem to whoever responded.

The autonomous truck’s maintenance architecture works differently and requires things that the current infrastructure was not built to provide. Sensor calibration becomes a scheduled safety event — a lidar unit operating at even minor degradation from road grime, insect accumulation, or moisture is making decisions about a world it cannot fully see, with no one in the cab to notice the picture is degrading. Software updates — Aurora has pushed four major releases since April 2025 — change the operational behavior of the truck in ways that require validation before deployment, and at scale that validation process introduces risk that has no parallel in conventional trucking.

Redundant systems — the backup braking, the backup steering, the backup power — must be tested regularly because their failure mode is invisible until they are needed. The problem is that in a conventional truck, a driver who discovers the backup is failing has discovered it because the primary just failed. The entire premise of the redundant architecture is that you find out in a shop, not on the highway. But testing redundant systems requires specialized technicians with specialized tools, working in hub facilities that do not yet exist along most of the routes these trucks will eventually need to run.

The CDL workforce availability is documented and ongoing. The shortage of technicians qualified to service autonomous sensor arrays, software-defined safety systems, and redundant electronic architectures does not yet exist — because the scale of demand for those technicians does not yet exist. When it does, the training pipeline to produce them is years behind where it needs to be. That gap is not a technology company’s problem. It is the industry’s problem, and it will land on the carriers, the drivers, and the roadside assistance networks that have to deal with the consequences.

The Breakdown at 2 AM That Nobody Has a Complete Answer For

Here is the scenario that deserves a direct answer from every autonomous trucking company operating on public roads.

A driverless truck is running a Sun Belt corridor at 2 AM. A tire fails. The vehicle executes a controlled stop and pulls to the shoulder — functions the autonomous system is designed to perform correctly. The truck is now stationary on the shoulder of a major interstate, in the dark, with 80,000 pounds of freight and no human being in the cab.

The system alerts Aurora’s operations center. Hazard lights activate. A remote operator assesses the situation via onboard cameras. A support vehicle is dispatched from the nearest hub terminal.

Now the questions start.

Who places the reflective triangles 100 feet, 200 feet, and 300 feet behind the disabled vehicle as FMCSA regulations require? Not the truck — it cannot. Not the remote operator in a different state — they cannot. The support vehicle, if it arrives in time, can. But what happens in the 45 minutes before it gets there, on a dark interstate, with an 80,000-pound disabled vehicle and approaching traffic that may or may not see it in time?

What does a state trooper do when they arrive at that scene? In San Francisco in December 2025, a power outage simultaneously disrupted more than 1,500 Waymo robotaxis. The city’s 911 dispatcher sat on hold with Waymo’s first responder hotline for 53 minutes while the system was overwhelmed with remote assistance requests. San Francisco’s fire department publicly stated that stalled autonomous vehicles were forcing first responders to become “default roadside assistance.” Those are passenger cars in an urban environment. The stakes of the same scenario on a rural interstate with a driverless semi are not comparable.

The Governors Highway Safety Association and Waymo launched a first responder training course in late 2025 specifically to address this gap — teaching law enforcement, firefighters, and EMS how to approach a vehicle with no driver, how to execute an emergency shutdown, and how to communicate with an operations center rather than a human being in the cab. The fact that this course had to be created at all tells you everything about how far ahead of the supporting infrastructure the technology has moved.

A 2023 U.S. patent covering autonomous vehicle breakdown protocols describes the vehicle’s ability to detect a breakdown, stop safely, and use its perception system to alert nearby traffic. It describes detection and communication. It does not describe the physical safety actions that follow — because those require a human, and the patent cannot patent something that does not exist in the system.

The Question the Industry Is Not Asking Publicly

The autonomous trucking companies running today will point to their safety records. Aurora: 250,000 driverless miles, zero system-attributed collisions, 100% on-time performance. Gatik: 60,000 driverless orders completed without incident. Those numbers are real and they are meaningful within the context that generated them — controlled Sun Belt corridors, favorable weather conditions, limited route complexity, and an operational scale that allows the support infrastructure to keep pace.

The question that those numbers do not answer is what the safety record looks like at 20,000 trucks across 500 routes including lower-density corridors, winter weather states, and the full range of highway conditions that professional drivers navigate every day as a matter of professional practice.

Waymo’s robotaxi fleet — which has accumulated dramatically more miles than any autonomous trucking program — offers the closest available data point on what AV safety looks like at scale. Between July 2021 and November 2025, Waymo reported 1,429 incidents to NHTSA, resulting in 117 injuries and two fatalities. Waymo vehicles in Austin and Atlanta were documented passing stopped school buses with flashing red lights on multiple occasions in late 2025 and early 2026. These are not arguments that autonomous vehicles cannot improve. They are arguments that the safety picture at scale is more complicated than the safety record at launch, and that professional drivers who spent careers developing judgment in complex, ambiguous, and high-stakes situations were providing something that the early data is not yet capturing.

The industry deserves to know — before the deployment scales past the point where the questions become urgent — what the plan is when a driverless truck encounters a scenario its system was not designed for and there is no professional driver present to exercise judgment about what to do next.

What Drivers and Carriers Should Be Demanding

This is not a conversation about whether autonomous trucks will exist. They exist now. It is a conversation about the terms on which they exist on public roads alongside the professional drivers, small carriers, first responders, and everyone else who shares that infrastructure.

There are specific things that drivers and carriers have the standing and the leverage to demand right now, while the regulatory framework is still being written and the operational protocols are still being established.

Transparent, independently verified safety data that covers the full operational domain — not just the best-case routes and conditions but the edge cases, the weather events, the infrastructure failures, and the out-of-domain scenarios that professional drivers handle with judgment every day. The data that Aurora and Kodiak publish is self-reported. Independent verification at scale has not happened.

Clear regulatory standards for roadside safety when a driverless vehicle becomes disabled on a public highway. FMCSA’s current regulatory updates are exempting autonomous trucks from human-specific requirements like hours-of-service rules. What the updated regulations do not yet specify with clarity is the full set of obligations that apply when a driverless truck is disabled on a shoulder — who is responsible, what must be done, and on what timeline. Those answers matter to every driver who passes a disabled autonomous truck at 70 miles per hour in the middle of the night.

First responder training and infrastructure investment in the corridors where autonomous trucks will operate — not just in the urban markets where Waymo has built relationships with city fire departments, but in the rural highway patrol posts and rural fire stations in the Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico corridors where Aurora and Kodiak are running their routes. That training costs money and takes time, and the companies whose trucks are on those roads have an obligation to fund and facilitate it before their trucks are there in numbers that matter.

And from the maintenance and infrastructure side: honest acknowledgment that the technician workforce needed to service autonomous trucks at scale does not exist yet, and a commitment to building the training pipeline before the deployment outpaces the people who can keep the equipment safe.

What This Means for Professional Drivers Right Now

The near-term freight market reality is this: autonomous trucks in 2026 are operating on a small number of Sun Belt highway corridors doing hub-to-hub long-haul runs. They are not backing into docks. They are not navigating shipper facilities. They are not managing customer relationships, responding to last-minute load changes, or exercising the kind of professional judgment that experienced drivers apply hundreds of times on every run. The human driver is still essential to every load these trucks move — on the first mile, the last mile, and every moment of complexity that the highway does not provide.

The professional skills that autonomous systems cannot replicate — dock interaction, situational judgment in ambiguous conditions, direct shipper relationships, physical presence, and the kind of contextual awareness that comes from years of operating heavy equipment on real roads — are also the skills that define the most defensible freight for small carriers and experienced drivers over the next decade.

That is not a reason to be comfortable with unanswered questions about highway safety and emergency response. It is a reason to insist those questions get answered while there is still time to shape the answers, and while the professional driver community still has the leverage to demand accountability from an industry that is scaling technology onto roads that belong to everyone.

The drivers who have spent careers keeping this supply chain moving — safely, professionally, and without the backup of a $1.2 billion cash reserve and a PR team — have earned the right to ask hard questions about what shares the road with them. Ask them.

The post Nobody Is Asking the Hard Questions About What Happens When an Autonomous Truck Breaks Down on the Highway at 2 AM. Let Us Start. appeared first on FreightWaves.

The White House published a press release on April 22, 2026, titled “Trump Effect: American Manufacturing Is Roaring Back as Factory Activity Hits Four-Year High.” The ISM Manufacturing PMI did reach 52.7 in March 2026 — a multi-year high that signals genuine expansion in domestic manufacturing activity. The administration counts over 100 companies that have pledged to reshore or expand domestic production.

Here is what those numbers do not tell you.

IoT Analytics, which tracks manufacturing construction data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Value of Construction Put in Place survey, published an analysis concluding that it is too early to characterize what is happening as a reshoring boom. Manufacturing construction spending excluding computer and electronic products — which is dominated by semiconductor fabs that generate relatively little trucking freight per dollar invested — rose approximately 5.6% between February 2025 and March 2026 in nominal terms. Adjusted for the 3.3% annual inflation rate as of March 2026, real growth in manufacturing construction was approximately 2.3%. Manufacturing employment has declined 1% since the widespread tariffs took effect, with only a slight uptick in the most recent data.

Meanwhile, the Kearney Reshoring Index, which measures year-over-year change in the U.S. manufacturing import ratio, shows that while 2025 was modestly better than 2024 for domestic production share, the U.S. remained well below the levels that would indicate a structural reshoring trend. And a December 2025 Institute for Supply Management survey of companies found that 64% had no plans to reshore operations — compared to only 36% planning to or actively doing so.

The freight reality that a carrier needs to understand is this: there is no across-the-board manufacturing boom generating a rising tide of new domestic freight. What there is — and what is directly actionable right now — is a specific set of industry sectors where domestic production investment is real, already underway, and generating truck freight that is not yet fully locked into routing guides. Those sectors are pharma, food and beverage, flatbed-adjacent construction materials, and regional automotive supply chains. Each one moves differently, requires different positioning, and rewards different kinds of carrier preparation.

Pharmaceutical: The Sector With the Most Freight Already Moving

Pharmaceutical manufacturing is the sector where reshoring is most concretely real and where the freight implications for regional carriers are most immediate. Eli Lilly announced a $27 billion domestic manufacturing investment plan that includes facilities in Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Alabama. The Alabama facility broke ground in 2026 as part of that plan and represents one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturing investments in that state’s history. Merck has an active domestic vaccine and biologics manufacturing program. Johnson & Johnson announced a $55 billion domestic manufacturing pledge in 2025, with production expected to ramp across a five-to-seven-year timeline.

The freight profile of a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility is specific and worth understanding precisely. Large pharmaceutical plants do not generate enormous volumes of outbound truckload freight the way a consumer goods distribution center does. What they generate is a consistent, high-frequency movement of regulated inputs, controlled substances, packaging components, and finished product — much of it temperature-sensitive, much of it requiring chain-of-custody documentation, and much of it moving on short regional lanes between facilities, distribution points, and specialty logistics hubs. This is not dry van spot freight. This is relationship-dependent, compliance-intensive, high-value-per-mile freight.

For a carrier positioned to move pharmaceutical freight — which requires understanding temperature requirements, chain-of-custody documentation, facility access protocols, and the compliance infrastructure that a pharmaceutical shipper demands before awarding a lane — the barrier to entry is real. But the barrier functions as a moat, not just an obstacle. Every compliance requirement that a small carrier meets is one that a less-prepared competitor cannot match. The carriers who invested in the carrier packet, safety record, and direct shipper outreach process described in previous articles on this platform are the ones who can walk into a pharmaceutical logistics conversation and present themselves credibly. The ones who have not done that work cannot get in the door.

The practical first step is geographic. Identify which pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities — including existing ones and announced expansions — operate within a 300-mile radius of your home base. The Reshoring Initiative’s database at reshorenow.org tracks announced domestic manufacturing projects by state and industry. Cross-reference that against your operating region and you will have a list of potential accounts that most of your competitors have never contacted.

Food and Beverage: The Sector Where the Freight Is Already There

Food and beverage manufacturing generates more domestically rooted truck freight than almost any other sector, for a straightforward reason: food cannot be offshored the way a circuit board can. The inputs are agricultural, the processing is regional, and the distribution is time-sensitive. What has changed in the current environment is not that food manufacturers are suddenly reshoring — they were always domestic — but that the combination of supply chain instability, tariff pressure on imported ingredients and packaging, and shifting distribution patterns is driving new facility investment and routing changes that create fresh freight opportunities.

C.H. Robinson’s December 2025 freight outlook noted that food and beverage produce and beverage seasons typically drive Q2 rate increases starting from a higher base than in recent years, with shippers in that sector actively evaluating carrier relationships heading into the seasonal surge. The Southeast, which saw capacity tighten significantly through 2025 due to carrier exits combined with steady food and beverage manufacturing activity, is a region where small carriers with consistent, documented service records on regional lanes are worth real money to shippers who cannot afford disruption on temperature-sensitive or just-in-time food distribution runs.

The food and beverage opportunity for small carriers is not in the national networks that run product from major processing plants to national distribution centers — those lanes are largely controlled by large carriers with dedicated routing guide positions. It is in the regional middle tier: moving raw agricultural inputs to processing facilities, shuttling finished product between co-packing facilities and regional DCs, running specialty and artisan food products that move in lower volumes and need flexible scheduling. These are lanes that a one-truck or three-truck operation can service consistently and win direct relationships on, because the shippers running them are often mid-sized food manufacturers who cannot get attention from a large carrier and do not want to be permanently dependent on broker spot freight for their primary production inputs.

The specific move: contact food processing facilities, dairy operations, and beverage manufacturers in your region directly — not through a broker. A regional dairy cooperative with three plants within 150 miles of each other needs a reliable carrier for interplant transfers and outbound distribution more than it needs a national carrier’s routing guide. A specialty food manufacturer shipping to regional grocery chains needs a carrier who can handle short-notice pickups and consistent temperature management. These are the conversations that build the kind of freight relationship the platform’s shipper outreach articles describe — and food and beverage is the sector where that approach has the shortest path from first call to first load.

Flatbed and Construction Materials: The Infrastructure Freight That Is Already Running

The U.S. infrastructure investment cycle is generating steady flatbed freight that is structural — driven by long-term federal funding commitments rather than consumer demand cycles — and that creates a freight profile most favorable to carriers who can position as reliable regional flatbed capacity rather than chasing spot loads on the open board.

S&P Global’s Regulatory Research Associates forecasts approximately $1.3 trillion in aggregate U.S. energy utility capital expenditure between 2026 and 2030, driven primarily by data center demand and grid expansion. Manufacturing facility construction itself — the physical building of the new plants that are either reshoring production or expanding domestic capacity — generates steel, precast concrete, structural components, and heavy equipment moves on flatbed and step-deck equipment. These construction-phase loads move before any production freight exists, and they move regionally from fabricators and steel distributors to the project site.

The manufacturing megaproject tracker maintained by Engineered Vision shows active construction underway across the Southeast, Arizona, Indiana, and the Midwest. Tesla’s Nevada facility for semi-trucks and battery cells was in production ramp-up in 2026. Hyundai and LG Energy Solution’s battery facility in Georgia was producing. Eli Lilly’s Indiana and North Carolina facilities are under active construction. Each of those projects generates construction material freight that is often served by whoever is available and positioned, because the general contractor’s first priority is keeping the project on schedule, not optimizing their carrier routing guide.

For the owner-operator running a flatbed: The construction-phase freight around major manufacturing projects is the most accessible and least competed-for freight in the reshoring story right now. It does not require a direct shipper relationship with the manufacturing company itself. It requires relationships with the steel fabricators, precast concrete suppliers, structural materials distributors, and heavy equipment rental companies operating in the construction supply chain around these projects. Those businesses have dock doors and outbound freight, and the article on finding shippers in your region applies directly to finding them. Drive the industrial corridors feeding the nearest active construction project in your area. That is where the freight is.

For the fleet manager running five to fifteen trucks: Infrastructure and manufacturing construction freight has a specific financial advantage that spot board freight does not: it is time-certain on the delivery end. Construction projects run on schedules. The general contractor needs the steel on Tuesday because the crew is framing on Wednesday. That timing requirement means the carrier who delivers reliably, on time, with accurate documentation, earns a direct relationship faster than in almost any other freight segment. A fleet that can cover a fabricator’s regular outbound load, show up every time, and handle the paperwork correctly will be invited back before the first load’s invoice has cleared.

Automotive Regional Supply Chains: The Understated Opportunity

The electric vehicle transition has created a complicated picture in automotive manufacturing. Ford dissolved its BlueOval SK joint venture with SK On in December 2025 and took sole ownership of the Kentucky battery plant, which closed in February 2026 pending restructuring. GM posted a $6 billion writedown on EV losses in Q4 2025. Honda has retreated from certain EV commitments. The EV manufacturing story in 2026 is significantly more uncertain than it appeared in 2023.

What has not changed, and what represents a concrete freight opportunity, is the regional automotive supply chain serving both traditional internal combustion and transitional powertrain production. The Belvidere, Illinois, Stellantis plant is reopening to produce two new Jeep models in 2027. Indiana is seeing new four-cylinder engine production start in 2026. Warren, Michigan, is retooling for extended-range electric vehicles. Each of these production changes generates supplier freight — components, sub-assemblies, and finished parts moving from Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers to assembly plants on tight just-in-time schedules.

The freight profile of automotive supplier lanes is the most demanding of any sector in this article. Just-in-time delivery windows are frequently measured in hours, not days. A missed delivery can shut down an assembly line. The standards for carrier performance in automotive supply chains are accordingly stringent. But the carriers who meet those standards — who can document on-time performance, handle EDI or portal-based load tendering, and maintain the communication standards automotive shippers require — are operating in a freight segment where rate pressure is lower and relationship stickiness is higher than almost anywhere else in trucking.

This is not a lane to walk into cold. It requires carrier packet preparation, insurance documentation, established business credit, and direct shipper relationship development before the first conversation. But for a small carrier operating near any of the Midwest or Southeast automotive manufacturing corridors, it is a freight segment worth building toward deliberately — because the carriers who have established those relationships by the time the Belvidere plant reopens and the Indiana engine production ramps up will have access to lanes that their competitors are still trying to find on the spot board.

The Semiconductor Exception: Why This Freight Is Not Yours to Chase

The semiconductor manufacturing investment is the largest single component of the reshoring construction story in dollar terms. CHIPS Act funding has supported 23 manufacturing projects across 15 states, including 16 new semiconductor facilities, with more than 115,000 manufacturing and construction jobs expected, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. TSMC’s Arizona investment alone represents $165 billion in planned capital expenditure.

A supply chain professor and industry analyst writing for the FreightCaviar newsletter made a point that every small carrier needs to understand about this freight: semiconductor manufacturing investment does not generate proportional trucking freight volume. A semiconductor fab is an extraordinarily capital-intensive facility that produces extremely high-value product in small physical volumes. The inputs are specialty chemicals, ultra-pure materials, and precision equipment. The outputs are chips that move in small packages by air or in small quantities by controlled freight. There is construction-phase flatbed freight around the fabs during the build period — and the same approach to finding that freight described above for general manufacturing construction applies here. But the ongoing production freight from a completed semiconductor fab is not a meaningful source of truckload volume for a regional carrier.

This distinction matters because the reshoring narrative that gets the most press is the one built around semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and energy. The freight that actually moves on a small carrier’s truck — full truckloads, regional lanes, consistent volume — is coming from food, pharma, flatbed construction, and automotive. Focus the prospecting work on those sectors and do not spend time trying to position your dry van fleet for semiconductor fab freight that does not exist at the volume the headlines imply.

How to Find What Is Actually Moving in Your Region

The practical approach to capturing reshoring-adjacent freight is not different from the direct shipper development approach described elsewhere in this lane — but it requires adding one layer of deliberate research before the outreach begins.

The Reshoring Initiative maintains a publicly searchable database at reshorenow.org that tracks announced domestic manufacturing projects by state, industry, and investment size. This is not a definitive or complete list — many smaller expansions never make a press release — but it provides a useful starting point for understanding which major facilities are under construction or recently opened in your operating region. Cross-reference that against your state’s economic development agency website, which typically maintains a list of announced business expansions that received state incentives or tax abatements. These are public records. Every state has them.

From that list, build your prospecting targets. For pharma and food and beverage, the target is the logistics or supply chain manager at the facility — not the procurement department, which typically handles capital equipment, not freight. For construction-phase freight, the target is the general contractor’s operations team or the primary materials suppliers feeding the project site. For automotive supplier freight, the target is the traffic or transportation manager at the Tier 1 or Tier 2 supplier, not the OEM itself.

Then make contact before the routing guide is written. This is the timing insight that most small carriers miss. When a new manufacturing facility opens its doors, its freight patterns for the first six to eighteen months are often served by whoever showed up and asked, because the routing guide that will eventually govern that freight has not been fully developed yet. The carrier who introduces themselves to a new pharmaceutical plant’s logistics manager during construction — when the manager is still figuring out who their carriers will be — is in a materially stronger position than the carrier who calls six months after the plant is fully operational and the routing guide is locked.

The window is now. The plants being built today are the direct shipping relationships of 2027 and 2028. The carriers who are making contact today will have established service records by the time those plants need consistent capacity. That is not a coincidence. That is the strategy.

Commonly Asked Questions

Q: I run dry van. Most of what I’m reading about reshoring mentions pharma and food — do I actually have the right equipment for this freight, or do I need a reefer to participate?

Dry van is appropriate for a meaningful portion of pharmaceutical and food and beverage freight. Not all pharmaceutical product requires temperature control — many packaged medications, medical devices, and pharmaceutical inputs move dry. Not all food freight is perishable — packaged goods, shelf-stable food products, dry ingredients, and packaging materials all move in dry vans. The equipment question is really a freight-type question: research the specific product profile of the facilities in your area before assuming reefer is required. Call the logistics manager directly and ask what their inbound and outbound lanes look like and what temperature requirements apply. You may find that a significant portion of what they move fits your equipment exactly. If you discover that your target accounts predominantly need temperature-controlled capacity and you are not equipped for it, that is useful information — it may be the signal that adding a reefer to your fleet is justified by documented demand in your specific market, rather than by a general trend article.

Q: How do I know if a new manufacturing plant in my area already has its carriers locked in before I even reach out?

Call and ask. The direct question — “Do you have your carrier relationships established for your outbound freight, or are you still evaluating options?” — gets answered honestly more often than most carriers expect. A logistics manager at a facility that opened in the last twelve months is almost never operating with a fully optimized routing guide. They have primary carriers for their most critical lanes and gaps everywhere else. What you are looking for is not an account with zero carrier relationships — that does not exist. You are looking for an account with capacity gaps, seasonal surge needs, or backup requirements that their current carrier base cannot consistently cover. Get on the approved carrier list, move one load well, and follow up. The routing guide evolves. Your position in it evolves with it if you show up reliably.

Q: I’m in a part of the country — rural Midwest, not near any of the major announced manufacturing projects — where none of this seems to apply to me. What’s the actual opportunity for a carrier in a market like mine?

The manufacturing investment concentrated in the Southeast, Arizona, and parts of the Midwest is generating new freight in those regions. But the food and beverage opportunity exists everywhere that agriculture and food processing exist — which is most of the country and disproportionately the rural Midwest. The flatbed construction opportunity follows infrastructure spending, which is active in rural and small-city markets through the multi-year federal infrastructure program. And the regional manufacturing supply chain opportunity — components, raw materials, and industrial inputs moving between suppliers and manufacturers on short lanes — exists in every industrial park in every market in the country. The dock-door prospecting method described in the 292,000 shippers article on this platform is not geography-dependent. It works wherever you are willing to drive an industrial corridor and make a phone call. The reshoring story is a useful overlay that helps you identify new accounts as they open — but the underlying direct shipper development strategy applies regardless of whether a CHIPS-funded fab just broke ground in your county.

The post Pharma, Food, Flatbed, and Automotive. The Four Re-shoring Freight Lanes Small Carriers Can Actually Win — and the One They Should Stop Chasing.  appeared first on FreightWaves.

The surge in freight movement that started in late April and is accelerating through May 2026 is not the organic demand recovery that small carriers have been waiting three years to see. It is, in large part, a tariff front-load. Shippers who import goods from China, Mexico, and Canada have been scrambling to pull inventory forward before tariff rates lock in or escalate further.

The FreightWaves SONAR National Truckload Index (NTI.USA) — a seven-day moving average of booked spot transactions from the TRAC consortium, inclusive of fuel — is tracking national dry van spot rates up more than 20% year over year as of mid-May 2026. The SONAR Flatbed Index (FTI.USA) shows flatbed volume running nearly 50% above year-ago levels, driven by construction material and steel movement as reshoring and infrastructure activity pull hard against a shrunken supply of available equipment. The SONAR Reefer Index (RTI.USA) confirms the refrigerated market has tightened ahead of produce season, with year-over-year rate gains in the same range. The SONAR Outbound Tender Rejection Index (STRI.USA) is hovering near 14% — a level not seen consistently since the post-COVID unwind of 2022 and meaningfully above the 7% to 8% threshold that historically signals sustained upward pressure on spot pricing.

Those are real numbers. That is real money on the table. But understanding why that freight is moving matters as much as understanding that it is moving.

Front-loading is a pattern that plays out every time a major tariff wave arrives. Importers anticipate the cost increase, rush to bring goods in before the effective date, and freight volumes spike. FreightWaves SONAR documented this pattern in early 2025 when the reciprocal tariff packages first landed — the SONAR Truckload Volume Index (SONAR: STVI.USA) spiked sharply as shippers pulled inventory forward, then gave back those gains as warehouses filled and new orders slowed. The same dynamic is repeating now as importers race to build inventory ahead of tariff escalations that remain in legal and political flux.

The problem with front-loading freight — from a carrier cash flow perspective — is what happens after. Once shippers have moved the goods, inventory sits in warehouses. New orders slow. Freight volumes drop. The carriers who stretched to capture the surge — taking on more fuel, running harder miles, signing longer commitments to load boards — get caught with inflated costs and a thinning load environment. The cycle is not new. It is predictable. And it is especially punishing for operators who confuse a busy month with a recovered market.

The Rate-to-Cash Gap That Is Going to Catch People

Here is the cash flow mechanic that does not get talked about enough during a rate surge: you still do not get paid until the invoice clears.

A dry van operator who books a load today at $2.00 per mile linehaul pays for fuel, tolls, and hours immediately. The invoice does not clear for 30 to 45 days in most standard broker arrangements. If that operator is running without factoring and without a cash reserve, the revenue from a strong load in May is not actually available until mid-June — by which point diesel has already been purchased, insurance has already been debited, and the truck payment has already posted.

Diesel at $5.64 per gallon nationally — the figure reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration for the week of May 4, 2026, up from $3.65 per gallon a year ago — represents a 54% increase in fuel cost in twelve months. At eight miles per gallon and 10,000 miles per month, that is roughly $2,500 more per truck per month going out the door compared to last May. At the same time, the standard broker quick-pay discount is pulling between 2% and 5% off each load if you choose early payment. On a $2,000 load, that is $40 to $100 in effective fees per transaction.

A carrier with three trucks who takes quick pay on 30 loads a month is spending between $1,200 and $3,000 per month just for the right to access money they have already earned. At the current rate environment, that cost is not trivial — it is a meaningful drag on take-home margin.

Tim Denoyer, Vice President and Senior Analyst at ACT Research, noted in recent commentary that international trade represents 16% to 25% of U.S. surface freight volume. When that segment surges and then corrects, the carriers who scaled into the peak and did not manage their working capital are the ones who feel it hardest on the way down.

The Steel and Parts Problem Is Not Over

Beyond the freight volume cycle, there is a second cash pressure hitting small carriers right now that runs on a slower timeline: the cost of maintaining and replacing equipment.

Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum derivatives currently sit at 50%, according to the Congressional Research Service’s updated tariff tracker as of May 2026. Those tariffs directly affect the cost of truck parts, chassis components, and repair materials. ACT Research projects Class 8 truck prices will increase approximately $10,000 per unit in 2026 due to tariff-related cost passthrough alone. S&P Global Mobility estimated the net impact on new truck prices could reach 9%, potentially suppressing demand by as much as 17% compared to pre-tariff baselines.

What that means operationally: if your truck needs a frame repair, a new fifth wheel, or suspension components, the parts that were priced at one level a year ago now cost more — and the shop knows it. For owner-operators on a preventive maintenance schedule, those increases are manageable if anticipated. For small fleets running tight reserves, an unexpected repair bill during a front-loaded freight surge creates a scenario where the operator is running hard, invoicing fast, and still short on cash because the repair hit before the invoice cleared.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has stated publicly that tariffs “have the potential to inhibit the recovery from a freight recession that has been acutely felt by America’s small-business truckers.” That framing is accurate. The inhibition is not just through reduced freight volume — it is through margin compression at every cost line simultaneously.

What the Boom-Bust Cycle Looks Like in the Numbers

The front-loading surge is already showing the early markers of the correction pattern that SONAR documented after the 2025 tariff wave. The SONAR Truckload Volume Index (STVI.USA) registered a sharp spike when importers front-loaded ahead of the April 2025 reciprocal tariff packages — followed by a measurable volume pullback once shippers had rebuilt inventory positions and new orders slowed. The correction was not gradual. FreightWaves SONAR noted at the time that once inventory stabilized, spot market load availability dropped and the rate gains of the surge period gave back a meaningful portion of their gains within weeks.

The U.S.-China tariff truce — currently extended through November 10, 2026 per a November 2025 agreement that reduced IEEPA-related tariffs from 20% to 10% and paused reciprocal duties — has injected temporary volume into the transpacific lane. Peter Sand, Chief Shipping Analyst at Xeneta, warned in May 2025 commentary that ocean freight from China to the U.S. West Coast could spike 20% in the short term due to shipping rushes. That cargo hits domestic trucking lanes as drayage, intermodal, and long-haul volume — and it peaks fast.

The pattern has a name inside freight economics: surge, absorb, drop. Carriers who do not manage cash with that cycle in mind are not positioned to capture the next wave. They are positioned to be exhausted by it.

For the Owner-Operator Running One Truck

If you are running solo right now and the load board is looking better than it has in years, that is real. But do not let a strong week of load availability convince you that the business is fixed. Here is what actually matters in the next 60 days.

Track your cost per mile before you chase rate. With diesel at $5.64 nationally per the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s May 4 weekly release, your fuel cost per mile on a truck getting 7.5 miles per gallon is $0.75 per mile. Add insurance, truck payment, maintenance reserve, and your own draw, and most owner-operators in 2026 have a break-even cost per mile of $1.65 to $1.90 depending on equipment age and debt load. A $2.00 linehaul rate feels like margin. But after fuel, it is $0.28 to $0.35 per mile before you pay yourself. Know that number before you book the load.

If you are using broker quick-pay, run the math on what it actually costs you annualized. A 3% quick-pay fee on a 10-day advance against a 30-day invoice is an annualized cost of capital of approximately 36%. If you are using it on every load, you are effectively financing your operation at rates that would make most bank loan officers uncomfortable. That does not mean quick-pay is always wrong — but it means you should know the real cost before you treat it as normal.

Build a 30-day cash reserve before you add a truck, sign a new lease, or take on a new driver. The cycle you are in right now is not guaranteed to hold through Q3.

For the Fleet Running Five to Twenty Trucks

The more immediate risk at scale is not missing the surge — it is over-leveraging into it. Fleet operators in the 5-to-20-truck range are being approached right now by lenders offering equipment financing, working capital lines, and factoring arrangements structured around the current rate environment. Some of those products are appropriate. Some of them will look very different if rates pull back 20% by August.

ACT Research’s preliminary April 2026 Class 8 order data shows net orders declined 24% month-over-month on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to Carter Vieth, Research Analyst at ACT Research. Vieth attributed the drop to the beginning of typical weak order seasonality, but noted the positive year-over-year comparison is being flattered by easy “Liberation Day” comps from April 2025 — not by genuine fleet confidence. That is a data point worth sitting with before you commit to a new truck payment based on current spot rate assumptions.

If you are going to add capacity, structure the debt against your floor — not your ceiling. Model your debt service against $1.75 to $1.85 linehaul rates, not $2.00. If the deal still works at $1.75, take it. If it only works at current peak rates, you are underwriting against the best-case scenario in a tariff-driven environment that is, by definition, temporary.

On the cash flow management side, fleet operators should be running a rolling 45-day cash flow projection right now — tracking what has been invoiced, what has cleared, what is outstanding, and what fixed obligations are coming. If your accounting system cannot produce that report in 10 minutes, that is a structural problem worth fixing before the market gets complicated again.

The Factoring Decision in a Rising Rate Environment

Factoring is a legitimate cash flow tool that makes sense in specific circumstances. It is not a solution to a structural cash flow problem, and it is not free money. A standard factoring arrangement charges between 2% and 5% per invoice, depending on the factor, your volume, and your broker relationships. With the SONAR NTI.USA tracking national dry van spot rates in the range of $2.80 per mile all-in with fuel, a 3% factoring fee on a 1,000-mile load costs you roughly $84 per load. On 100 loads per month for a five-truck fleet, that is $8,400 per month in cost of capital access — real money that does not show up on anyone’s rate sheet.

That is worth paying if it keeps you from missing a truck payment, if it lets you take loads that are priced well but pay slowly, or if it eliminates the cash timing gap on fuel costs. It is not worth paying if you have a sufficient cash reserve and are factoring out of habit or anxiety rather than necessity.

The question to ask before signing or renewing a factoring agreement in the current market: what is the minimum cash reserve I need in my operating account to move freight without factoring on any given week? If you know that number and you have it in the account, factoring is optional. If you do not know that number, find it before you decide anything else about how you manage cash.

Three Questions Operators Are Actually Asking

Q: Rates are up and I’m moving freight. Why does my bank account still feel tight?

The timing gap is almost certainly the problem. Revenue from loads you deliver this week does not hit your account for 30 to 45 days under standard payment terms (unless you factor of course). Meanwhile, diesel, insurance, and equipment costs are hitting right now. If you are running without factoring and without a cash buffer, you can be operationally profitable and still functionally cash-short. The fix is not more revenue — it is tightening the gap between delivery and payment. Negotiate faster payment terms directly with brokers (some will offer 15-day net without a quick-pay fee if you ask), use factoring selectively on slow-paying brokers, and build a minimum 20-day operating cash cushion before you run any new lanes.

Q: Should I buy a second truck right now while freight is moving?

Only if the deal works when you stress-test it against a 15% to 20% rate drop. Current spot rates are elevated partly because of tariff-driven front-loading, which is a temporary demand event. ACT Research has documented that Class 8 equipment prices are projected to increase $10,000 or more in 2026 due to tariff-related costs on truck components, so you are also buying into a higher price environment. That does not make the decision wrong — it makes it one that requires realistic modeling. Run your P&L at $1.75 linehaul, current diesel prices, and your actual maintenance reserve. If that scenario generates enough to cover the payment and your draw, proceed carefully. If it only works at $2.00, wait.

Q: Brokers are telling me freight is about to slow down after the tariff rush. How do I protect myself if that happens?

That is doubtful but let’s address that if it did. Start now by identifying two or three shippers in your lanes who might be open to direct capacity relationships. A shipper who was scrambling for trucks in April is more likely to have a conversation about a consistent lane arrangement in May than they were six months ago — you have leverage right now that you will not have if you wait until the spot market softens. Beyond that, trim any discretionary expenses that are not generating revenue, run your cash flow projection out 60 days, and make sure your factoring or working capital line is in place before you need it rather than after. Lines of credit are easy to get when things are good and difficult to access when things turn. If you do not have a revolving line of credit or invoice factoring arrangement established, establish it now while your revenue is strong and your payment history is clean.

The post The Load Board Is Busy Because Shippers Are Panicking — Not Simply Because the Market Recovered. Here Is the Difference That Matters. appeared first on FreightWaves.

FMCSA inspection records show Day 1 produced 1,580 inspections across 1,417 distinct carriers. Total violations logged: 2,637. Out-of-service orders issued: 496. That works out to an average of 1.67 violations per inspection — a 31.4% out-of-service rate against total inspection volume. Data via Search Carriers, which aggregates live FMCSA inspection records and refreshes daily during the event at no cost.

That OOS rate is worth holding next to the full-event benchmark from 2025. Across all 56,178 inspections conducted during the complete 2025 Roadcheck, CVSA reported an 18.1% vehicle OOS rate. Day 1 of 2026 is running substantially higher. Every one of those 496 OOS orders is already in FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System. Those carriers are managing that CSA score impact right now, and Days 2 and 3 will add to it.

Where Enforcement Hit Hardest: State-by-State

The Day 1 data shows the top 10 states by inspection count. Pennsylvania led the country with 217 inspections — more than any other state and well ahead of the second-place finisher. Kentucky came in at 159. New Jersey logged 154. Oklahoma had 89, Michigan 80, Alabama 71, Connecticut 70, Massachusetts 67, Nebraska 64, and Maine rounded out the top ten at 54.

Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and New Jersey alone accounted for 530 of the 1,580 Day 1 inspections — exactly one-third of the national total concentrated in three states. The Northeast corridor and I-75/I-65 through Kentucky are the enforcement density hotspots based on Day 1 data. If your loads are running through those corridors on Day 2 or Day 3, that geographic pattern is the most useful operational piece of information the dashboard is producing right now.

This geographic pattern is the most useful operational piece of information available heading into Days 2 and 3. Large carriers have compliance teams monitoring live enforcement data in real time. An owner-operator running solo or a dispatcher managing five trucks has the same access to the same live FMCSA feed — no subscription, no account required. Knowing that Pennsylvania ran 217 inspections on Day 1 while a state like Vermont was in single digits is exactly the kind of route-relevant context that sharpens where you focus your pre-trip discipline.

The Worst Individual Inspections From Day 1

The Day 1 data surfaces the five worst inspections by total violations and the five worst by OOS conditions issued.

By total violations, the worst single inspection of Day 1 was SPEPI02245 in New Jersey — 30 total violations, 28 of them vehicle violations. That is not a truck caught with one bad brake adjustment or a burned-out marker light. A 30-violation inspection represents accumulated mechanical failures across multiple systems that did not get addressed before the truck was dispatched. Second was inspection 1750002578 in Alabama with 22 total violations, 21 of them vehicle. Third was 3063007612 in Connecticut at 21 violations, all vehicle. Fourth and fifth — PTLP000665 in Wyoming and PABJI00468 in New Jersey — each logged 20 violations.

The worst OOS list tells a sharper story. Wyoming inspection PTLP000665 produced 9 OOS conditions out of 20 total violations — nearly half the violations found were severe enough to pull the vehicle. Kentucky’s S199003136 logged 6 OOS out of 10 violations. Massachusetts inspection ED00001018 generated 6 OOS out of 15 violations. Connecticut’s 3019007132 had 6 OOS from 13 violations. Vermont’s 4600001019 produced 5 OOS out of 13 total violations.

On the driver side, five inspections from Day 1 generated 7 or 8 driver-specific violations in a single stop. Four separate inspections — in Alabama, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Alabama again — each logged 8 driver violations. Pennsylvania inspection T408613108 produced 7 driver violations. At 7 to 8 driver violations per inspection, you are not looking at one missed annotation or an expired medical card sitting alongside clean logs. You are looking at multiple stacked failures: credential problems, HOS violations, and ELD compliance issues compounding in the same cab. That is a compliance posture, not a paperwork oversight.

The 2026 Focus Areas: What Inspectors Are Specifically Looking For

CVSA designated two focus areas for the 2026 event. The driver focus is ELD tampering, falsification, or manipulation. The vehicle focus is cargo securement. The focus areas do not narrow the scope of the Level I inspection — inspectors still run the full 37-step process — but they direct additional scrutiny and time toward those categories. Understanding what specifically triggers a finding in each area is what separates a passed inspection from an OOS order.

On the ELD side, CVSA chose this focus because the underlying data demands it. According to CVSA, falsification of records of duty status was the second most-cited driver violation across all FMCSA inspections in 2025, at 58,382 total violations. Five of the top ten driver violations in the 2024 FMCSA enforcement dataset were hours-of-service or ELD related. During the 2025 Roadcheck specifically, 332 driver OOS violations — 10% of all driver OOS findings — were for false logs or falsified records of duty status.

What inspectors are looking for during an ELD check is not limited to obvious fraud. They are cross-referencing the record of duty status against supporting documents — fuel receipts, bills of lading, toll records — and flagging specific anomalies. Driving time recorded while the device was in an unidentified or disconnected state. Edits to the log without annotations, which federal regulations require on any change to an entry. Location data that does not align with the driving time recorded. Log patterns so uniform they don’t reflect how real driving behavior actually looks in the data. CVSA acknowledged directly in its 2026 focus area announcement that some inaccurate ELD entries result from drivers misunderstanding regulations rather than intentional falsification. The enforcement consequence is identical either way.

The penalty structure is not ambiguous. Operating without a certified ELD carries fines of $1,000 to $3,000 per violation. Falsifying electronic records runs $3,000 to $10,000. Willful violations can reach $16,000 per violation, and criminal charges are a legal possibility in severe cases. Every ELD violation is weighted into the HOS Compliance BASIC in FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System. CSA BASIC scores above 65% in any category trigger warning letters and targeted inspection attention. Insurance underwriters use CSA data in premium calculations. Brokers use it in carrier vetting.

There is a separate ELD compliance risk running in parallel with the falsification focus: revoked devices. Since January 2026, FMCSA has removed 27 ELDs from its registered devices list — nine in February and 14 in March — continuing a pace of revocations that ran 80% higher in 2025 than the year before. After a 60-day grace period from each revocation date, a carrier still operating a revoked device is treated by FMCSA as running without an ELD. That means full OOS exposure on every mile. The revoked devices list is publicly available and searchable at eld.fmcsa.dot.gov. If your device has not been checked against that list recently, do it before your next dispatch.

On the cargo securement side, CVSA’s choice of focus area reflects consistent violation volume. In 2025, inspectors issued 18,108 violations for cargo not secured to prevent leaking, spilling, blowing, or falling, and another 16,054 violations for unsecured vehicle components and dunnage — more than 34,000 violations in a single year from two securement subcategories alone. The governing standard is FMCSA’s cargo securement rules at 49 CFR Part 393. The foundational requirement: the aggregate working load limit of all tiedowns must equal at least half the weight of the cargo being secured.

What inspectors are physically examining during a cargo securement check goes beyond counting straps. They are looking at tiedown condition — frayed webbing, rusted chain, cracked anchor points, worn hardware. A tiedown that passes the working load limit calculation on paper but shows visible degradation in the field is an OOS condition under the CVSA North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria. They are verifying that loads cannot shift in any direction, that flatbed freight is either blocked against the front-end structure or secured with tiedowns that prevent forward movement under hard braking. They are checking every piece of equipment on the truck — dunnage, tools, tarps, spare tires, chains — because loose equipment generates violations at the same rate as unsecured freight.

Which Carriers Are Showing Up in the Data

The Day 1 data identifies the most inspected carriers by name and DOT number. This is public FMCSA data presented as a compliance performance record.

Tornado Bus Company (DOT #565859) led all carriers with 11 inspections on Day 1 and posted a 0% OOS rate with only 2 total violations — 0.18 violations per inspection, tops among carriers with 10 or more inspections. Eleven inspections without an OOS order on Day 1 of Roadcheck reflects a maintenance and compliance program built to hold up under scrutiny, not one assembled for a single week.

Autobuses Ejecutivos LLC (DOT #1044521) logged 9 inspections on Day 1 with 0 violations and 0% OOS. New Prime Inc (DOT #3706) had 6 inspections, 3 violations, and a 17% OOS rate. Shark Transportation Inc (DOT #793512) ran 5 inspections and came away with 13 violations and an 80% OOS rate — the worst performance by OOS percentage among the most-inspected carriers in Day 1 data. Protour and Travel Services LLC (DOT #2571867) completed 5 inspections with 0 violations and 0% OOS.

The Day 1 data also ranks shippers by OOS rate among loads with sufficient inspection volume. Amazon freight led the worst shippers list with a 21% OOS rate — 4 of 19 inspections resulting in OOS orders, with 20 total violations — while simultaneously appearing at the top of the best shippers list at 1.05 violations per inspection. That apparent contradiction reflects the ranking methodology: worst shippers are ranked by OOS rate with total violations as tiebreaker, while best shippers are ranked by violations per inspection. Amazon’s volume is high enough that both lists include it using different metrics. “Same As Carrier” ran a 10% OOS rate with 12 violations across 10 inspections. The category listed as “MC” logged 3 of 31 inspections OOS at 10% with 44 total violations across those 31 stops.

What the Level I Inspection Covers Beyond the Focus Areas

The 2026 focus areas — ELD tampering and cargo securement — direct additional inspector attention but do not limit what the Level I process examines. Every truck going through a Roadcheck inspection this week is being evaluated on the full 37-step checklist. The 2025 OOS data from the full Roadcheck event shows where trucks consistently fail across the full inspection, independent of any named focus area.

Brake systems led the 2025 OOS list and have led it in every recent Roadcheck cycle. CVSA inspectors recorded 3,304 brake system violations in 2025 — 24.4% of all vehicle OOS findings — plus 2,257 additional violations for 20% defective brakes, where at least one-fifth of the vehicle’s braking system was in an OOS condition. Those two categories combined for more than 41% of all vehicle OOS orders in 2025. Brakes are not a 2026 named focus. They do not need to be. They generate more OOS orders than any other category regardless of whether inspectors are told to pay extra attention.

Tires were the second leading vehicle OOS category in 2025 at 2,899 violations and 21.4% of vehicle OOS findings. Lighting violations were third at 14%. Lights are the most preventable violation on the list — a burned-out clearance light or a trailer with a non-functioning brake light is something any driver can catch in a pre-trip walk and correct in the yard.

On the driver credential side, no valid medical certificate accounted for approximately 16% of driver OOS findings in 2025, up from 12% the prior year. That number has been trending in the wrong direction for two consecutive years. An expired medical card is a compliance failure that does not require a wrench or a parts order. It requires a scheduled appointment that didn’t happen.

What to Do on Day 2: The Owner-Operator

If you are dispatching today, the pre-trip process is the compliance program. It is not a formality.

Start with your ELD. Pull up eld.fmcsa.dot.gov and confirm your device is on the registered list and not under a revocation notice. Open your 8-day log and look for unassigned driving events — driving time not assigned to a driver is one of the first patterns a trained inspector checks, because it is a primary indicator of potential manipulation even when the driver had a completely innocent explanation. If there are unassigned events in your record, resolve them through your device’s proper edit procedure with an annotation before you reach a scale.

Check your securement before the load moves. Physically inspect every tiedown for fraying, rust, cuts, and wear. Verify the working load limit against the weight of what you are hauling. Walk every piece of equipment on the truck that could shift or fall — chains, tarps, dunnage, tools — because an inspector will ask how it is secured.

Walk the truck. Lights front to rear, trailer markers, brake lights. Brake hoses for visible air leaks. Tires for inflation, tread, and sidewall condition. This is what 49 CFR 396.13 requires on every dispatch, not just during Roadcheck. A violation found at a scale on Day 2 of blitz week is not a Roadcheck violation. It is a pre-trip failure that existed before the truck left the yard.

If your truck is clean and your paperwork is current, do not avoid the scale. A vehicle that passes a Level I or Level V inspection without critical violations during Roadcheck earns a CVSA decal valid for up to three months — a documented compliance signal that reduces the likelihood of reinspection during that window. The carriers routing around weigh stations this week are the ones who cannot afford for their trucks to be examined. That assumption is a compliance problem that needs to be fixed, not worked around.

What to Do on Day 2: The Small Fleet

If you are managing multiple trucks through a live enforcement event, FMCSA inspection data is updating daily and is publicly accessible. Use it. It shows live inspection counts by state, surfaces the worst individual inspections by violation count and OOS severity, and identifies which carriers are accumulating the most activity.

The first priority today is ELD compliance across every truck currently running. Since January 2026, 27 devices have been removed from FMCSA’s registered list. If your fleet runs different ELD providers across different trucks, or if any truck is running hardware that has not been audited recently, that is where your compliance exposure lives today. Cross-reference every device against eld.fmcsa.dot.gov. If a device is revoked and the grace period has passed, that truck should not dispatch until a compliant device is installed.

Run a spot audit of the last 8 days of records for each driver currently on the road. You are looking for unassigned driving events, edits without annotations, and gaps that do not align with supporting documents. Drivers create these compliance gaps regularly without intent to falsify anything — they do not fully understand how the ELD handles certain scenarios, and the resulting record raises flags at roadside. Finding and correcting those records before your trucks reach a scale is the highest-leverage compliance action available on Day 2.

For any truck running flatbed, step deck, or open-deck: require a driver confirmation that securement was physically inspected before departure — tiedown condition, working load limit against cargo weight, and a walk of every piece of equipment on the trailer. That confirmation is the documented pre-dispatch process that keeps cargo securement violations in the yard rather than on an inspection report.

Three Questions Operators Are Actually Asking

Q: My driver got placed out of service on Day 1. The truck is sitting at a weigh station and he’s calling me. What’s the sequence here?

First, get the inspection report number — it will be referenced in every subsequent communication with FMCSA and is the document you need if you want to contest any factual errors through the DataQs system. If the OOS is HOS-related, the driver is parked for a minimum 10-hour restart before they can legally operate. The freight sits at the inspection location until either the driver is compliant and can move it, or you arrange another driver and truck to complete the delivery — which means a truck and driver that can legally reach the location within a timeframe that makes sense for the load. The OOS order is already on your safety record regardless of what you do next. It is attributed to your USDOT number and will appear in your CSA BASIC scores within the next reporting cycle. Pull your current BASIC scores at ai.fmcsa.dot.gov and know where you stand before this adds to a category that is already elevated.

Q: I’m running flatbed. Day 1 data shows cargo securement is generating serious OOS counts. What specifically are inspectors looking for that most flatbed operators miss?

The most commonly missed items in flatbed cargo securement inspections are not tiedown count — operators generally know how many straps are required. They are tiedown condition and equipment securement. An inspector looking at a strap with visible abrasion, a burn mark from contact with a hot surface, or fraying at the hook connection does not see a usable strap at reduced capacity. They see an OOS condition under the CVSA’s North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria, which defines defect thresholds for every securement device type. The second area is loose equipment on the truck: spare chains, load binders, tarps, dunnage blocking, pallet jacks, spare tires. Anything on the truck that is not secured to the truck is a violation waiting to be written. Walk the trailer as if the inspector is standing next to you. If you can move it, it needs to be secured.

Q: My company name is showing up in the Day 1 inspection data. How do I find out exactly what violations were written against my trucks during blitz week?

Every inspection result entered into FMCSA’s system during Roadcheck is accessible through the Safety and Fitness Electronic Records system at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov. Search by your USDOT number and pull every inspection report entered, including the specific violations cited and the inspection level conducted. If you find a violation that contains a factual error — wrong vehicle, wrong date, wrong violation code — the FMCSA DataQs system is the formal process to challenge it. A successful DataQs challenge can result in a violation being corrected or removed from your record. File it as soon as you identify the error, because the process takes time and the violation is affecting your CSA score from the moment it is entered.

The post The 2026 CVSA Roadcheck Opened Yesterday. Here’s What the First Day of Real Data Actually Shows. appeared first on FreightWaves.

During the opening keynote at the Coupa Inspire 2026 conference on Tuesday, CEO Leagh Turner unveiled new AI-focused products, including the launch of Coupa Compose and Coupa Catalyst, while also announcing the acquisition of AI-based intelligent document processing company Rossum.

Turner said global supply chains are entering a new phase where automation, AI agents and data orchestration are becoming central to procurement and logistics operations.

“Because in a world of constant change, global trade, complex supply chains, shifting job roles, the advantage no longer comes from hard work,” Turner said during the keynote. “It comes from intelligence, orchestration, and automation.”

Coupa is a cloud-based, AI-native platform designed for total spend management and supply chain optimization.

Coupa executives said their platform has processed more than $10 trillion in cumulative spend over the past two decades and plans to expand its AI capabilities across procurement, invoicing and supply chain workflows.

The conference, held Monday through Wednesday at ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, brought together hundreds of procurement, finance and supply chain executives focused on spend management, sourcing and supply chain technology.

Turner said the Rossum acquisition brings a purpose-built, AI-first architecture that moves beyond legacy OCR technology Coupa. 

“The combined value of Coupa and Rossum has been proven in AP and invoicing, and we see massive future value in applying Rossum’s T-LLM and AI-first technology across the Coupa platform,” Turner said in a statement. “We’ve been able to deliver over $300 billion in customer savings over the past 20 years. With Rossum, we believe we can help them save the next $300 billion in five with a system of decision and intelligence that is unrivaled.”

The launch of Coupa Compose aims to provide a comprehensive environment to build, manage, and orchestrate a digital workforce of AI agents, transforming how work is executed across procurement, finance, and supply chain. 

“With Coupa Compose, we are empowering our customers to easily build, deploy, orchestrate and connect agentic AI through our core platform — no migrations, no new code, just instant AI agent activation grounded in our proprietary dataset that generates business outcomes others can’t match,” Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa’s chief product and technology officer, said.

Turner emphasized that AI and automation tools are being positioned as decision-support systems rather than replacements for procurement and supply chain workers.

“This is not about replacing people,” Turner said during the keynote. “This means that we are going to eliminate the work that nobody should have ever done in the first place.”

Grupo Bimbo, M. Dias Branco use digital supply chain models to improve profitability

Much of the conference discussion centered on how manufacturers are using digital modeling and scenario-planning tools to respond to shifting trade policies, volatile transportation markets and increasingly complex global manufacturing networks.

Executives from Grupo Bimbo and M. Dias Branco discussed how network optimization has become increasingly important as companies expand through acquisitions and global growth.

Jose Ramos, Grupo Bimbo’s director of supply chain transformation, said the bakery giant’s network includes about 200 manufacturing sites, more than 100 co-manufacturers and roughly 157,000 delivery routes serving 3 million points of sale globally.

“We started using Coupa because of this complexity,” Ramos said. “The network itself is really complex, so we needed a tool that helped us organize, understand and improve the way we were working with that complexity.”

Rogério Neto, logistics, industrial and tax network manager at M. Dias Branco, said the Brazilian food producer has completed seven acquisitions since 2003, forcing the company to integrate multiple manufacturing and distribution systems.

“When we acquire these companies, they come with their own agenda, their own culture, and they do not have synergy, standardization, with anything that we have already on our company,” Neto said. “So it’s a sea of opportunity that we can go and try to attack.”

Executives said digital network models are helping companies make faster decisions around transportation flows, inventory placement, plant locations and production allocation.

M. Dias Branco said its optimization efforts helped reduce cost-to-serve by 14% for cookies and 24% for pasta products.

Jabil accelerates procurement and logistics sourcing decisions using digital sourcing tools

Meanwhile, executives from Jabil discussed how AI-powered sourcing optimization tools have transformed the company’s logistics procurement operations.

The session, titled “From weeks to hours: How Jabil transformed logistics sourcing with Coupa CSO,” featured Ryan Johnson, Jabil’s director of indirect procurement technology and Source2Pay, alongside Heidi Banks, vice president of global indirect procurement.

Jabil operates more than 100 manufacturing and supply chain facilities across over 25 countries and employs roughly 135,000 to 140,000 workers globally. The company manufactures electronics assemblies, healthcare devices, automotive components and data center infrastructure products.

Banks said logistics sourcing had historically relied heavily on spreadsheets and manual analysis, limiting the company’s ability to evaluate transportation scenarios across its global network.

Johnson said Coupa’s sourcing optimization platform now allows Jabil to analyze millions of transportation combinations in a fraction of the time previously required.

“Now, with CSO, it takes hours just in this analysis phase, from weeks to hours on that analysis phase,” Johnson said. “We can do 50-plus scenarios as we see fit within our different sourcing events.”

Jabil said the sourcing transformation generated roughly $25 million in logistics savings and cost avoidance while reducing sourcing cycle times by about one month.

The post Coupa bets big on AI,  optimization as supply chains face new volatility  appeared first on FreightWaves.

Under the approved plan, FedEx (NYSE: FDX) will execute a pro rata distribution of 80.1% of FedEx Freight’s outstanding common stock to its shareholders. Investors of record as of Friday will receive one share of the new standalone company for every two shares of FedEx held. FedEx will retain a 19.9% stake in FedEx Freight, which it intends to dispose of within 24 months through debt repayment or dividend distributions to shareholders.

“Today’s announcement is an important step as we prepare for a seamless separation of the FedEx Freight business on June 1,” said Brad Martin, executive chairman of FedEx’s board and incoming chairman of FedEx Freight’s board. “As separate organizations, FedEx and FedEx Freight will build on their respective industry leadership positions to serve customers with excellence, while creating value for their stockholders.”

FedEx Freight, the nation’s largest LTL carrier, is scheduled to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “FDXF” on June 1, while the legacy company will continue trading under “FDX.”

The company said the distribution is expected to be tax-free for U.S. federal income tax purposes.

By splitting the freight operations from its broader express and ground networks, FedEx aims to provide investors with more targeted exposure to the LTL market while allowing the legacy business to focus on its transformation strategy.

FedEx began LTL operations in 1998 with the acquisition of Viking Freight. It acquired American Freightways in 2001 and Watkins Motor Lines in 2006. In 2011, it merged its national (Watkins) and regional (Viking and American Freightways) operations into one network offering priority and economy services.

FedEx Freight has 40,000 employees, 365 terminals (26,000 doors) and 30,000 vehicles (17,000 tractors), generating approximately $9 billion in annual revenue.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• Hub Group’s accounting error causes further reporting delays
• Forward Air flags customer loss, stock plummets
• Freight capacity plummets, prices skyrocket in April

The post FedEx board approves spinoff of LTL unit appeared first on FreightWaves.

The UP-NS response filed Tuesday addresses the three areas that caused the board to reject the initial application as incomplete – a lack of market-share data, which they say now uses “the best information available regarding merger-related changes in traffic;” the status of the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis, which they say that have “unambiguously and unconditionally” indicated they will not seek to control; and all documents related to the merger agreement.

In rejecting the original application as incomplete, the board cited the railroads’ failure to include the complete merger agreement, specifically a section on terms that would allow UP (NYSE: UNP) to walk away from the transaction. That portion of the agreement was included in the revised application filed on April 30.

The board has until May 30 to determine whether to accept the revised application or again reject it as incomplete. Recent history shows that a merger application has never been rejected twice.

A substantial portion of the UP-NS response – more than 13 of the 46 pages – is devoted to the two railroads’ explanation why they believe they have fulfilled the requirement to provide market-share data, and relies largely on an explanation of the processes their three outside experts used to develop the information in the revised application.

Part of this discussion addresses CPKC (NYSE: CP) concerns over the way the market-share data is presented, and notes that “the level of detail and aggregation did not materially change from the original application. No party objected to that presentation format during the first round of comments, and the Board likewise did not identify any defect in the structure, aggregation, or organization of the analyses.”

That the board did not previously cite a topic as a completeness issue is a recurring theme of the UP-NS (NYSE: NSC) filing, used to respond wholly or in part to a number of the issues raised in comments on the revised application. This includes addressing questions over control of the Kansas City Terminal Railway, raised by BNSF (NYSE: BRK-B) and CPKC; control of railcar pooling organization TTX, brought up by BNSF; identification of shippers that would be served by two railroads instead of three, or one instead of two; and downstream effects of a UP-NS merger, including possible future Class I mergers.

Regarding the latter issue, the UP-NS filing says, “BNSF, CN (NYSE CNI), CPKC, and CSX (NASDAQ: CSX) obviously know more about the potential downstream effects of a UP/NS merger on mergers of other Class I railroads than the Applicants, and they are free to share those positions with the Board during the merits phase of this proceeding.”

Comments from BNSF, CSX, and CN all argued that the revised application is incomplete because it does not include an application for control of the TRRA, the St. Louis-area switching line jointly owned by UP, NS, and three other Class I railroads. The UP-NS response is that, unlike the original application, the revised version does not make divestiture of the NS share of the TRRA contingent on the other owners’ willingness to pay fair market value. Instead, the new application asks the board to make divestiture a condition of merger approval, “thereby ensuring the Applicants could not acquire control of TRRA, even temporarily.”

The Tuesday filing also argues that several objections presented by other railroads, as well as by the National Grain and Feed Association, are matters addressing the merits of the merger, not the completeness of the application, and therefore can be addressed in the next phase of the review process.

UP and NS also responded to concern by the New York Department of Transportation and New Jersey’s NJ Transit that the application did not address operations on lines featuring Amtrak or commuter rail operations. In each case, UP and NS say that while NS operates on the lines in question, they are owned or dispatched by other entities (CSX, Conrail, or NJ Transit) and therefore do not fall under the requirement that the application address impacts “where passenger services are operated over the lines of applicant carriers.”

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

Railroads cheer crime bill passage, want DoJ to gear up supply chain theft fight

CN: STB should reject ‘incomplete’ UP-NS merger application

Six found dead inside cargo train near Texas-Mexico border

April trucking jobs report shows a big increase in hiring, rail jobs edge down

The post UP-NS say revised merger application is ‘comprehensive and complete’ appeared first on FreightWaves.

That story isn’t true and the announcement last week that Hirschbach Motor Lines, a major refrigerated carrier based in Iowa, signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to deploy 500 Aurora Driver-equipped autonomous trucks starting in 2027 tells you almost everything you need to know about which part of the story, if any of it, is actually real.

There isn’t a driver shortage. There is a long-haul problem. There is a skilled driver problem. Those are completely different things, and the industry has spent decades conflating them for reasons that aren’t always in the public interest.

In October 2024, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a landmark study commissioned by FMCSA and mandated by Congress in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The title was clinical, “Pay and Working Conditions in the Long-Distance Truck and Bus Industries”, but the conclusion was anything but. The study concluded that the truckload sector’s long-asserted driver shortage cannot be supported. 

Labor economists maintain that when demand for workers in an occupation increases, the normal response is to increase wages. Based on average wages from 2006 to 2024, the study found trends not indicative of the wage premium one would expect for long-distance employees if they were truly working in an occupation experiencing a chronic labor shortage. 

If drivers were actually scarce, their wages would have risen dramatically and consistently. They didn’t. The market corrected. It always does.

Operating authority for motor carriers grew by 45% from July 2019 to August 2023, while truckload demand was only up about 11% during the same period. The current difficult conditions in trucking are a result of too much capacity chasing too little freight. 

So why does the shortage narrative persist? The American Trucking Associations has been criticized for using the driver shortage narrative to push agendas such as heavier trucks, younger drivers, and other regulatory changes. Despite repeated public challenges to defend their data, the ATA declined to participate in a debate even when FreightWaves offered to donate $50,000 to a charity of their choice. 

That tells you something.

Here is the real number. The average annualized turnover rate from Q3 of 1996 through Q1 of 2023 was 92.7% for large truckload carriers (those with $30 million or more in annual revenue) and 77.6% for small truckload carriers. 

Nearly a hundred percent annual turnover. Not at one company. Across the entire large-fleet sector, consistently, for nearly thirty years. That is not a shortage. That is an industry that has consciously or unconsciously decided that replacing drivers is cheaper than keeping them.

In the 1990s, J.B. Hunt experimented with increasing driver pay by 35%, resulting in reduced turnover and accident rates. The practice was abandoned, revealing an industry preference for replacing drivers rather than addressing underlying retention issues. 

The contrast with other segments is stark. LTL carriers reported an average turnover rate of just 11.8% from Q4 2000 through Q1 2022. For private fleets, the National Private Truck Council reported annualized turnover rates of only 15% from 2005 through 2022. 

The difference between a 92% turnover rate and a 15% turnover rate isn’t the drivers. It’s the job. The driver persona has changed fundamentally in the last decade in ways that the industry’s workforce models have been slow to absorb. 

I was that old driver persona. Before ELDs, before electronic logging, before any of it, I was running LA to Atlanta, stopping only for fuel and a few hours of sleep, swapping trailers on the dock, then turning right back around to the Central Valley before the sun came up again. When I ran seafood for Shackelford Seafood out of Virginia, hitting Miami, then Hunts Point in New York, or the Boston Fish Pier the next day, there were runs when I genuinely never slept. It was a toothpick-soaking, mile-chasing, dollar-hunting survivor’s mindset. Shackelford had so many hours of service violations that we had to start uploading our paper logs directly to the FMCSA. You measured your worth by how far you ran and how fast you turned. Broke didn’t mean what it means now. Hustle didn’t mean what it means now. Running didn’t mean what it means now. That driver wasn’t just willing to be gone for weeks; this was and is a source of pride. We were killers. We, like many blue-collar old-school real workers, wore the exhaustion like a badge. ELDs and HOS reform hamstrung that world, and rightfully so; those logs were fiction, and those schedules were dangerous. Nights I’d be awakened by the “S” I was making between the lanes, and I realized it was time to stop. Somewhere in the process of making the roads safer, we also removed the last cultural permission structure that made the long-haul OTR life feel like an identity worth having. The modern driver didn’t just stop chasing those miles. He stopped wanting to. 

The driver who was willing to be gone for three weeks at a stretch, sleep in his cab, run 700 miles a day, and measure his success in annual mileage still exists, but he is increasingly rare and increasingly old. The median age of a commercial truck driver in the United States is now 46. The drivers entering the industry today grew up in a fundamentally different cultural context around work-life balance, mental health, time with family, and the definition of a good job.

OTR home time is the biggest reason drivers leave the segment. Most regional drivers get home every weekend. OTR drivers are out for 2 to 3 weeks at a time, and this is the primary reason experienced OTR drivers transition to regional. 

That migration is accelerating. Experienced drivers with options are choosing regional. New drivers with options are choosing local. The pool of drivers genuinely willing to haul coast to coast for weeks at a time is shrinking, not because fewer people have CDLs, but because fewer people want that life.

The operational consequence of that shift is simple: if a driver used to be willing to run 700 miles a day and a modern driver is comfortable with 350 to 400, you now need roughly two drivers to cover the ground that one used to cover. That’s not a driver shortage. That’s a doubling of the driver requirement per mile of freight moved. The math looks like a shortage. It isn’t one.

The shift to regional and local preferences has coincided with the structural reality that a significant portion of the country’s most time-sensitive, temperature-sensitive freight cannot be transported by rail.

California’s Central Valley is the salad bowl of the country. Strawberries from Watsonville, stone fruit from the San Joaquin, romaine from Salinas, tomatoes, grapes, almonds, pistachios, all of it has to move on a truck and most of it has a shelf life measured in days, not weeks. A load of fresh strawberries from Salinas to the distribution centers outside Washington, D.C. is 2,800 miles. It has to arrive in roughly 72 hours. Rail can’t reliably do that. The driver who wants to be home by Friday isn’t doing that run.

The same is true of live livestock hauls. Medical supply chains. Pharmaceutical cold chain. Temperature-controlled LTL consolidation. These are the loads that need somebody willing to drive far, fast, and for days at a stretch, and the universe of drivers who want to do exactly that is contracting in real time.

This is the actual driver problem. Not a shortage of CDL holders. A shortage of willingness to haul the runs that modern drivers find least desirable. Perishable long-haul. Overnight transcon. The loads that can’t be handed off to a regional relay because the freight doesn’t have time for the handoff.

Hirschbach Motor Lines is expanding its partnership with autonomous truck developer Aurora Innovation, aiming to have the fleet own 500 Aurora Driver-equipped trucks, with deliveries beginning in 2027. Hirschbach will subscribe to Aurora’s Driver-as-a-Service model. The 500 trucks will be deployed across Aurora’s network with a focus on high-volume routes between customer facilities in the Sun Belt and beyond. 

The CEO of Hirschbach, Richard Stocking, was unusually direct about exactly why. “Autonomy isn’t just a business move, it’s a quality-of-life investment for our people. The Aurora Driver will handle the longer, less desirable routes, giving our drivers greater flexibility. It’s a win-win.” 

Hirschbach’s expansion strategy envisions a hybrid network where autonomous trucks handle long-haul routes, allowing traditional drivers to focus on shorter hauls that get them home daily. 

The CEO of a major refrigerated carrier explicitly says that long-haul routes are less desirable. That his human drivers don’t want them. That autonomous trucks are the solution, not because humans can’t do the job, but because humans increasingly won’t.

Aurora had already demonstrated the capability on exactly the kind of run that matters here. Aurora began running freight between Dallas and Houston and has completed over 1,200 miles in a single self-driving truck without a driver, with plans to expand to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025. The Fort Worth to Phoenix corridor, one of Hirschbach’s key lanes, is 1,000 miles of Sun Belt highway that connects the coasts through the Southwest. Hirschbach is already leveraging Aurora’s full network to maximize value for its operations, with loads traveling from Houston to Dallas, El Paso, and on to Phoenix. 

Aurora’s own SEC filings are unambiguous about what they believe the technology solves. “The Aurora Driver addresses major challenges the freight industry faces, including the structural driver shortage, persistently high turnover, and asset underutilization. We offer a solution that provides a scalable, stable driver supply, which we expect will nearly double truck utilization.” 

The Hirschbach-Aurora deal is not the only response to the long-haul preference problem. Another answer that doesn’t require autonomous technology is the relay model, dividing long runs into human-manageable segments, swapping drivers at strategically located handoff points, and getting the load to the destination without requiring any single driver to be away from home more than a night or two.

Several carriers have been building relay networks quietly for years. The concept isn’t new; team driving is essentially a manual relay, but the modern version uses terminals, drop lots, and hub-and-spoke coordination to chain together regional drivers who each handle their home region before handing off to the next link. The freight keeps moving. The drivers go home.

The practical limitation is infrastructure. You need enough terminal density to make handoffs efficient. You need coordination technology to sequence the relays without losing time. And you need the freight economics to work, which adds cost through handling and coordination overhead, which has to be weighed against the premium the shipper is willing to pay to get a time-sensitive load moved without disruption.

For perishable reefer freight moving from California to the East Coast, that premium is often worth paying. A load of strawberries that costs $800 extra to move in a relay model still costs less than the load being rejected at the destination because it arrived warm after a detention delay.

The Montgomery v. Caribe Transport case, pending before the Supreme Court and expected to produce a decision on broker and shipper liability in carrier selection this summer, is landing in an industry in the midst of a transition. Shippers and brokers selecting carriers for long-haul perishable and temperature-sensitive freight are about to face elevated legal scrutiny on the adequacy of their carrier vetting. The question of whether a carrier had the driver capacity, the equipment integrity, and the safety record to reliably complete a transcontinental run without incident is going to be harder to wave away as irrelevant.

A shipper who puts a load of produce on a carrier whose drivers are demoralized, undertrained, and cycling through at 92% annual turnover because nobody wants to run the transcon anymore is not making a neutral business decision. After Montgomery, that decision may carry a verdict.

The industry is being honest with itself, slowly. Hirschbach’s announcement isn’t an aberration. It’s a signal that major carriers have accepted a structural reality: there is a category of freight movement that the modern driver workforce is not positioned to cover at scale, and the options are autonomous trucks, relay models, intermodal expansion where it’s viable, or just accepting that the loads don’t move on time.

The ATA’s shortage narrative has been useful for lobbying, but it has obscured the real problem for thirty years. The problem was never headcount. It was always the job description. Weeks away from home, sleeping in a truck, chasing miles across four time zones, bouncing around like a pinball from shipper to consignee across a random geography, fewer people want that life than used to, and the ones who did it for years are aging out.

Hirschbach’s most seasoned professional drivers, who collectively represent over 75 years of on-road experience, evaluated Aurora’s system and were, as the company reported, “blown away by the Aurora Driver’s performance.” I flew home for every one of my children’s births and flew back out. The people who know exactly what that job costs them were the first to say the machine can have it.

The post We have a long-haul problem and Hirschbach proved it appeared first on FreightWaves.

The moves come as Texas and federal officials increase scrutiny of issues ranging from commercial driver qualification standards and English-language proficiency enforcement to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices tied to supply chain contracting.

In one of the latest actions, Paxton’s office announced Tuesday that it sent a warning letter to CVS Health regarding the company’s supplier diversity practices tied to procurement and supply chain operations.

According to the attorney general’s office, CVS reserves a portion of its contracts for suppliers meeting certain demographic criteria, including minority-owned, women-owned and LGBTQ-owned businesses.

Paxton’s office said such programs “may violate state and federal civil rights laws” and could expose the company to liability under the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act because CVS participates as a Medicaid pharmacy provider.

The attorney general’s office said CVS has 14 days to inform the state about steps it has taken to comply with state and federal anti-discrimination laws.

CVS Health operates a supply chain network with more than 22 distribution centers and a fleet of 2,500 delivery vehicles across the U.S. supporting more than 9,000 retail stores, pharmacy services and e-commerce platforms, according to its website.

A 2016 report indicated CVS Health’s supplier diversity initiatives supported more than 21,145 jobs within its supply chain at that time.

Related: Feds tell states: Enforce trucker English rules or lose millions

Texas launches investigation into trucking schools over English proficiency standards

The CVS action follows a separate statewide investigation launched April 28 into several truck driving schools amid allegations that some commercial drivers may be obtaining commercial driver’s licenses without meeting federal safety requirements, including English-language proficiency standards.

The investigation targets:

• EP Texas Trucking School
• Trucker Certified LLC
• Fast Track CDL LLC
• CDLCALL.COM LLC
• Lindenwood Education System, also known as Ancora

Federal regulations require CDL holders to “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, understand highway traffic signs and signals in English, respond to official inquiries, and make entries on reports and records,” according to Paxton’s office.

State investigators allege some schools may have disregarded those requirements by advertising programs to non-English speakers, offering accelerated training timelines and falsely claiming certification status.

The schools named in the probe operate in major Texas freight markets, including El Paso, Odessa, San Antonio, Garland and Arlington, with graduates likely moving into trucking jobs across logistics hubs such as Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

EP Texas Trucking School provided the following statement to Border Report and KFOXTV: “We are aware of the concerns raised and take them seriously. Our school is committed to full compliance with all applicable state and federal standards and regulations.”

On Sept. 30, the Texas Department of Public Safety said it halted the issuance of CDLs to noncitizens following a federal directive aimed at tightening commercial licensing requirements.

Texas DPS said it would no longer issue, renew or reissue CDLs for drivers who are refugees, asylees or recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Pending applications and testing were also suspended until further notice.

A non-domiciled CDL is a commercial driver’s license issued to someone who is not a permanent resident of the state or the U.S. but is legally present for work.

Texas has recorded the highest total issuance of non-domiciled CDLs since 2015 among states that supplied data to a report by Overdrive.

Since 2015, Texas has issued more than 3.2 million total CDLs, including 51,993 to non-domiciled drivers. In 2024, Texas issued 6,265 CDLs to noncitizens.

Related: Texas stops issuing CDLs to non-citizens to comply with feds

The post Texas probes CDL schools, warns CVS over supply chain practices appeared first on FreightWaves.

The rapid deployment timeline marks a seismic shift from traditional automated gate systems that require months of installation work. Even Outpost’s first-generation kiosk took roughly a week to assemble and install.

“This is the first system of its kind that deploys in one day and eliminates costly gate labor while improving facility efficiency and security,” said Greg Akselrod, Outpost chief technology officer. “Every upgrade in this release is based on learnings across millions of production gate events.”

Hardware Built for Industrial Realities

The hardware reflects lessons learned in harsh industrial environments. One of those challenges is truck mirrors smashing into and damaging the expensive kiosks. Now the kiosk has a fighting chance.

Akselrod pointed to what engineers colloquially call the “mirror smasher” — a guard designed to deflect truck mirrors that come within inches of equipment.

“The mirrors come within an inch of your equipment and sometimes hit the equipment,” Akselrod said. “It’s basically a guard so that if they come a little too close, it knocks the mirror out of the way and protects the equipment.”

The kiosks contain an array of cameras, touchscreens, driver’s license and QR code scanners, HID pin and badge readers, lighting and built-in edge AI compute. The platform replaces manual staffing that typically runs $25,000 or more per gate monthly.

Engine-Canceling Microphone Technology

A major update to the platform is an industry-first engine-canceling microphone system. Standard noise-canceling technology fails against diesel engines because it trains on quieter environments like coffee shops and office acoustics.

“Competing with not just an engine, but a diesel truck engine, and doing it from outside the vehicle rather than from within the vehicle where the driver is speaking into their own microphone — it’s a very unique challenge,” Akselrod said. “It’s something that AI can do today; it’s just nobody’s built it.”

The custom digital signal processor pairs with 50-watt speakers, allowing drivers to hear operators or AI voice agents without shutting down engines or exiting cabs.

Advanced Fraud Prevention and Inspection Capabilities

Fraud prevention capabilities expand significantly with a full-color driver’s license scanner that checks for holograms and microprint rather than simply reading barcodes. The system cross-references USDOT numbers, motor carrier numbers and vehicle decals against an AI memory that stores every sighting of every piece of equipment.

“It’s not just scanning the barcode on the back, which can be easily photocopied,” Akselrod said. “It’s actually doing a full color scan and checking for things like the holograms, the microprint — looking for forged documents.”

One framing for the innovative technology is with an airport analogy: “This is the runway. It’s every takeoff, every landing. And if you don’t keep track of everything that’s coming through that gate with 100 percent accuracy, you miss things. Even if you’re missing half a percent, that means every day you’re losing an entire trailer, an entire truck,” Akselrod said.

The platform captures full recordings of equipment condition for damage inspection, establishing chain of custody documentation.

“Was that mud flap there when it left? Or did it get torn off while it was on the road or somewhere else? Was that dent there, was that hole there?” Akselrod said. “All of that comes together to give a ton more operational control.”

Customer Adoption and Remote Operations Tools

Customer reception has accelerated since the initial August 2025 release. Outpost signed contracts for 50 new locations in the first four months of 2026.

“Visibility at the gate is critical to controlling facility costs, maintaining security, and providing food safety protection across the supply chain, yet staffing reliable gate operations has remained a persistent challenge,” said Mitch Harper, area general manager at United States Cold Storage. “Outpost is uniquely closing that gap without adding headcount or complexity to our operations.”

New remote operations tools include a pooled operator model allowing multiple employees to coordinate across yards and a detailed gate event timeline providing audit trails for every transaction.

The post Outpost launches second-generation gate kiosk that deploys in one day appeared first on FreightWaves.

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) said it applauds the U.S. House of Representatives for passing the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) Tuesday.

The bipartisan legislation (H.R. 2853), which takes aim at criminal networks targeting American supply chains, passed by a vote of 348-60.

“Today’s House passage of CORCA is a win for every business, worker, and consumer who depends on the reliable and affordable movement of goods across America,” AAR said in a statement. It called on the Senate to pass the bill as well. 

“CORCA is critical to supply chain security, providing much-needed federal enforcement and intelligence support to address cargo theft and freight fraud,” said Intermodal Association of North America President and Chief Executive Anne Reinke. “IANA has been at the forefront of efforts to advance this legislation because our members are seeing the real-world impact of these crimes across the intermodal supply chain. We thank the lawmakers who helped move CORCA forward in the House, and we now urge the Senate to act quickly and get H.R. 2853 across the finish line.”

The group commended Reps. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), Dina Titus (D-Nev.), David Valadao (R-Calif.) and Susie Lee (D-Nev.) for backing the legislation, which attracted 206 co-sponsors.

“Organized cargo theft raises costs across the supply chain – from railroads and trucking companies to retailers, manufacturers, and ultimately consumers – while also putting transportation employees and frontline workers at greater risk from increasingly sophisticated criminal activity,” said Ian Jefferies, president and chief executive of AAR. “Today’s House action brings Congress one step closer to delivering the federal response Americans deserve.”

AAR said 75,000 incidents of  theft from major U.S. railroads caused losses of more than $200 million in 2025, an increase of more than 50% year-on-year. Much of it was carried out by transnational networks that exploit enforcement gaps across jurisdictions. “Despite substantial industry investments in security, only about one in 10 theft attempts lead to an arrest,” the group said.

The legislation strengthens federal law enforcement tools, establishes a national coordination center within Homeland Security Investigations, and provides grants and training to frontline agencies. 

The rail group as part of a coalition has called on the Department of Justice to deploy existing federal resources to combat organized supply chain theft, to investigate and prosecute criminal networks.

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post Railroads cheer crime bill passage, want DoJ to gear up supply chain theft fight appeared first on FreightWaves.

Tariff disruptions, regulatory reversals and a prolonged freight recession have suppressed new vehicle orders across every drivetrain. Federal policy shifts erased the previous federally driven push toward zero-emission trucks. 

The rollback of greenhouse gas vehicle standards, expiration of commercial zero-emission vehicle tax credits worth up to $40,000 per medium- and heavy-duty unit, and nullification of California’s clean truck regulations left fleet managers unsure what to order next.

Available funding for clean projects still exceeds pre-Biden levels. There remains more than $5 billion flowing annually from state, local and utility programs through 2028. 

California alone held roughly $1 billion in grants for on-road trucks and buses last year and reserved $592 million in vouchers for 3,569 Class 2b-8 zero-emission vehicles through its Hybrid and Zero Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project.

Markets mature across fuels

Natural gas engines saw growth. The Cummins X15N 15-liter natural gas engine finished its first full commercial year with diesel-like performance and clear cost wins. Among fleets running the engine, 71% reported savings versus diesel and 59% versus other natural gas vehicles.

Battery electric also delivered on savings. Medium- and heavy-duty battery-electric vehicle registrations rose 21% in 2025. Fleets operating medium-duty BEVs said the trucks delivered lower operating costs than the vehicles they replaced.

For RNG, California is king. Renewable diesel and biodiesel displaced nearly three-quarters of conventional diesel in California’s transportation market in 2024. “Renewable diesel makes the single biggest carbon reduction of all alternative fuels in use, and at no additional cost over petroleum diesel,” said Richard Battersby, assistant director of Oakland Public Works.

Propane use grew steadily, and expanded among school districts. The market burned an estimated 1.8 million more gallons in 2025 than the prior year, and more than 23,000 propane school buses now serve 1,100 districts in 49 states. 

Private propane fueling deals dominate, with many Midwest districts locking in prices between $1.32 and $1.90 per gasoline-gallon equivalent — 47% to 63% below gasoline’s 2025 average of $3.60.

Hydrogen remains an outlier. Fleets paid $18.86 per kilogram after incentives — an 89% to 135% premium over diesel. Industry analysts say the fuel must reach $8 to $10 per kilogram for fuel-cell trucks to break even with diesel. Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub funding cancellations and the exit of two Class 8 fuel-cell startups left the segment in its toughest spot yet.

AI moves from pilots to daily ops

One notable area was the increasing AI adoption rate among fleet managers.

Nearly half of fleet managers — 48% — now use artificial intelligence, primarily for route planning and dispatching (21%), maintenance diagnostics (19%) and preventive maintenance (19%). By 2027 they expect 35% of their fleets to be AI-enabled, up from roughly 20% today. 

Autonomous trucking pilots are also advancing: Volvo’s VNL Autonomous paired with the Aurora Driver is hauling freight for DHL and Uber Freight in Texas, while Kodiak has doubled its driverless Class 8 fleet and logged more than 5,200 hours of paid driverless operation.

Diesel still dominant but cleaner

Class 8 tractors posted strong efficiency numbers, with two units in a North American Council for Freight Efficiency demonstration averaging 11.6 miles per gallon over 22,550 miles. 

Renewable natural gas made up 97% of all natural gas fuel used in California transportation last year. Leading fleets including Walmart, Amazon, UPS, FedEx and Werner placed X15N orders in the engine’s debut commercial year.

Global signals point to growth

The global market continues to grow. Battery costs in China have fallen to $90 per kilowatt-hour, and battery-electric trucks now hold 22% of that country’s heavy-duty market.

 AI-driven freight automation on electric trucks could cut fleet-level total cost of ownership by 8% to 13%, compared with the roughly 3% average savings from simple diesel-to-BEV swaps.

One core takeaway: fleets that spread risk across multiple technology pathways are proving more resilient to sudden policy and market shocks than those waiting for one perfect solution.

The post State of Sustainable Fleets 2026: Fleets diversify amid policy shifts appeared first on FreightWaves.

The industry conversation around Roadcheck is predictable every year. Brake adjustments. Tire tread depth. ELD compliance. Cargo securement. The usual compliance checklist stuff that fleet managers and safety directors obsess over each May. This year is no different on the surface, with CVSA naming ELD tampering and cargo securement as its 2026 focus areas.

The missed conversation about Roadcheck and trucking enforcement more broadly, which almost never happens. It is a conversation about national security. About criminal interdiction. About the fact that the same 80,000-pound vehicles hauling America’s freight are also hauling drugs, trafficking human beings and, in the hands of the wrong people, functioning as weapons of mass destruction.

The trucking industry prefers to frame enforcement as a safety and compliance exercise, full stop. The data, the case files and the body count tell a different story.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck containing 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. At 9:02 a.m., he detonated it. The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s day care center, and injured more than 675 others. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

At the time, federal oversight of commercial motor vehicles was buried inside the Federal Highway Administration, an agency whose primary mission was building and maintaining highways. Trucking safety was a side desk inside a road construction agency. The Office of Motor Carrier Safety, as it was known, had inherited regulatory authority from the Interstate Commerce Commission when the ICC was abolished in 1995, the same year McVeigh demonstrated what a truck could do in the wrong hands.

Understanding the timeline of federal trucking oversight is worth it because it explains how we got here. The ICC’s Bureau of Motor Carriers wrote the first federal truck safety rules in 1936. When the Department of Transportation was established in 1966, the ICC’s safety authority transferred to DOT and was delegated to FHWA. For the next 34 years, trucking safety lived inside a highway agency. It was not until a series of high-profile bus and truck crashes in the late 1990s, combined with an annual CMV fatality count of 5,374 in 1998 alone, that Congress finally carved out the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as a standalone agency effective January 1, 2000, under the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999.

The political will to create FMCSA did not come from a single event but the post-Oklahoma City enforcement environment, in which FHWA’s Office of Motor Carriers suddenly found itself at the intersection of national security and commercial vehicle regulation, was part of the backdrop. A truck had just killed 168 Americans. The agency responsible for truck safety was three bureaucratic layers deep inside an organization that poured concrete for a living.

Three decades later, the lesson of Oklahoma City has been largely forgotten by the trucking industry, even as the rest of the world has learned it the hard way. The use of commercial vehicles as instruments of terror is an accelerating global phenomenon.

On July 14, 2016, a Tunisian-born man drove a rented 19-ton cargo truck for more than a mile along the packed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, during Bastille Day celebrations. He killed 86 people and wounded more than 430 in the span of four minutes and 17 seconds. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.

Five months later, on December 19, 2016, a rejected Tunisian asylum seeker hijacked a Scania semi-trailer truck in Berlin, murdered the original driver, and plowed the rig into a Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz. Twelve people were killed and 56 were injured. On October 31, 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek national who had entered the United States through the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, rented a Home Depot pickup truck and drove it down a crowded bike path along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring 13. Public records showed Saipov held a commercial driver’s license. He held a commercial truck license AND had his own DOT authority. He wasn’t just a CDL holder working for someone else. He was a registered motor carrier with FMCSA. The system gave him a CDL, gave him operating authority, and nobody flagged him, even though federal agents had interviewed him in 2015 about his contacts with two suspected terrorists and had declined to open a case. 

On January 1, 2025, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Army veteran from Houston, rammed a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people and injuring at least 57. An ISIS flag was recovered from the vehicle. The FBI also found two rudimentary pipe bombs in coolers nearby. It was the worst vehicle ramming attack in United States history.

West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center noted in a March 2025 analysis that by 2016, vehicle ramming had become the most lethal form of terror attack in Western countries, responsible for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths in the West that year. The technique’s appeal is straightforward. Vehicles are ubiquitous, require no special materials or expertise to weaponize, and are extraordinarily difficult to defend against in open public spaces.

Al-Qaeda understood this early. Inspire magazine, the English-language publication of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, actively promoted vehicle-ramming tactics before the technique proliferated globally. The Islamic State adopted and amplified the strategy. In February 2025, the House Homeland Security Committee introduced the Department of Homeland Security Vehicular Terrorism Prevention and Mitigation Act, legislation requiring DHS to produce annual reports on emerging vehicle-ramming threats and countermeasures.

The common thread across these incidents is the vehicle itself. The trucking industry’s 11 million registered large trucks and buses are not just economic assets. They are potential force multipliers for anyone with violent intent and the ability to get behind the wheel.

In November 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 31-year-old Akhror Bozorov in Kansas while he was working as a commercial truck driver. Bozorov, an Uzbek national, had been wanted by Uzbekistan authorities since 2022 for belonging to a terrorist organization. He is accused of distributing jihadist propaganda online and recruiting individuals to join the jihad movement.

Bozorov had crossed the U.S. southern border in February 2023 and was apprehended by Border Patrol, released, and subsequently granted work authorization. He obtained a Pennsylvania-issued commercial driver’s license in July 2025. A photograph of his CDL, released by the Department of Homeland Security, showed it was issued as a nondomiciled license. It was also a Real ID.

Pennsylvania State Republican Chairman Greg Rothman called it “a national security breach right here in Pennsylvania,” demanding to know how someone with terrorist ties passed every check required to operate an 18-wheeler. PennDOT stated that it had followed its standard process, running applicants through the DHS SAVE verification database, which confirmed Bozorov’s lawful presence in the country. The federal system cleared him.

Bozorov was not an isolated case. In October 2025, Homeland Security arrested a man who had been issued a New York commercial driver’s license under the name “No Name Given Anmol.” In August 2025, an undocumented immigrant named Harjinder Singh, who held a California-issued CDL, killed three people on the Florida Turnpike after making an illegal U-turn with an 18-wheeler. Singh had crossed the Mexico border into California in 2018.

In September 2025, FMCSA issued an interim final rule barring states from issuing CDLs or commercial learner’s permits to drivers domiciled in a foreign jurisdiction without proper documentation and a mandatory SAVE immigration status check. The agency’s review of Pennsylvania’s nondomiciled CDL practices found systemic issues. The U.S. Department of Transportation demanded that Pennsylvania immediately pause issuance of all new nondomiciled CDLs, conduct a comprehensive internal audit and void all noncompliant licenses.

The national security conversation about trucking extends well beyond terrorism. Commercial motor vehicles are the arterial system of American criminal enterprise, and the evidence is overwhelming.

The FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative, launched in 2004 after analysts at the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation noticed a pattern of murdered women’s bodies being dumped along Interstate 40, has compiled a roster of more than 850 murders believed to be connected to long-haul truck drivers. Approximately 450 potential suspects have been identified, many of them active or former commercial drivers.

Former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi, who spent a year riding more than 2,000 miles in a semi-truck researching the phenomenon, described the profession’s appeal to serial predators in blunt terms. An 18-wheeler is a mobile crime scene. A killer can pick up a victim in one jurisdiction, commit murder in a second and dump the body in a third, all in the same shift. The mobility, anonymity and jurisdictional fragmentation that define long-haul trucking also define the ideal operating environment for serial violence. I went on to cover this both on X and in my new book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Trucking: How We Built, Broke, and Can Still Save American Trucking.

The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program identified that the majority of victims were women living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse or sex work, who were picked up at truck stops. The initiative remains active, and the FBI is using truck company logs, fuel receipts and forensic genealogical DNA to build case timelines against suspects. Two hundred of the 850 linked killings remain unsolved.

Drug trafficking through commercial vehicles operates at industrial scale. Mexican cartels, principally the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, use personally owned vehicles, rental vehicles and tractor-trailers on interstate highways as primary smuggling conveyances. In January 2023, federal agents intercepted a tractor-trailer carrying 1.4 million fentanyl pills after monitoring wiretapped phone conversations about the shipment. In a separate May 2023 bust, authorities seized 480,000 fentanyl pills, 72 kilograms of methamphetamine and a loaded handgun from another semi-truck. A long-running investigation into the Valenzuela Transnational Criminal Organization, a Sinaloa Cartel component, led to charges against 109 defendants and the seizure of approximately 2,000 kilograms of cocaine and fentanyl, more than $16 million in cash and 21,000 rounds of ammunition from a commercial truck yard in Otay Mesa, California.

In February 2024, the FBI announced the results of Operation Dead Hand, which dismantled an organized crime network that used long-haul semi-trucks to transport cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl and heroin from Los Angeles to Canada through the Detroit Windsor Tunnel, the Buffalo Peace Bridge and the Blue Water Bridge. The investigation documented approximately 845 kilograms of methamphetamine, 951 kilograms of cocaine, 20 kilograms of fentanyl and 4 kilograms of heroin moving through the network. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a separate investigation resulted in the seizure of two tractor-trailers with hidden compartments specifically built for narcotics smuggling, along with 328 kilograms of cocaine, 26 kilograms of fentanyl, 60 firearms and more than $2.4 million in drug proceeds.

Human trafficking, too, moves by truck. CVSA itself has acknowledged this piece. In May 2026, just days before International Roadcheck began, CVSA announced a human trafficking awareness initiative tied to the upcoming international football competition. The alliance recognizes that commercial vehicle operators and enforcement personnel are uniquely positioned to identify trafficking indicators at truck stops, rest areas and inspection points.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the federal government moved aggressively to secure certain segments of surface transportation. The 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 mandated security training for frontline employees in higher-risk surface transportation operations. The Transportation Security Administration eventually published its Security Training for Surface Transportation Final Rule in March 2020, requiring TSA-approved security training for employees performing security-sensitive functions.

The rule’s applicability is narrow. It covers higher-risk freight railroads, public transportation agencies, passenger railroads and over-the-road bus companies operating fixed-route service in 10 designated high-density urban areas. Over-the-road buses, those motorcoaches with elevated passenger decks and under-floor baggage compartments, are covered because of their visibility, publicly available schedules, ease of boarding by unknown individuals and access to high-consequence locations. TSA identified 127 surface transportation operations as high risk. The GAO reported in April 2022 that TSA had approved approximately 73% of submitted training programs.

Hazmat endorsement holders already undergo TSA security threat assessments under 49 CFR 1572, a requirement that has been in place since 2003. Drivers who want to haul explosives, flammable materials or other dangerous goods must submit fingerprints and pass a background check administered through TSA’s vetting infrastructure.

General freight carriers, however, operate in what amounts to a security void. There is no TSA-mandated security training for the standard Class 8 tractor-trailer driver hauling dry van freight on the interstate. There is no security coordinator requirement. There is no security awareness curriculum. There is no “observe, assess and respond” framework.

TSA did create a Trucking Security Program and developed T-START, a set of five security guidance modules for highway transportation companies. The program has not been funded since fiscal year 2009. It exists on paper. It does not exist in practice for the vast majority of America’s 521,000 active interstate freight motor carriers.

The logic behind the gap is understandable from a risk-based resource allocation standpoint. Motorcoaches carry dozens of passengers and are high-visibility soft targets. Hazmat vehicles carry materials that can be weaponized or create catastrophic environmental damage. A dry van hauling consumer goods presents a different risk profile.

The logic breaks down when you consider the operational reality. The same CDL that authorizes a driver to haul pallets of bottled water also authorizes that driver to operate an 80,000-pound vehicle through a crowded urban core. The same tractor-trailer that legitimately crosses the U.S.-Mexico border 21,359 times per day on average, per Bureau of Transportation data, is the same vehicle that cartels use to move 1.4 million fentanyl pills at a time. The same commercial vehicle network that the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative has linked to 850 murders is the same network that operates with zero formalized security training requirements for the majority of its participants.

Akhror Bozorov did not need a hazmat endorsement to be dangerous. He needed a CDL. He got one.

International Roadcheck is marketed as a safety initiative, and it is, but strip away the compliance language and look at what actually happens during those 72 hours. Law enforcement officers across three countries are conducting a coordinated enforcement operation targeting commercial motor vehicles and their operators. They are checking driver credentials, verifying identity documents, examining vehicle condition, reviewing electronic logging records for evidence of falsification and inspecting cargo securement.

That is interdiction infrastructure.

Every driver credential check is a potential hit against criminal databases. Every ELD review is a potential window into falsified movements. Every cargo inspection is a potential discovery of contraband. The 56,178 inspections conducted during the 2025 Roadcheck generated 13,553 vehicle out-of-service violations, 3,317 driver out-of-service violations and 177 hazardous materials violations. The secondary value of those inspections, the criminal intelligence generated by tens of thousands of law enforcement contacts with commercial vehicle operators in a 72-hour window, is never quantified or discussed publicly.

CVSA itself coordinates with FMCSA, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators and Transport Canada. The cross-jurisdictional, cross-agency architecture of Roadcheck mirrors the architecture of a national security operation because, in practical terms, that is part of what it is. This is the equivalent of the HSIN Intel Network post McVeigh. 

The carriers who voluntarily park their trucks during Roadcheck week, and the industry openly acknowledges that this happens, are self-identifying as operators who cannot survive a 37-step inspection. That is a safety concern. It is also a security concern. A carrier that falsifies ELD records, operates with defective equipment and avoids law enforcement contact is also a carrier that is operationally invisible to the enforcement and intelligence infrastructure that Roadcheck represents.

The trucking industry moves 72.6 percent of the nation’s freight tonnage. It is the backbone of the American economy. The overwhelming majority of the millions of men and women who drive trucks are hardworking, law-abiding professionals who keep the country running.

The same characteristics that make trucking economically indispensable, its scale, its mobility, its distributed operational structure, its cross-jurisdictional reach, and its low barriers to entry, also make it an attractive operating environment for criminal and terrorist actors. The data is unambiguous. Terrorists have used commercial vehicles to kill hundreds of people worldwide. A wanted jihadist recruiter obtained a U.S. commercial driver’s license and was driving commercially when arrested. Cartels move industrial quantities of narcotics by tractor-trailer. Serial killers exploit the anonymity and mobility of long-haul trucking. And the majority of the nation’s freight carriers operate without any formalized security training whatsoever.

The question is not whether trucking has a national security dimension. The question is why the industry and its regulators continue to treat enforcement as though it does not.

International Roadcheck is the largest targeted commercial vehicle enforcement program in the world. It has been running since 1988, and more than 1.8 million inspections have been conducted under its banner. FMCSA, under Administrator Derek Barrs, is running the most aggressive enforcement posture in the agency’s 26-year history, with 60+ ELD devices revoked since January 2025, new out-of-service criteria for ELD tampering effective April 1, 2026, and a 28 percent increase in enforcement activity.

That is all progress but until the industry and its regulators are willing to have an honest conversation about the security dimension of what they do, until general freight carriers are brought into a security awareness framework comparable to what motorcoaches and hazmat operators already have, the blind spot remains.

The next Timothy McVeigh, the next Sayfullo Saipov, the next Akhror Bozorov does not need to build a bomb or board an airplane. He just needs a truck and right now, we are making it remarkably easy to get one.

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The transportation lending business of Canada’s BMO is being sold to a private equity company with the bank retaining a minority stake.

Stonepeak, which already is heavily involved in logistics through, among other assets, its ownership of chassis provider Trac Intermodal, said Monday it was acquiring the unit, along with BMO’s vendor finance business.

The sale will bring an end to BMO’s (NYSE: BMO) majority ownership of the group, which it acquired from GE Capital in 2015. The possibility of it being sold was first reported by Bloomberg last year. 

BMO’s transportation sector is believed to be one of the largest lenders in the trucking business. 

It will also bring an end to a frequent feature of various trucking conferences: BMO paying what it took to snag that first spot in the exhibition hall as delegates walked into the large room. The BMO booth at the head of the queue was a frequent sight.

In a possible foreshadowing of what was to come, BMO took a booth at the Truckload Carriers Association meeting in March, but it wasn’t in its usual prized location.

A new name for the group has not been chosen. And while the group under Stonepeak might take that primary spot in the future, it won’t be under the BMO name. 

According to a prepared statement released by both BMO and Stonepeak, BMO will retain a 19.9% share in the business being sold to Stonepeak. The sales price was not disclosed.

The management team at BMO’s transportation group will be remaining in their positions after the sale. 

The head of the group at BMO, Gary Kempsinski, said in the statement that “we could not have envisioned a better partner to lead BMO Transportation and Vendor Finance into its next chapter.” 

“Stonepeak brings deep experience, operating expertise, and relationships in North American transportation and logistics infrastructure, and particularly in asset leasing businesses,” he said.  

No more credit data

The sale will also end the industry being provided four times a year with a highly transparent look at credit conditions in the trucking sector through BMO’s quarterly earnings statement. 

Supplemental information provided each quarter by BMO broke out such measurements as writeoffs, impaired loans, provisions and allowances for all of their sectors, transportation included. Given that the transportation segment was believed to be at least 90% trucking-focused, that data gave a clear picture of the strength or weakness of trucking credit markets.

The data showed when conditions were very good. It showed when the trucking market was most definitely not good. It showed recently when things were starting to improve.  

That data was available because BMO is a publicly-traded company. But it would not be expected to release that data as just a minority shareholder in the business.

The sale is expected to close in the fourth quarter, according to the companies. It is possible that the individual sector data will be released in BMO’s next two quarterly earnings statements, May 27 and sometime in late August.

BMO reported a book of business in transportation of CA$12.42 billion at the close of the first quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended January 31. The size of the book of business peaked at $15.62 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023. 

While a sales price for the units was not disclosed, the companies said the combined book of business for the two units was about $14.5 billion as of March 31.

Selling near the bottom?

The timing of the sale did raise eyebrows for some observers. If it is assumed the sales process began around the time of the Bloomberg story, that was occurring when the freight market was near the bottom of its years-long slump.

The sale, by contrast, is coming at a time when freight markets by all accounts are rapidly strengthening.

But BMO will be able to participate in the turnaround through its almost 20% stake. And BMO said in its statement that the small stake would enable it to “benefit from ongoing income participation with significantly lower capital.”

Banking sources said the capital needs of an independent lender like Stonepeak, as opposed to  a more tightly regulated bank, could be seen as favoring the less encumbered private ownership. 

Stonepeak has $88 billion of assets  under management. It declined comment beyond its prepared statement that was issued jointly with BMO.

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The post BMO’s transportation group, huge lender to trucking, is being sold appeared first on FreightWaves.

Power aboard the container ship Dali failed twice as it left the Port of Baltimore for Sri Lanka at 1:30 a.m. on March 24, 2024. The vessel crashed into a bridge pier, causing the span to collapse. The National Transportation Safety Board earlier found that a loose wire in a control panel probably caused the ship’s systems to twice lose power. Six highway workers on the bridge died in the accident.  

Synergy Marine Pte Ltd. of Singapore, Synergy Maritime Pte Ltd. of Chennai, India, and technical superintendent aboard the Dali, Radhakrishnan Karthik Nair, 47, an Indian national, were charged by federal prosecutors.

An improper fuel pump system left the ship unable to regain power, according to the indictment.

“As alleged, the bridge was struck and collapsed because those who were responsible for the ship’s operation deliberately cut corners at the expense of safety,” Jimmy Paul, head of the FBI’s Baltimore office, told a media gathering.

Charges include conspiracy, willfully failing to immediately inform the U.S. Coast Guard of a known hazardous condition, obstructing an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and making false statements. 

The government also brought misdemeanor charges against the operators for a hazardous spill into the Patapsco River.

The Dali had two power failures in port the previous day, the FBI found. Synergy did not investigate or report them as required and provided false information to the NTSB.

Also Tuesday, the state of Maryland finalized a settlement worth $2.25 billion with the Dali’s owner and Synergy. The state’s claims against the ship’s builder, Hyundai Heavy Industries of South Korea, are not included in the settlement.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post U.S. charges ship operators in fatal Baltimore bridge collapse appeared first on FreightWaves.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) last year began testing ultra-fast delivery in parts of Seattle and Philadelphia and currently offers it in nine countries, including the United Arab Emirates. The service essentially competes with DoorDash, Instacart and Uber Eats, which have expanded beyond food delivery into merchandise, as well as Walmart.

Amazon Now operates out of strategically located, urban micro-fulfillment centers, where on-demand workers will pick up packaged orders. The facilities are about the size of a Walgreens retail outlet, stock about 3,500 fresh grocery, personal care products, electronics and household items. The centers position essential products close to neighborhoods and work districts, utilizing advanced inventory systems that optimize product selection based on hyperlocal demand to maximize efficiency and speed. They also reduce the distance delivery associates need to travel and enable faster delivery times.  

Thirty-minute delivery now widely available in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia and Seattle, and is rapidly expanding in dozens more cities such as Austin, Texas; Houston; Minneapolis; Orlando, Florida; Phoenix; Denver and Oklahoma City. The company said it plans to expand the service to tens of millions of shoppers in these and other cities by the end of the year.

Ultra-fast delivery is the latest move to increase delivery speed and keep customers buying on Amazon’s marketplace by offering extreme convenience. Amazon also offers one-hour and three-hour delivery on more than 90,000 products and same-day delivery on millions of items. Amazon has also promised to significantly scale up its Prime Air drone delivery service, which will offer a much wider selection than Amazon Now. Prime Air delivery in under 60 minutes is available in nine U.S. locations so far.

Amazon’s success training consumers to expect same-day delivery, and now near-instant delivery, has proved costly to other retailers and delivery companies that try to match its services. Amazon is raising the delivery bar again when competitors like Walmart and Target are dealing with tariff pressure, higher fuel costs and thinner margins, said Joshua Ketter, global CEO of marketplace seller Spreetail, in an email.

Some retailers are trying to buck the trend by offering deferred delivery service for customers that aren’t in a rush. In fact, a McKinsey survey last year found that 90% of customers are willing to wait at least two to three days for their deliveries if the shipping is free. 

Walmart, however, is rapidly expanding its same-day delivery capabilities by leveraging its more than 4,600 stores as local fulfillment centers. The number of orders delivered in under three hours increasing more than 60% in 2025, President and CEO John Furner said during the company’s earnings call in February. At Walmart U.S., 35% of store-fulfilled orders were delivered in under three hours in the fourth quarter. And the company is averaging delivery in less than an hour when customers opt for express delivery.

Where Amazon Now is available, customers will see a “30-Minute Delivery” option in the banner on the Amazon app or homepage, and see Amazon Now offers as they search and shop. Prime members pay a discounted delivery fee of $3.99 per order, while customers without a Prime membership pay $13.99. An additional small order fee of $1.99 for Prime members and $3.99 for customers without a Prime membership applies to orders below $15.

In most areas where it’s available, Amazon Now serves customers 24 hours a day. It should be noted that Amazon doesn’t guarantee delivery in 30 minutes, but says it will provide updates on the arrival time.

Last year, more than 13 billion items worldwide were delivered to Prime Members the same day or next day. In the U.S., Prime members received over eight billion items the same or next day, an increase of more than 30% from 2024, with groceries and everyday essentials making up half the total of items, according to the retailer.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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In a release, Rockaway, N.J.-based CCM said Pellicori will partner closely with leadership to oversee all legal, regulatory, and compliance matters, supporting growth and operations across the intermodal ecosystem. 

“Tara is an exceptional addition to CCM at a defining moment for our company and our industry,” said Paul Nazzaro, chief executive of CCM. “Her breadth of experience across transportation, logistics, and complex corporate matters – combined with her practical, business-focused approach – makes her uniquely suited to help guide CCM as we continue to scale. Tara’s leadership will be instrumental in ensuring we grow responsibly while delivering value to our partners and customers.”

Pellicori most recently served as director and associate general counsel at Subaru of America, Inc. She also serves as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post Eyeing growth, chassis provider CCM appoints new SVP-General Counsel appeared first on FreightWaves.

Fraudsters are sharing warehouses, swapping drivers, and coordinating across networks. The people trying to stop them are still working alone.

That’s the gap Dale Prax has spent years trying to close. Prax is the founder, president, and CEO of Collaborative Rating Systems (more widely known as FreightValidate.com) and a strategic fraud advisor and advocate at Truckstop.com. Prax joined Malcolm Harris on What the Truck?!? to lay out a vision for cross-platform collaboration between vetting companies, a closer working relationship with federal regulators, and a shared sense of accountability that extends to every party in a freight transaction, from the driver at the dock to the broker booking the load.

The conversation picks up where Prax left off during a December appearance on the show, where he first floated the idea of bringing competing vetting platforms together. Five months later, the idea is becoming a meeting on the calendar, with the FMCSA at the table.

The bad guys are already collaborating

Prax has been making the argument for collaboration among vetting and onboarding platforms since at least 2022, when a wave of new fraud-prevention companies began entering the market in response to surging cargo theft and identity fraud schemes. The problem, as he sees it, is that even with more tools in the ecosystem, the bad actors are still finding ways through.

“We all know that the bad guys are collaborating with each other,” Prax said. “They own warehouses, they  share truck drivers, so they’re collaborating very closely.”

Coordination on the criminal side has created a gap problem. A carrier flagged in one vetting platform might sail through another with no issues.

“I get calls all the time from people who don’t understand why they’re not validated in our platform,” Prax said. “Some people can fall through the crack, which is why we have to bring the systems together.”

Why sharing intelligence beats sharing algorithms

His proposed fix doesn’t involve simply sharing proprietary algorithms or trade secrets between competing platforms. The key, he says, is sharing intelligence, such as verified, time-consuming findings that individual companies are already producing in isolation.

“It takes several months to a year sometimes to get information from the Freedom of Information Act office to prove a guy is a bad guy,” Prax explained. “So if I’m doing it, I should be able to share that with the other vetting platforms and let them know we’ve proven if someone owns 15 MC numbers and has not disclosed that affiliation, or if he lives outside The United States, but he lied in his application.”

If one platform has already done the investigative legwork to uncover a fraudulent operator, every other platform in the ecosystem should benefit from that finding rather than duplicating the effort (or worse, never catching it at all).

What was once a theoretical pitch is now materializing in practice. Prax described a pivotal conversation with Derek Barrs at the Transportation Club of Jacksonville that turned into a formal invitation to Washington, D.C. When Prax sent the invite out to vetting platforms across the industry, the response was immediate.

“When I sent out the list to all the vetting platforms that I know, the immediate response was a resounding yes,” Prax said. “It’s really refreshing to see that happen.”

What the FMCSA can and can’t do

The meeting, scheduled for May 14, will bring together not just vetting companies but also representatives from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). Prax considers that pairing essential. For too long, he argues, the private-sector fraud prevention community and federal regulators have operated without a clear understanding of what the other side can and can’t do.

“A lot of us vetting companies may not know the limitations of the FMCSA,” Prax said. “We don’t know where their hands are tied.”

He pointed to a specific legal constraint that most of the industry may not be aware of: a case called FMCSA v. Darlene Riojas, 7 Star Transport, and Four Star Trucking, in which  Administrative Law Judge J. E. Sullivan ruled in 2019 that the agency lacks the authority to impose civil penalties. That kind of limitation changes the calculus for how fraud gets addressed at the federal level.

“Vetting platforms and onboarding platforms need to know what their limitations are,” Prax said. “They also need to know what our capabilities are so we can help each other. Maybe the agency can’t do something, but we certainly can.”

That means the private sector may need to serve as a de facto enforcement layer in cases where the regulatory process is slow or legally hamstrung, recommending against the use of carriers that shouldn’t have been granted operating authority in the first place, even while the formal legal process plays out at the FMCSA.

The real cost of cargo theft

The actual dollar cost of cargo theft is still an ongoing discussion between industry voices who have offered widely varying estimates, but Prax is working to resolve that.

“You can’t know the cost of cargo theft until you define the cost of cargo theft,” he said.

Removing that ambiguity starts by understanding what the industry is measuring. The cost to manufacture the stolen goods, the retail value, and the wholesale price are all going to give wildly different numbers when it comes to value lost. Even once you settle on a definition, you’re still only looking at reported incidents.

Expert estimates vary from up to a billion lost annually to 6.6 billion annually. “Now how about unreported fraud?” Prax asked. “We don’t know what that answer is because it’s unreported.”

He pushed the lens even wider, suggesting that the downstream costs (including lost customers, forfeited revenue, and damaged relationships) are rarely factored into headline figures. 

“I like to compare it to the cost of war,” Prax said. “What’s the cost of war? Is it the cost of the bullets and the bombs? Or is it the cost of the bloodshed and damage that would happen on the battlefield? There are a lot more costs to go with it. It’s also the cost of the counseling for the grieving person that lost their son or daughter.”

Either way, Prax says, if the industry underestimates the scope of the problem, it will underinvest in the solution.

Vetting platforms aren’t the problem – how people use them is

Prax pushes back on the assumption that vetting platforms are the weak link. The tools, he says, are generally doing their job. The problem is how people use the information those tools provide.

“Too many people have used vetting platforms as a crutch rather than a tool,” Prax said. “For any cargo theft or even fraud that I’ve investigated, it’s rarely the fault of the vetting platform. It’s a fault in not following through with a proper process after you get the information.”

There are still many kinds of checks that require human judgment: verifying the driver, confirming the carrier isn’t operating as a chameleon, ensuring the shipper is doing its part. No algorithm replaces the person making the calls.

“There is no algorithm that can make a decision for you,” Prax said. “It can lead you to your decision faster, but the decision belongs to the person.”

Everyone in the transaction has a responsibility

Brokers, carriers, shippers, and tech providers all need to step up, according to Prax. Even drivers, he says, have a responsibility to exercise good judgment. 

“The driver has a responsibility,” Prax said. “The driver has the ability to ask questions. If you show up at a shipper’s dock, the first question you should ask is, ‘who did you broker this load to?’”

The accountability runs both ways. The shipper should be asking the driver who assigned the load. The broker should be confirming the carrier’s identity. Everyone in the transaction has a role.

Prax implores the entire freight community to stop being passive.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy told the audience at the Mid America Truck Show to “stop bitching at the windshield” and start engaging directly with elected officials. An unprecedented 19 trucking-related bills are currently before Congress, including the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act and the Household Goods Shipping Act which would restore the FMCSA’s ability to impose civil penalties.

“Write to your representatives, call them,” Prax said. “Tell them to get these bills passed.”  

The threat has moved well past the point where any broker, carrier, or shipper can afford to act in isolation.

“I don’t care which vetting platform you use,” Prax said. “Use somebody. You can’t do it on your own.”

Click here to learn more about Truckstop.

The post The fraudsters are collaborating. It’s time the good guys did too. appeared first on FreightWaves.

The benchmark price used for most fuel surcharges fell this week by the smallest increment possible, with the broader market showing signs that a recent slide is beginning to be overtaken by tightening market fundamentals.

The Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration average weekly retail diesel price declined 0.1 cents/gallon to $5.639/g, effective Monday and published Tuesday. The decline comes after a sharp increase of 28.9 cts/g last week, which followed three weeks of declines.

The small downward move comes amidst what is growing to be a schism in oil market views about where they might be headed.

The relative calm in recent weeks has led to some confidence that oil markets have taken a big loss in supply in stride and managed to rise sharply but not move into areas seen only at two other times in history: the 2008 price surge and the 2023 reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The other side can be summed up by what energy economist Philip Verleger said in his most recent weekly report, “Based on historical data, crude should now trade for around $200 per barrel.”

It’s not trading at that level, nowhere near it. But in the past two days, the futures price of world crude benchmark Brent has started to move upward in a reversal of a mostly downward trend that saw Brent settle at a recent high of more than $118 on April 29 before falling to a settlement of just over $100/b Thursday. 

Recent upward moves

The futures price of Brent, the world’s crude benchmark, settled Monday at $104.21. That was a 2.88% gain from Friday but remains well below a recent high settlement of $114.44 on May 4. 

But the increase Monday was followed Tuesday by further gains. At approximately 9:10 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Brent on the CME commodity exchange was trading at $107.41/barrel, a gain of $3.20/b, 3.07%, from Monday’s settlement. 

Meanwhile, ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD) on CME at that time was up 9.43 cts/g from Monday, 2.38%, to $4.0692/g.

The worldwide squeeze on inventories that is beginning to become a focus of oil markets–a factor in Verleger’s statement– is highly visible in recent weekly statistics from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). 

Nationwide stocks in the U.S. of ULSD for the week ended May 1, reported Wednesday, were at 93.14 million barrels. Since the Iran war began in March, those stocks have declined by 14.8 million barrels, a drop of about 13.4%. 

More striking is the fact that the report shows ULSD stocks at their lowest level for the first week of May in the last 10 years. Two of those years, 2020 and 2021, have inflated numbers due to the pandemic. But the latest weekly EIA report shows those ULSD inventories below every other year in that 10-year stretch. 

The tightening of the diesel market relative to crude can be seen in the spread on the CME between Brent and ULSD. 

A straight comparison of the front month prices between the two show that ULSD has started to move back toward a $1.50/b premium over Brent. That spread since the war began has been over $1.80/g, but in the last two weeks has fallen as low as $1.23. But Monday’s settlement put it at just under $1.49/g. 

Brent’s high water settlement since the war began ULSD was a settlement of $118.35/g on March 31. It has been below $100/b at several points, and its failure to move higher even with little immediate prospect for the end of the Strait of Hormuz closure has left some observers scratching their heads. 

What’s keeping prices restrained

Verleger cited several reasons for the continued restraint in oil prices.

“The key disparities this time are the substantial amount of Russian and Iranian stocks stored at sea and the extremely high price sensitivity of consumers, especially in China,” he wrote. “The availability of ocean-borne stocks and decreasing demand (sometimes called “demand destruction”) have moderated the war’s impact. This moderation will be temporary, however, if the global economy responds as it did to past disruptions.”

A recent article in Bloomberg referred to two other factors that have helped keep a lid on prices and said “traders (are) now questioning how much longer they can be sustained.”

One was the high level of U.S. exports of crude and products, driven in part by releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In recent weeks, U.S. exports of crude and products topped 12-million b/d three times and more than 14 million b/d once. Prior to that, total exports had only exceeded 12-million b/d twice.

Bloomberg reported that the other factor was “a sudden collapse in Chinese crude purchases.”

“Some of (China’s) large oil companies have been reselling cargoes from West Africa in recent weeks,” Bloomberg reported. “The move came shortly after state refiners were given permission to draw from commercial storage, helping to ease supply pressures.”

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The post Tiny move in benchmark diesel as futures prices start to shift higher appeared first on FreightWaves.

In February, the company flagged a $77 million understatement of purchased transportation expenses for the first three quarters of 2025, causing it to delay the release of fourth-quarter and full-year results.

At the time, it said it was also assessing any potential impacts to 2023 and 2024. The Tuesday update said Hub Group (NASDAQ: HUBG) “identified certain transactions that were prematurely or incorrectly recognized or not adequately supported within those financial statements.”

The $77 million understatement represents roughly 2% of Hub’s 2025 revenue. The company does not expect any impact on cash or operating cash flow for any periods.

Hub has until Sept. 14 to regain compliance with Nasdaq’s timely filing rules, and “intends to regain compliance on or prior to such date.”

Q1 business update

Hub didn’t provide any numbers in a recap of first-quarter trends.

It said intermodal volumes reflected “steady demand” and that the outlook for intermodal pricing continues to improve as truckload capacity exits. Heightened regulatory enforcement of the driver pool and higher diesel prices are prompting the capacity exodus.

Hub noted “significant new business” wins in its managed transportation and final mile offerings. It said brokerage volumes declined in the period as it continues to focus on higher yields and profitability.

“The Company continues to take actions to drive growth, improve profitability and increase operating cash flows, which along with its balance sheet strength and strong service positions Hub Group well for long-term growth,” the report concluded.

Shares of HUBG were off 9.2% in pre-market trading on Tuesday.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• Forward Air flags customer loss, stock plummets
• Freight capacity plummets, prices skyrocket in April
• Losses continue at TL carrier Pamt Corp.

The post Hub Group’s accounting error causes further reporting delays appeared first on FreightWaves.

The document focuses on how the DOJ plans to address organized cargo theft groups that rely on fraud, fake identities, hacked communications, and networks operating across multiple states. The letter comes at a time when cargo theft is no longer seen as only a physical crime involving stolen trailers or warehouse break-ins. Today, many cases begin with fake carrier setups, spoofed emails, stolen identities, or manipulated onboarding systems.

a different view of cargo theft

The biggest takeaway is not just that cargo theft is being discussed at the federal level. It is how the government is starting to describe the problem. The language in the letter shows a growing understanding that modern cargo theft often starts long before a truck arrives for pickup.

That matches what many investigators, brokers, insurers, and fraud experts have been warning about for years. In many cases, the freight is already at risk before it ever moves. The criminals first gain access to systems, identities, or trusted accounts. Once that happens, the shipment may still appear normal on the surface.

The letter also raises important questions for the industry. Will the DOJ start treating organized freight fraud more like organized crime instead of isolated theft cases? Will federal agencies work more closely together on cargo theft investigations involving cybercrime and financial fraud? Will prosecutors start using stronger fraud charges in these cases instead of treating them like business disputes?

Many theft groups today do not operate like traditional cargo thieves. In many cases, they use active authorities, stolen credentials, or shell companies to gain access to freight through normal systems. Once control changes hands, recovery rates drop quickly. Many experts warn that after the first 24 to 48 hours, the chances of recovering stolen freight fall sharply.

why this matters to the industry

The letter also shows growing pressure from both lawmakers and the industry to improve communication and data sharing around cargo theft. For years, companies have argued that investigations move too slowly because reporting systems are disconnected. Information is often spread across different states, agencies, insurers, and private companies.

That problem has become more serious as organized theft groups continue expanding operations across the country. Many modern cargo theft cases now involve identity theft, fake pickups, double brokering, payment fraud, and compromised communication systems all at the same time.

Cargo theft may finally be moving beyond being viewed as only a supply chain issue. It is increasingly being seen as a larger economic and organized crime problem. That shift could affect investigations, resources, and enforcement priorities moving forward.

For the freight industry, the message is becoming clear. The problem is no longer just stolen freight. The real issue is stolen access, stolen identities, and trusted systems being manipulated from the inside.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phillip Brink.

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The post The DOJ may finally understand what modern cargo theft really looks like appeared first on FreightWaves.

This is a notable shift. California has long been a leader in autonomous driving for robotaxis but has lagged in heavy-duty autonomous trucking. Many companies based in the state have had to test their rigs in states such as Texas. The new regulations change that, giving companies a clear — albeit measured — path that may eventually see driverless big rigs on California highways.

Whether this leads to a gold rush, a measured deployment or an outright reversal may depend in part on the outcome of California’s gubernatorial election. But the regulations have been in development since around 2014, making any quick reversal politically and procedurally difficult.

To get more insight, FreightWaves spoke with Ariel Wolf, partner and chair of the Autonomous and Connected Mobility Practice Group at Venable LLP.

California-flavored AV regulations, years in the making

Creating detailed legislation and rulemaking on high-profile issues takes time in California — and that is often by design.

“The regs are done. They’re published. This is, depending on how you count it, somewhere between 13 years or eight years in the making to have DMV regulations in California for autonomous vehicles that cover all classes of vehicles,” Wolf told FreightWaves.

California’s approach differs from that of at least 26 other states that have embraced autonomous vehicle testing with less prescriptive frameworks. The Golden State requires a three-step “crawl, walk, run” progression: testing with a safety driver, driverless testing and finally commercial deployment. Each phase requires specific mileage thresholds and a comprehensive safety case.

For heavy-duty AV makers, the bar is particularly high. Light-duty vehicles must complete 50,000 miles per phase, while heavy-duty trucks face 500,000 miles of testing before commercial deployment, with 100,000 of those miles required in California.

“California’s approach to autonomous vehicle regulation is in some respects distinct from the dominant approach that has been implemented in at least 26 states. They take a permit approach, right? It’s a crawl, walk, run,” Wolf said. “Whether it’s the most comprehensive or not, it is a quintessentially California approach.”

Enhanced safety and enforcement tools

A major focus of the new framework is accountability and enforcement. Law enforcement officers can now issue a “Notice of AV Noncompliance” directly to manufacturers when an autonomous vehicle commits a moving violation. Manufacturers must notify the DMV within 72 hours of receiving such a notice (or 24 hours in cases involving clear or potential danger to others).

First-responder interaction requirements are also strengthened. Vehicles must maintain two-way communication links with a 30-second response time. Manufacturers must provide annual updates to interaction plans and training protocols, including instructions for removing vehicles from active roadways.

Local officials now have authority to issue electronic “do not enter” or “restricted area” directives, requiring AVs to exit the identified zone within two minutes. Violations can lead to permit restrictions or suspension.

The rules also set distinct standards for remote operations, separating “remote drivers” (who perform the dynamic driving task) from “remote assistants.”

Regulatory reactions and what’s next

Reactions have varied widely. The Teamsters strongly opposed the move.

In a statement, Teamsters California Co-Chairs Victor Mineros and Peter Finn said the DMV’s decision to allow driverless heavy-duty trucks was “reckless” and vowed to fight it in court and through the political process “until California gets rules that protect communities, protect workers, and put accountability over experimentation and corporate greed.”

On the industry side, companies including PlusAI, Aurora Innovation, Bot Auto and others have expressed support for the regulatory clarity.

Wolf noted there has been “a lot of pent-up energy” to deploy autonomous vehicles of all kinds in California. However, he cautioned against expecting a sudden gold rush.

“I wouldn’t call it a rush,” Wolf said. “So I would say it’s going to be something that evolves consistent with the business justification. It takes a lot of upfront investment to go into a particular location or state.”

The center of gravity for autonomous trucking remains in Texas for now, and the structured permitting process — including substantial in-state testing requirements — means deployment will be deliberate rather than immediate.

There is also the political question. Several gubernatorial candidates have criticized the DMV rulemaking. However, overturning it legislatively would require significant political capital given the lengthy, stakeholder-heavy process that produced the rules.

“I think the burden rests with the folks who are pushing that to say what is actually wrong with these regulations that would require legislative involvement,” Wolf said. “What’s the burden of proof on the folks to come and disturb what is again an eight-year process to get to where we are from a lot of experts with enormous amounts of stakeholder input?”

The post Autonomous truck gold rush or California dreaming? appeared first on FreightWaves.

The company, which serves North and South America, is the Americas regional organization of Seoul-based LX Pantos, South Korea’s leading global logistics company. Pantos ranked in the top 10 of global ocean forwarders in 2025 with volume of 1.569 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs), and among the top 15 of overall forwarding. It provides logistics solutions across sea, air, rail, and contract logistics through a worldwide network spanning more than 40 countries.

The opening ceremony held this past week was attended by representatives of Sen. Andy Kim and state Assemblywoman Ellen Park.

“Today we celebrate the relationships that have made this journey possible. Gathering together with valued customers, trusted partners and distinguished community leaders for this important program provided insight, reflection and a shared vision for the future of global supply chains,” said David Bang, chief executive of LX Pantos Americas. “This new chapter underscores our continued commitment to innovation, partnership and a broad, deeply integrated portfolio that enables us to deliver world-class logistics solutions across the Americas and beyond – all powered by our passionate and dedicated colleagues across the region.”

In 2025 Pantos announced Boxlinks, a joint venture with liner operator Ocean Network Express (ONE) offering end-to-end U.S. domestic intermodal transportation services. 

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post Top 10 ocean forwarder opens new U.S. headquarters appeared first on FreightWaves.

On the earnings front, Kodiak posted 74 percent revenue growth quarter over quarter in the first quarter of 2026. Revenue increased to $1.8 million, driven primarily by the expansion of its Driver-as-a-Service revenue as it deployed eight additional fully driverless trucks during the quarter.

Kodiak also accumulated more than 23,500 cumulative hours of paid driverless operations, representing a 120 percent increase from the end of the fourth quarter of 2025, and delivered more than 15,600 cumulative loads.

The company remains pre-profit, reporting a first-quarter GAAP operating loss of $37.9 million. Free cash flow was a loss of $35 million.

The $100 million common stock and warrant private placement financing included participation from existing investors, including an affiliate of Ares Management, and several new institutional investors.

“This financing will provide us with additional flexibility to execute on our operating plan and will support our next phase of growth,” said Surajit Datta, chief financial officer of Kodiak. “We believe that the equity financing combined with our continued progress in scaling our business will enable us to make progress toward profitability and generating free cash flow over time.”

Kodiak previously used PIPE financing when it went public via a SPAC merger with Ares Acquisition Corporation II in September 2025 that included $145 million in PIPE financing from institutional investors.

This comes as the autonomous trucking technology company pushes toward a late-2026 launch of driverless operations on long-haul highways. The additional financing from institutional investors is a positive signal despite the company’s current cash burn rate.

Kodiak ended the first quarter with $90.2 million in cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities, excluding the PIPE proceeds.

“We delivered significant revenue growth and continued to scale driverless operations in the first quarter, while raising additional capital that will fund our growth,” said Don Burnette, founder and chief executive officer of Kodiak. “We are executing on our strategy while maturing our Physical AI-powered technology and adopting additional AI tools to further increase the pace of development.”

Roehl Transport Partnership Targets Dallas-Houston Lane

In addition to earnings, Kodiak announced it began hauling freight autonomously with Roehl Transport. The Wisconsin-based carrier is one of North America’s leading truckload companies and hauls dry van, flatbed and other freight.

Trucks equipped with the Kodiak Driver now haul freight four round trips per week between Dallas and Houston.

“Working with Roehl Transport reflects a shared commitment to safety in trucking,” Burnette said. “By combining our AI-powered autonomous capabilities with Roehl’s safety approach, we’re proving how our technology can enhance efficiency while making meaningful progress toward safer roads at scale.”

Kodiak’s safety-first approach was one reason behind the partnership. Roehl Transport was a recent recipient of the American Trucking Associations’ President’s Award, the industry’s highest safety honor.

“Roehl Transport is built on values, and Safety is our cornerstone value,” said Rick Roehl, chief executive officer of Roehl Transport. “The Kodiak Driver was built with this same philosophy. Kodiak’s safety-first approach was a key factor in our decision to partner with Kodiak.”

Another factor is the high rate of human error in truck crashes. In October 2025, the Kodiak Driver earned a VERA (Visually Enhanced Risk Assessment) score of 98 out of 100. That tied for the highest recorded score in an independent evaluation by Nauto that examined more than 1,000 commercial fleets.

Kodiak Enters Logging Industry With West Fraser Pilot

In its first international operations and entry into the timber industry, Kodiak will pilot its autonomous technology at West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd.’s log-hauling operations in Alberta, Canada. The pilot will transport timber from forest sites to processing facilities later this year.

“We built the Kodiak Driver to be the most versatile autonomous system on the market, capable of handling everything from interstate highways to the toughest industrial environments, from arid West Texas to the forests of Western Canada,” Burnette said.

Logging truck routes often involve challenging, remote resource roads with uneven and rough terrain. These are conditions Kodiak says its modular technology can handle after proving itself in West Texas’s Permian Basin, where it scaled operations to 20 driverless trucks by the end of 2025.

FPInnovations, a private nonprofit research and development center supported by federal and provincial governments and more than 50 forest-product companies, facilitated the collaboration.

The post Kodiak AI reports 74% Q1 revenue growth, fleet reaches 28 driverless trucks appeared first on FreightWaves.

In both cases, the rate adjustment would take place on July 12 if the Postal Regulatory Commission approves the requests.

On Monday, the Postal Service filed notice to eliminate ounce-based pricing for published commercial Ground Advantage prices, implement a 3% price increase for parcel PO Box service and make other changes. 

The elimination of ounce-based pricing will not impact customers that have negotiated commercial rates for USPS Ground Advantage, the organization’s economy delivery model that offers merchants two-to-five-day transit times with pound-based, ounce-based and cubic pricing options for parcels weighing up to 70 pounds. The decision aligns Ground Advantage with the rate structure of Parcel Select, the Postal Service said.

The elimination of pricing by the ounce for lightweight shipments could hurt retailers most, industry watchers say. “A massive chunk of direct-to-consumer shipping lives under one pound. Ounce-based pricing is what kept those shipments economical” because prices only increased incrementally, said Beth Guynn, a small parcel consultant who recently joined the startup courier company Gofo as director of national accounts for North America, on LinkedIn. Shippers that don’t want to absorb the increase can switch to a carrier that still prices by the ounce, she suggested.

The price moves are part of the Postal Service’s 10-year modernization plan. Postmaster General David Steiner has made revenue growth a priority, saying that cost-saving measures aren’t sufficient to restore the organization’s financial health.

“It is important for all users that the USPS grows its parcel business because it would help its overall financial situation, and reduce pressure to increase prices on the monopoly (mail) side of the business. Nonprofit organizations have seen compounded price increases since 2021 that range from 47% to105%, which has had a devastating impact on their ability to use mail to accomplish their critical nonprofit missions,” said Kathleen Siviter, executive director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, in an email. “Despite that level of price increase on mail, the USPS is in a precarious financial position.  The USPS is trying to grow the parcel side of its business by leveraging its last mile network, but its parcel volume has declined by 8.1% since October. Today’s parcels price increase announcement would increase commercial USPS Ground Advantage prices by over 11% as well as increasing costs for transporting hazardous materials and increases in other fees.  We are concerned these types of changes will make the USPS less competitive in the parcels arena.”

For the first half of the fiscal year, Ground Advantage volume was up 19.5% and revenue grew 23.6%, according to USPS financial reports filed last week, while total parcel volume is down 8.1%.

The USPS also said the price for forwarding and returns under Parcel Select will increase from $3.80 to $6.00. For customers using Address Correction Service with shipper paid forwarding/return, the price will increase from $3.20 to $5.40. 

Additionally, new fees will be established to cover the additional cost associated with transporting hazardous materials for Priority Mail Express and Priority Mail, as well as a noncompliance fee for improperly prepared hazardous material items shipped using parcel products. 

The Postal Service also said it will update an address enhancement offering through which shippers can validate and correct addresses under a monthly tiered pricing model. And it will align the formula for dimensional weight pieces to industry standards for Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, Ground Advantage and Parcel Select. Reducing the divisor in the formula will raise shipping rates, which the filing acknowledged “may shift those packages to our competitors in the future.”

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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“Near-term volumes on affected lanes have softened, but the complexity of navigating new trade routes, customs regimes, and compliance requirements increases the premium on experienced, technology-enabled partners who can guide customers through the transition,” said Bohn Crain, Radiant founder and CEO, on a Monday call with analysts.

The Renton, Washington-based company reported adjusted net income of $5.3 million, or 11 cents per share, for the fiscal third quarter ended Mar. 31. The result was 4 cents ahead of the consensus estimate but 3 cents lower year over year. (Two analysts cover the stock.)

Revenue of $214 million was in line with the consensus estimate as well as the prior-year quarter. Management said the U.S. truckload market was slow in January and February, but experienced sequential improvement through March. It said it’s getting high-single-digit rate increases on its TL contractual renewals.

Radiant (NYSE: RLGT) reported adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $7.8 million, which was 18% lower y/y. The adjusted EBITDA margin fell 240 basis points to 13.8%.

Radiant’s proprietary global trade management platform, Navegate, continues to gain traction with shippers. The offering aggregates and organizes supply chain data, providing customers with better routing and capacity purchasing options.

The company ended the quarter with $40 million in cash, which exceeded debt, finance lease obligations and contingent earnout liabilities linked to prior acquisitions.

It will continue to use a $200 million credit facility to buy back stock, fund acquisitions and convert third-party agent stations into company-owned operations.

Shares of RLGT were up 3.9% in after-hours trading on Monday.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• Forward Air flags customer loss, stock plummets
• Freight capacity plummets, prices skyrocket in April
• Losses continue at TL carrier Pamt Corp.

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Montreal-based CN (NYSE: CNI) in a filing Monday said the application “continues to omit required information regulators and stakeholders need to meaningfully assess the competitive and operational impacts of this major proposed merger.”

The STB in January rejected the initial application from UP (NYSE: UNP) and NS (NYSE: NSC) for missing information on, among other elements, forward-looking market share data; details that would allow UP to walk away from the deal; and specifics on control of a terminal railway in St. Louis that interchanges traffic between railroads.  

CN said the revised application addressed only one deficiency by providing the complete merger agreement.

“Applicants still have not offered meaningful competitive enhancements, falling far short of the STB’s higher burden for Class I mergers to enhance competition and meet the public interest standard,” CN said.

The filing also lacks complete competition analyses and market share information, and instances where rail service to shippers would shrink from two Class I options to one, or from three to two. Also, it noted the absence of analyses of downstream competitive impacts from future potential rail consolidation.

CN criticized the proposed Committed Gateway Pricing (CGP) program, which it termed the sole alleged enhancement to competition, calling it a “temporary” and “highly limited” program that applies to less than 1% of U.S. rail traffic.

“CGP excludes major categories of traffic including finished vehicles, intermodal shipments, unit trains, and all customers currently served by CN, CPKC (NYSE: CP), and most short lines,” CN said. According to UP and NS, it claimed, “CGP will actually harm many shippers. Importantly, many shippers would face increases in rail shipping costs due to the CGP program, as shown in the state maps submitted with CN’s comments. 

“Rather than provide the required competition analyses, they recycled the same flawed approach the board already rejected,” said Olivier Chouc, CN executive vice-president and chief legal officer, in a release. “Rather than submit the required Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis application, they deleted their prior filing and offered a vague promise in its place. And rather than propose real competitive enhancements, they doubled down on a pricing program that will harm more shippers than it helps as shown by their own expert’s study. 

“This is not a serious effort to comply with the Board’s requirements – it is a disregard for the process and for the stakeholders who depend on it.”

The company said it expects the STB to conduct a thorough and fair review. 

“CN remains confident the board will hold applicants to the standards required by the board’s regulations and to reject this incomplete application.”

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Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post CN: STB should reject ‘incomplete’ UP-NS merger application appeared first on FreightWaves.

LA, with the Port of Long Beach half of the San Pedro Bay maritime gateway, saw consumer demand boost strong imports despite ongoing uncertainty around tariffs and trade policy.

The port handled 3,279,704 TEUs through the first four months of this year, 2% ahead of its five-year average for that stretch and 2% below the 2025 record pace when front-loading was spurred by President Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff policies.

“April was our strongest month this year and the highest cargo volume we’ve seen since last August, a clear sign that the American consumer remains resilient,” Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka said Monday in a media briefing. “Retailers and manufacturers are continuing to move goods despite uncertainty, and based on what we’re seeing in Asia, the next wave of imports – from back-to-school to early holiday merchandise – is already beginning to build.”

That resilience is likely to be tested by soaring gas prices. Seroka said trucking companies, like airlines, could begin to pass on the added cost of diesel fuel, which has increased 50% from the beginning of the year.  

Cargo continues to move with no back-ups or delays, said Seroka, who recently visited Asia. “Factories are running at full capacity.”

April loaded imports totaled 459,825 TEUs, ahead by 5% y/y and up 21% from March. Loaded exports dipped 0.5% to 127,726 TEUs.

Empties surged 10% to 303,310 TEUs, said Seroka, as liners reposition assets to handle peak season eastbound goods on the trans-Pacific.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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