Hello and welcome to 2012.  This past week The Transcore Freight Talk Blog focused on the trends throughout the US now that the Holiday Season has wrapped up.  With truckload prices around the holiday season being a little bit lower than most analysts expected, our expectation is that there would not be any immediate spike in truckload prices as we enter the 1st half of January.  This is typically a time of year when we see consumers spending more and manufacturers producing less, typically resulting in rate decreases this time of year.

In their entry, Freight Talk called out that in the 1st week of the month that Van rates remained stable, “while both flatbed and reefer rates rose 1.9%” in the 1st 7 days of the new year.  At Open Mile with a majority of our freight being moved on Dry Vans, we certainly noticed a ton of available capacity, with carrier rates actually dropping as opposed to remaining flat. Overall we saw rates drop about 2% on back-haul shipments from the East Coast to the Midwest and saw rates lower 4% to Northern California, which may be a result of “The Stockton market gaining some speed with a 4.6% uptick in rates.  Additionally, we have noticed uncharacteristically low Load to Truck Ratio’s on Transcore’s Hot State Index in the Midwest with less than 1 load available for every truck.  This is a market that has boasted ratio’s of 5+ loads per truck throughout much of the year, so it is very surprising to see capacity remain so readily available even in the 1st Quarter.  Additionally, we have noticed trends of only 1.5 load per truck in Memphis which also seems uncharacteristically low even for this time of year.

At Open Mile we still feel that it is a little to early in the year to predict where rates are going to go, but right now it appears that capacity is readily available.  There will most likely be some outside factors (HOS, Driver Regulation, CSA) that make capacity flip, but from everything we can see day to day on the floor along with the data we have gathered from Transcore, it seems pretty quiet out there right now.  We will continue to keep an eye on capacity trends throughout the US over the next few months, to determine what if any capacity/price shifts will happen in 2012.