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I don't want to make light of your frustration. I can tell from your words it is real. There is a solution I have thought of for some time now, but when I share it with others they all laugh it off. I don't know why. The numbers seem to work. As you know, reliable same-household teams are...

A little Trip Pak trick we learned is to never fold two documents together. If you have multiple pages to send, do not stack and fold them together. Fold each page separatly, stack them after they are folded, and then put them in the Trip Pack envelope. Same for multiple log book pages. At the...

First, it is great to hear that the two of you have taken a shine to the industry and the road. Good for you! Bravo! Watch for a private message from me regarding your question.

Diane and I are getting paid by our carrier as regularly and reliably as always.

It's not gloom. It's frustration over the lack of competency in leadership that could have foreseen and prevented the financial crisis; especially visible now in California but true in many states and at the federal level. It is also the felt need to continue to prosper by protecting one's...

It may well come to that, but if your shuttle service is to be lucrative, your list needs to stick to business and money. I comment on it as follows: 1) Handing the border officer our BOL. Border patrol check points are not a problem. There is no added value in hiring someone to shuttle...

An industry-wide California compliance surcharge that covers the thousands of dollars of extra costs California regulations add to a truck would send an important message to shippers, California legislators and the states that model their laws on California.

California's congestion, deteriorating infrastructure and regulatory environment have presented special challenges to truckers for years. I am told of a saying that comes out of East Texas that today seems especially appropriate in California. "Nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse."...

It was months ago so I do not recall exactly. I believe we first learned of the experimental BR-unit in a weekly fleet bulletin received by e-mail. If not that, then by an e-mail of another sort that was sent to multiple contractors. It may not have gone fleet wide but news of the BR unit did go...

You need to read more. FedEx Custom Critical put the word out months ago that a BR-unit was being added to the fleet on an experimental basis. The owner of that unit participates in the EO Open Forum. The unit is pictured in his posts and profile. The unit was discussed in this thread in...

Some of the comments made in this thread about home time and in-service time don't make sense to me. 1. True expedited freight is not scheduled so far in advance that home time can be counted on as regularly as some suggest here. 2. True expedited freight pickup and delivery locations are not...

You are not wrong, if the only thing you are looking at is availability of trucks. Load acceptance must also be considered. If a carrier has 100 loads to dispatch and 150 available trucks, the carrier will have no need to add trucks. That's the not wrong part. But if the trucks need say $1.00...

At last night's expediter dinner one of the owner-operators spoke of a carrier that had failed to pay several thousand dollars of money the O/O earned. The carrier has so far been unresponsive to the demand to be paid. The O/O has since changed carriers but could really use the money owed by the...

This is too cool! As I write this, one of the people from last night's meal is out knocking on doors now, rounding people up for breakfast. Not that I need to eat a full meal again, but it's off to breakfast I go! :)

Spontaneous events like these are easy to organize, especially at the Bordentown Petro where a private room is available and a number of expediters are usually hanging out. "Organize" overstates the effort. All you have to do is tell other expediters that you and maybe other expediters will be...

With freight slowing, rates declining and no sign of turnaround in sight, it's more somber out there and dampened spirits tend to linger ... at least until you put some expediters in a room and start swapping stories and talking shop. At the Bordentown Petro today a number of expediters were...

While a number of expediters are holding their own and some are even doing well in the midst of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, I don't know of any who are doing as well as they were before the recession took hold. It's rough out there, even for the people who are...

Like DaveKC, I'm not clear on what you are saying either. I only respond here because you reference predictions I made. Not quite sure what you mean. Your words, "Only the services you provide to the customer and your company will allow you to survive in this business, no matter what you hear...

It would be a mistake for anyone to confuse my belief and confidence in the professionals at FedEx Custom Critical with religious conviction. Diane and I cast our business lot with them because they passed the test and proved to us that they are the competent business professionals we seek to...

I have seen different figures quoted by different sources, some of them line-haul carriers. Depending on the source, it costs somewhere between $3,000 to $7,000 to recruit a new truck into a fleet. So the cost of increasing the fleet size by 10 trucks would be $30,000 to $70,000. Adding 100...