Truck Topics

Mileage Wars

Reprinted with the kind permission of the author and RoadStar Magazine.

One topic sure to raise the blood pressure of many drivers is the issue of fleets using household goods (HHG) miles as the basis for their rate and pay calculations. Drivers often complain that fleets are gouging them out of money by using the HHG Mileage Guide to set rates. The typical complaint is that household goods miles are routinely 10% less than the actual hub miles the driver logs.

It's a financial issue for drivers, thus an emotional one. And it is often the basis for much conflict between drivers and fleet managers. I don't expect I'll be able to resolve all the issues involved here. But hopefully, by providing some information to help clarify everyone's position on this controversial matter, some understanding will come to bear.

Just where do HHG miles come from and why do fleets use them? We went to the source and interviewed Joseph Harrison, president of the American Moving & Storage Assn., and the folks at Rand McNally, who facilitate setting up the HHG Mileage Guide as the basis of their many trucking-related routing products.

A little history: The HHG Mileage Guide has been around for a long, long time. The first Guide was published in conjunction with Rand McNally back in 1936 and was developed as a guide for household goods movers who based their charges on weight and miles. In those days, the mileages were based on auto road maps, and there were only about 300 point-to-point mileages published and only about 400 carriers using them.

As the HHG Mileage Guide evolved, other carriers who were basing rates on mileages not just movers, began to use them. Eventually, everyone was using the Mileage Guide because at the time, it offered the only mileages available. Also, because the Guide provided some stability and uniformity, customers knew there was an authoritative resource they could use to ensure that the mileages they were being charged for were not arbitrary.

Through the years the mileages themselves have changed. As new highways were constructed and the Interstate System expanded, the criteria for the Guide has changed to keep pace --both with new roads and regulations affecting trucks.

Primary criteria are height, weight and lane width restrictions. Once it is determined which route between two points is suitable for truck travel, the "shortest" route possible can be determined. "That's the only non-arbitrary way that one can develop mileages that are consistent and can be defined properly," says Harrison.

And, he says, depending on what route you prefer, those miles can differ vastly. "You could take the scenic route, the fastest route, the route with less bumps, the route with the best truckstops, the route your cousin, or your girlfriend, or your wife lives on... there's all kinds of ways of getting from point A to point B."

Harrison says that the Mileage Guide, by its nature, must be customer-driven: "The people who are paying the transportation bill -- if they are paying the bill on a per-mile rate -- need to know that the mileage for that per-mile rate is not arbitrary, that it's defined and can be audited if necessary."

Obviously, says Harrison, there may be a route that a driver will chose that is better. And that route may be longer than the shortest route detailed in the HHG Mileage Guide. But he adds, "It's not because the carrier has tried to figure out a way to cheat the driver. The carrier is trying to appease their customer by providing a reasonable basis for pricing the transportation service provided."

As to claims that the HHG miles are always 10% shorter than the actual miles?

"I always hear claims that it's 5% short, or 10% short," says Harrison. "There is no such percentage out there. You have to look at every route individually. There is no way of coming up with any percentage that's even close to reality. We just look for the shortest route."

"Drivers have been complaining about this forever. And we continue to do what we've always been doing because no one has come up with a better way. No one ever dwells on the cases where our miles are about right, or even longer than another route. But you certainly hear about it when they're short."

"It all goes back to who pays the bills. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know a customer who would prefer a system that provides an arbitrary longer mileage."

The carrier is caught in a squeeze here. The shipper wants to pay less, the driver wants to make more and the carrier can't win for losing.

Another consideration is that the mileages must be set from a certain point -- generally the center of a particular city to the center of another. And since many cities are extremely large, the mileages a driver actually travels can differ tremendously, depending on where his load leaves and where it's eventually delivered.

Says Harrison: "Is everybody satisfied? No. Am I or Rand McNally totally satisfied with it? No. I would love to be able to find the magic bullet. But it's just an impossibility.

"We are very cognizant of this problem. I also represent all the movers in the U.S. And the drivers who work for those carriers, both company drivers and independent owner-operators, who are the life of our business. We could not do business without them. We need them. And we want to satisfy them as best we can because we know we'd be out of business without them. My members would be fools to do anything to run drivers out of their companies.

"That being said, we don't have any revenue if we don't have a customer. We gotta please that customer. So it's a difficult proposition, all the way around."

But don't feel like there is no hope of changing things. Harrison says drivers and carriers need to be more proactive. Rand McNally is currently putting together the data for a new Guide to be released this fall. Any information on routes that are inaccurate should be reported as soon as possible.

"If anyone has a route they have a problem with, we'd be glad to take a look at it and fix it if we can," Harrison says.

"Unfortunately, we usually get more gripes than we do data."

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