Trucking is not a single industry. It can’t be easily described or explained because it’s really a collection of diverse businesses that happen to use trucks. For some, trucking services are their primary business, and trucks are their primary business tool. For others, trucks provide essential support for their core businesses.
But even dividing fleets into the two general categories of for-hire and private doesn’t begin to reflect the true scope and variety of trucking. If you remember your high school geometry, a straight line can be divided in half an infinite number of times. When you begin dividing types of trucking operations into subcategories—say, dividing for-hire carriers into truckload and LTL, then truckload into dry van and bulk, and so on—it can feel like you’re dividing that straight line. And when you’re in the trenches running your own particular fleet with its own particular requirements and challenges, it’s easy to lose sight of just how massive trucking is as a whole and how central it is to the country’s economic life.
In an attempt to help you see the entire long, long line that
stretches out beyond your half of the half of the half, we’ve assembled 13 pages of charts, graphs and other statistical data about trucking as a general economic entity. They’re organized into broad categories like safety, fuel, truck equipment, and drivers. Within those categories, some of the data sets are related, some overlap a bit, and others are outliers that just seem to add something interesting.
Since business priorities vary so greatly among fleets, you may find some of the numbers irrelevant to your operation and others of high interest, but the hope is that in the aggregate, this description of trucking by the numbers will prove a valuable resource as you think about your fleet, as well as a reminder of trucking’s vital role.
A few words on our sources. Much of the data was gathered from various federal sources that include the Depts. of Energy, Transportation, Labor and Commerce. Two recent reports from the American Trucking Assns.—“American Trucking Trends 2013” and “U.S. Freight Transportation Forecast to 2024” —also offered some highly informative statistical analysis. Other sources for our numerical look at trucking include WardsAuto.com (a sister Penton media outlet), DAT and Transport Capital Partners.
And, finally, a public acknowledgement is due to Fleet Owner staff members Brian Straight, Elsa Pecoroni and Dan Zeis for their hard work in translating all these numbers into presentations that are not just accurate, but also attractive and easy to understand.
