Conference Recap

Your eyes and ears on the industry

As our members know, ICSA is active in many trucking organizations and attends many conferences to get and share information that can be useful in your business. On a regular basis we will provide information that you can use. In October, we attended the Management Conference and Exhibition (MCE) put on by American Trucking Associations (ATA). The following week, we also attended the Future of Freight Festival put on by Freightwaves. The highlights:

•  In both events, the economy was a key focus. We heard from numerous economists, both national and international, both trucking specific and general economists. Obviously, the economy is not going well. The consensus of all the economists speaking in these meetings is that there will be a recession in early 2023. It is projected to be relatively small, and not as severe as in the rest of the world. In fact, the United States was described as the “best house in a bad block.” 

So, what does that mean for you? Loads are going to be down (as you probably have experienced) and hard to come by. Loads are shifting from the spot market to the contract market and from FTL to LTL. This also means that finding loads will be more difficult and many loads will be on the brokerage side, especially those operated by the large carriers with shipping contracts.

• Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of the Department of Transportation, addressed the ATA MCE and outlined the federal government’s plan to recruit more drivers to the industry. Those plans include (1) a Trucking Action Plan, a comprehensive plan to address industry issues, (2) a nationwide plan to streamline the process of obtaining a CDL, and (3) spending a portion of the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill to improve safety, reduce delays and increase parking.

• ATA President & CEO Chris Spear described the ATA victories over the past year, including defeating truck-only tolls in Rhode Island (that inevitably would have led to truck-only tolls in other states), defeating the federal vaccine mandate, and getting the infrastructure bill passed in Congress. ATA testified 25 times before Congress this past year. Spear also touted the environmental steps taken by trucking – as an example, today one new truck emits the same amount of pollution as 66 trucks did in 1988. As an industry, trucking has taken great steps to become more environmentally sound and will oppose government actions to force the industry to take any further steps, such as electric truck mandates.

• In addition to the economy, a key emphasis at Festival of Freight was on hundreds of new technologies that have come or are coming on the market that are designed to help trucks and their owners operate more efficiently. Each day we saw multiple demonstrations of new technologies ranging from sophisticated in-cab systems to reduce distractions and improve safety, to highly integrative mapping systems to programs that network devices, vehicles and hardware which can actively share data, including networks of sensors mounted throughout the truck to monitor everything from tire pressure to load stability and feed data back to the carrier.

ICSA will continue to attend industry conferences on your behalf and provide you information that you can use in your business.