Editorial: The Age of Trucking

Here in the opening months of the century and millennium, trucking has a lot of reasons for pride and happiness.

Our nation’s economy is rolling along. In fact, it’s rolling along on 18 wheels.

These days we hear so much about Internet Service Providers, dot.coms, bandwidth and the new economy. Actually, none of that digital dander means a thing if those big trucks aren’t out there carrying the loads over our highways.

The new marketplace may be in cyberspace, but you deliver the goods in a truck, exactly the same way you moved freight to the old, pre-Internet marketplace.

In 1999, ATA commissioned a study of the outlook for freight transportation by Standard & Poor’s DRI group. While the latest data were from 1997, the study nonetheless provided great insight into today’s economy and the freight system.

That year, trucks carried 60% by weight of all the goods moved in primary shipments. That was a total of 6.67 trillion tons. Compare that to about 16% for railroads.

If you add the many secondary shipments involved in freight distribution, trucking’s share gets even larger, since trucks make nearly all of the movements at this level.

Thus, it’s no surprise that trucks accounted for 81% of the total freight revenue for 1997 – about $372 billion – compared to less than 8% for railroads.

By 2007, according to Standard & Poor’s, trucking will carry almost 8 trillion tons of goods, 18% more than 1997.

The forecast was conducted before the explosion in Internet-based transactions. Today’s boom in selling over the Internet – both business-to-consumer and business-to-business – has fueled another spurt in demand for trucking services.

Anyway you slice it, trucking, with its ability to deliver just-in-time and exactly-on-time, door-to-door or dock-to-dock, will continue to be the only absolutely irreplaceable ingredient in an economic boom that has many of us convinced we’re dreaming some happy, impossible dream.

Trucking owes itself a big pat on the back.