Tonnage Jumps 8% in Oct.

This story appears in the Nov. 25 print edition of Transport Topics.

U.S. truck tonnage rose 8% in October from a year earlier, even though it fell short of the all-time high recorded in the previous month, American Trucking Associations reported.

“We’ve seen some things in trucking recently that show that perhaps the economy is a little stronger than we think,” said Bob Costello, ATA’s chief economist.

On a month-to-month basis, ATA’s seasonally adjusted freight index slipped 2.8% to a reading of 124, down from 127.5 set in September. September’s total still was a record despite being revised lower from 128.7.

ATA’s revised September index lowered that month’s year-over-year gain to 7.4% from 8.4%. The index uses freight levels during 2000 as a base level of 100.

October’s year-over-year gain was the largest since December 2011, ATA said in its Nov. 19 report.

Through 10 months, tonnage levels for 2013 are up 5.5% from the same period last year.

ATA’s Costello said, “Tonnage has been good for a while now,” recalling that, in the third quarter, the dry-van sector posted its best growth rate for loads delivered since the second quarter of 2010.

But Costello described October as a “mixed bag,” with tonnage remaining at a “good” level despite the sequential decline.

He said the federal government’s partial shutdown in early October “clearly must have had some negative impact” on tonnage, but added that it’s difficult to determine how much of the month-to-month downturn could be attributed to it.

The strong year-over-year growth reflected an easy comparison with a down month in October 2012, Costello said. Superstorm Sandy struck the East Coast at the tail end of last October.

Steve O’Kane, president of regional less-than-truckload carrier A. Duie Pyle Cos., said his company’s business volumes in October were “really good.”

In fact, October was the company’s best month for year-over-year tonnage growth so far in 2013, even after removing the tonnage losses associated with Sandy in the final days of October 2012.

“Overall, there’s been some slow economic growth that’s helped tonnage,” O’Kane said. “I’d like to think that maybe we had a little bit of a market-share gain as well. Putting those two things together has made us pretty busy.”

O’Kane said he sees 2013 as a “good but unspectacular year” and predicted more sustainable, slow growth in 2014.

A. Duie Pyle, based in West Chester, Pa., ranks No. 85 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers.

Hogland Transfer Co. in Everett, Wash., has experienced high freight demand all year, including a “strong” month in October, said Steve Holtgeerts, the company’s president.

“Our business is heavily influenced by a couple of key customers in the manufacturing sector that are increasing output, so we’ve benefited from them,” he said. “It’s been a good year. It has the possibility of being a record year.”

At the same time, capacity has tightened at the local truckload and LTL carrier. “We’re probably declining more business than we ever have, just because it doesn’t fit our lanes or we just don’t have additional capacity to take it on for certain days of the week,” Holtgeerts said.

Mike Habeck, president of Habeck Trucking Inc. in Belle Fourche, S.D., said his company also is running at full capacity.

Habeck’s customers have more freight than the carrier can cover with its 30 trucks.

“We certainly don’t have to go out looking for anything,” he said.

The company would haul more freight if it had more trucks, but “the biggest problem we have here is trying to find qualified drivers,” Habeck said.

Freight demand in 2013 has been up “a little bit” compared with 2012, he added.

ATA’s Costello said tonnage continues to outperform other measures of truck freight, including the number of loads and the amount of miles. That’s because the parts of the economy that are growing the most — home construction, hydraulic fracturing and auto production — happen to generate heavy freight, he said.

Meanwhile, load-board freight volume jumped 24% in October to a record high for that month, according to DAT, a load board owned by TransCore.

Last month’s activity also increased 1.9% from September, according to DAT’s North American freight index, which is not seasonally adjusted.

Spot-market activity usually declines beginning in the summer, but this year, freight has remained at an elevated level in the second half.

“It’s been a fairly exceptional period over the past three or four months, because typically you see a seasonal decline which we just haven’t seen,” said David Schrader, senior vice president of operations for TransCore.

October dry-van freight volumes rose 4.4% year-over-year, while refrigerated loads climbed 22% and flatbed freight jumped 24%.

Schrader said flatbed freight has benefited from strength in the energy and auto industries, while reefer freight has been bolstered by a good year for agriculture.