The mega-viral “Trucker’s Strike” story made national news and may have even directly influenced the White House and state governors, but did it actually happen?
Overdrive went to lengths to speak to drivers who said they were parking the truck around the announced date of October 1, though most described it as a “vacation” rather than a strike.
Those drivers weren’t available for comment Monday, and data shows that if a strike did happen, it didn’t really tip the scales.
Some data from DAT suggests there were even slightly more trucks on the road.
“The seven-day average number of equipment posts on the DAT One load board on Oct. 1 was less than 1% higher than on Sept. 30, and 3% higher year over year,” a rep for the load board said. They went on to admit that truck posts on DAT don’t really tell the whole story, but it’s still a useful benchmark to measure changes within the platform.
More data from Class 8, a carrier solutions company that pulls in data directly from trucks’ ECMs, also didn’t illustrate any real large-scale strike or shutdown action.
Class 8 told Overdrive it looked at “all connected trucks in our OEM network nationwide,” just about 200,000 trucks, and didn’t see much.
“As for the full day” on October 1, Class 8 saw “only 0.6% less total location pings than the week before and only 0.2% less in unique moving trucks than the week before.”
So really, no big changes to report.
“Both of these are negligible changes that suggest to us either a very limited strike (that we can’t see from the national data) or something that didn’t happen at all,” a rep from Class 8 said.
[Related: Oct. 1 trucker’s strike: Is Trump already taking notice?]
But maybe truckers weren’t striking because there was actually money to be made last week?
“Truck postings fell 4.6%, and the Market Demand Index — the ratio of loads to trucks – rose to its highest level since mid-July,” FTR Intelligence’s weekly update, with Truckstop.com data, found.
Furthermore, FTR said that last week the “total market broker-posted rate increased about three cents a mile week over week for the fifth gain in the past six weeks. Total rates, which were at their highest level in nine weeks, were more than 41% higher than in the same week last year.”
Also, diesel prices are down. Recall that some of the original strike promoters were saying they’d stop hauling until something was done about diesel prices.
While the White House floated a ban on diesel exports, some states paused fuel taxes and even checks for dyed off-road diesel.
The Energy Information Administration will release new numbers on diesel prices on Tuesday at 10 a.m. Eastern, but fuel went down nationally on average 15 cents a gallon last week. A similar drop could come this week.
Overdrive reached out to the drivers who said they were shutting down, but only heard back from one Pennsylvania-based owner-op Dumitru Malai, who still wasn’t moving.
“Fixing some things on my truck,” he said. “Best time to do it.”
Here’s hoping they’re enjoying home time or at least catching up on maintenance or running profitably.
To make sure you’re running smart in these times of volatile fuel prices, know those costs and run any rate offer through Overdrive‘s Load Profit Analyzer to see profit potential per-mile and per-day.
[Related: Overdrive‘s Load Profit Analyzer: Ways to use to assess rates, costs]
