Trucking is Robust

ARLINGTON, Va. – The American Trucking Associations released its annual data compendium Wednesday – ATA American Trucking Trends 2019 – which showed industry revenue in 2018 was up $700 million from the previous year.
 
“2018 was a year of dynamic growth for the trucking industry,” ATA chief economist Bob Costello said in a news release touting the highlights of the report.
 
Here are some other key findings in the report:
 
– Industry revenues were $796.7 billion in 2018, an increase from $700.1 billion in 2017, accounting for 80.3 percent of the nation’s freight bill.

– Trucks moved 11.49 billion tons of freight in 2018, 71.4 percent of the nation’s tonnage freight. 

– Trucks moved 67.4 percent of surface freight between the U.S. and Canada (an increase of 3.6 percent) and 83.5 percent between the U.S. and Mexico (an increase of 10.2 percent).

Warner Enterprises CEO Derek Leathers told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday there were 33,000 truck entries across the northern and southern borders every day.

– There are 7.8 million people employed in trucking-related jobs, an increase of 100,000. The figure includes 3.5 million professional drivers.

– Women make up 6.6 percent of the industry’s drivers (and figure that has remained relatively steady in most reports) and minorities account for 40.4 percent of truckers.

– Most carriers are small companies – 91.3 percent of fleets operate six or fewer trucks and 97.4 percent operate 20 or fewer.

Despite the rosy numbers, Costello last week offered a mixed outlook when discussing the ATA’s 2019 driver shortage analysis.

That report showed the 2019 shortage of OTR for-hire truckload drivers actually incurred a slight reduction from the record 2018 numbers, due in part to soft freight, but the trend was expected to rise again in the long term.

“The industry is growing the driving population,” Costello told reporters on a conference call. “It is just not growing fast enough.”