Trucks Are Ready, Is the Freight?

The good news is that the trucking business is pretty good and is getting better. The bad news is that the economy is somewhat better, but it’s not getting better fast enough or strongly enough.

And that’s where our troubles begin.

Everyplace we look, the trucking sector is rebounding from its miserable performance last year. Fleet profits are much higher, truck sales are rising, truck employment is up, freight rates have firmed up and fuel prices have been relatively stable.

Clearly, the trucking industry and its partners in the freight delivery system are expanding, ready to move quickly the higher levels of consumer goods we all have been anticipating as the overall economy recovers.

But stock markets have been rocked in recent days as more data have been released to show the dip in the recovery most fleets already knew had occurred in late spring and early summer.

What is going on now perhaps can be likened to a rocket flight. The major hurdle is to get going fast enough to break the bonds of gravity that hold down all things on Earth. Above the atmosphere, space flight gets much easier.

The nation’s economy is growing and has been growing. The key element now is getting the economy growing strongly enough to generate the jobs necessary for consumers to feel secure enough about their future to spend more of their money.

Despite years of concern about the paltry rate of savings in the United States, consumers in recent months have shown they do indeed know how to not spend. And it is this frugality that has helped dampen growth.

Helping Americans to feel good again is as much a political and psychological process as it is an economic one. As long as workers are worried about the future of their employment and their employers, they will remain skittish about spending their cash.

The trucking industry cannot fix the national economy. What we can do is prepare for the future by rational investment in the country’s freight delivery system as we help drive out unnecessary costs.

And all indications are that is exactly what most fleets are doing as they concentrate on modernizing their equipment and having enough skilled drivers available to satisfy demand.

The trucking industry will be ready to handle America’s needs, whether the economic recovery is slow or fast.