How would a trucking company use the truck loadings outlook tactically?

So that will help them position whether they're going to increase their recruiting or maybe, soften their recruiting a little, whether they might go beyond their normal truck purchase and purchase a little more, or maybe, pull back a little so that's the goal with that. The TCI is really very much a broad thermometer. for most carriers, this would be the most useful. But when we're looking at where the rubber meets the road, the real question really is, are you going to have more volume or less volume? And that is because that's something that you can process when we start looking into things like utilization and pricing.

Ok, does the truck loadings outlook include all trailer segments?

It includes what we consider to be the truly major ones, and so that would be dry van, refrigerated, and flatbed, the three of which together make up certainly the vast majority of over the road and transportation. We also look at tank and we look at specialized. And then finally, there's what's called dump in bulk. Some of that's trailers. Some of that is what we call a straight truck, which is just a single unit truck like a dump truck.

Does the truck loadings outlook, impact pricing, hiring, equipment, purchase decisions, all of the above?

Yeah, it's really the bedrock of all of that because you will not need more drivers unless you're going to have more freight., it's certainly not the only determinant, but it is sort of the core determinant because if the rate if the volume of freight does not go up, it's very unlikely that you're going to see rates go up, because, in order for that to happen, the driver supply is going to have to drop pretty precipitously.

And what sources do we tap into for this metric?

The truck loadings outlook is drawing from a vast range of data and inputs. Probably the most critical one is industrial production, which feeds, a lot of transportation. But we also look at imports and exports. And we have built a model that we've tweaked over the period of the past couple of decades where we take basically the entire volume of tonnage that we expect to be in the entire transportation system. And we segment that out. We segment out based on what we know to be volume in rail and in barges and in airfreight and in pipelines. Basically, the rest of what's left over is trucking. And the reason we have to do it that way is that trucking, unlike other modes, really has no centralized reporting. So we built a model to tell us really how much freight is moving. And we do that through taking the amount of total freight, determining basically how much of that is truck freight, and then running it through a model that takes into account freight density by trailer type and productivity for drivers to basically spit out a number of loadings that we expect. We forecast total freight. And then from that, we build a forecast of loadings by trailer type.