Congratulations Washington D.C. for screwing up the trucking industry and being ground zero where a driver’s available hours go to die!
No, I am not referring to the FMCSA and the hours-of-service rules (that should be reexamined), I am referring to the shippers and receivers that occupy your metro-area. You are the worst city for truckers in America/Canada. Congrats!
What am I talking about? Drivers are running out of hours by waiting on your inefficient and abusive shipping community? How do we know?
Remember that ELD mandate you created on December 18, 2017 that is used to track drivers?
Well, it can do a lot more. The same data that is used to log driver activity can also be used to monitor shipper data. So, over the past year, FreightWaves has been quietly accumulating hundreds of million records to understand where drivers are being detained.
So we took this data, applied some machine learning, artificial and human intelligence and created an ELD map of the market. We then developed market-level indices to examine where drivers are being delayed and what city sucks (or doesn’t) for drivers.
We also overlayed the same data with physical addresses on shippers and consignees to understand which physical locations were causing drivers to burn time by being on-duty but not-driving and came up with a clear understanding of where drivers are being held up.
And here is what we found (the worst cities for drivers to be held up on-duty/not-driving in U.S. and Canada):
#1 Washington DC (149 minutes)
#2 Central Chicago (136 minutes)
#3 Halifax, Nova Scotia (121 minutes)
#4 Edmonton, Alberta (118 minutes)
#5 Northern Chicago (109 minutes)
#6 Modesto, CA (106 minutes)
#7 Northwest Chicago (101 minutes)
#8 Amityville – Long Island (101 minutes)
#9 Far Far North Chicago (99 minutes)
#10 Salt Lake City (99 mins)
#11 Midland-Odessa TX (97 mins)
#12 West Chicago (95 mins)
#13 San Antonio, TX (93 mins)
#14 Brooklyn/Lower Manhattan (92 mins)
#15 Toronto (92 mins)
#16 Sacramento, CA (91 mins)
#17 Dallas (91 mins)
While Washington D.C. is by far the worst, Chicago metro showed up in our data a total of five times!
And the best city in America/Canada: Buffalo/Niagara Falls, NY. You are far better than your football team!
At first glance the delays are not as bad as one would assume, but these are delays for all loads that were in the data-set, including drop/hook freight. This means that some of the worst shipper/receiver locations had average delay times far above the city averages.
As the data flows, we will continue to model areas where drivers are being held up and what types of freight are most likely to create delays. You can keep up to date on our research and models, by subscribing.
Ultimately, we want to educate the market on areas that are ripe for improvement and how costly the delays are for everyone. It is our goal to provide the information and encourage shippers to take corrective actions and carriers to charge and collect detention for these delays. The unfortunate part is that detention collection is usually at the discretion of the shipper or the leverage that the carrier has over the shipper.
Perhaps the BiTA Standards Board will soon create a detention blockchain smart-contract that can automate detention billing and collections. Until then, data don’t care. If you are interested in participating in this discussion, join us at Transparency18 in Atlanta on May 22nd and 23rd, 2018.
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