Caroline: [00:00:00] Welcome to This Week in Trucking, the podcast that tells you what you need to know about the trucking market for the week. I’m Caroline. Gurvir is out today, so we’re going to make this super quick and just do an update on the hottest freight markets and diesel price trends for the week.

If you want to stay up to date on the trucking industry, we release a new episode every week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple podcasts. So definitely subscribe if you don’t want to miss any of our updates. Before we get into all the content about the trucking industry today, we just want to do a shout out to all of the relief workers and truck drivers who are contributing to the relief efforts in the southeast part of the country after Hurricanes Helene and Milton touched down.

We hope everyone is safe and staying as safe as they can, and we send our thoughts to you. Out to all the people who have lost loved ones and lost property in all of that damage. Alright, let’s get into what the hottest rate markets can tell us about the trucking industry this week. Remember that we use spotter.ai to get [00:01:00] information realtime data on the Spotter index, which is a measurement of.

Profitability of different freight markets. And we look at those markets for dry van, reefer, and flatbed. I’m still on the lookout for information on rates for box trucks. So if you have an idea of a platform that does that let us know. All right, let’s check this out. We’ve got van markets here. So the hottest van markets are up here in the Northern Midwest.

Saginaw Michigan, Fargo, North Dakota. Got some places in Minnesota as well. It looks like Duluth and also some good markets here in Illinois and Wisconsin, and then out West is almost always a good market, at least for the last eight months or so that we’ve been tracking it California, Las Vegas.

You’ve got Ontario, California, Fresno, Stockton, LA, San Diego, and also Tucson, Arizona is a pretty good market for flatbeds this week. Places to avoid are places. in [00:02:00] Florida in for obvious reasons. But these are also usually pretty, pretty low markets and up in the Northeast in New England New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

Let’s take a look at the reefer market. So the hottest markets that we’re going to see are also up here in the Northern Midwest. And then you’ve got some good markets out West as well. So we’re looking at Duluth, Minnesota. Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Fargo, North Dakota, Twin Falls, Idaho out here, as well as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa, all of Iowa is pretty good right now, Omaha, Nebraska, Bismarck, North Dakota, and St.

Cloud, Minnesota. And then we’ve got a couple of good markets out here in Missouri and Illinois. For flatbed, we’re looking mainly at the Midwest and some of the South. So it looks like Michigan is up here as well as places in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama and [00:03:00] Mississippi and New Orleans.

Places to avoid for flatbeds looks like El Paso, Texas, Grand Junction, Colorado, pretty much anything here in the Rocky Mountain West region is really cold for flatbeds right now, as well as the Northeast in Maine New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are also pretty cold markets for flatbeds.

Okay, let’s take a look at trends in diesel prices for this week. Unfortunately, this is the first week that I’ve had to give you bad news about diesel prices going up. They’re not going up by two too much, about four or five cents, but five cents per gallon can add up really quick when you’re fueling trucks.

So it’s not nothing. As of the 14th on Monday, the national average on highway diesel fuel price was three 63 one. That is across all of the U. S. and pretty much across the board. Prices went up by a couple of cents, most [00:04:00] notably in the Midwest and Gulf Coast, where they went up by 6 and 7 cents, respectively.

So we’re looking at increasing prices for fuel. We’re still pretty far down from where we were very far down from where we were at this time. Last year. You’re looking at a difference of 80, 77, 65 cents. That’s an enormous difference compared to 2023. So we’re still doing relatively well compared to last year, meaning that trucking should be, even if the rates haven’t gone up, trucking should be at least a little more profitable.

If not, only for the diesel prices. As we know, diesel prices are also pretty seasonal. So things start cooling down. You need more heating fuel. That’s a similar fuel to diesel. And so when the demand goes up for something, We know that prices follow it. Of course, on the Spotter Index, we’re really just comparing markets to see what’s better or what’s a cold market that you should [00:05:00] avoid or a hot market that you should target.

It doesn’t really tell us anything about the freight market overall. Overall spot load. For this week, according to are down spot. Truck posts are slightly up. That doesn’t really bode well for spot rates going up at all. And national spot rates really haven’t increased much at all. If we look at is, information about national spot rates. A couple of cents up on dry van. About seven cents, five cents actually up on flatbed and reefer is only up by a cent. So really not much movement here at all. We’re getting seasonally we should be getting a bump in rates in October and November holiday time.

This is the end of the peak season for the year for trucking. So hopefully we’ll see more movement here, but it doesn’t look super promising. Truckload rates, did go down, sorry, and DAT’s weekly update as of October 13th said that truckload rates had cooled last week with volumes dropping off due as [00:06:00] Hurricane Milton made landfall.

We can expect volumes to rise with recovery efforts. Never a good reason that our spot rates would go up. But that’s the reality. We got a great comment on one of our last videos with Adam from DIY Semi. We were talking about what his pet peeves are out on the road. He doesn’t have much complaints. He doesn’t like to complain, but Jim 108857 commented telling us what his biggest pet peeve on the road is.

He said on the road, it’s a lack of patience. I don’t pray for a world of peace. I pray for a world of patience. Amen to that, Jim. Amen to that. That’s all I have for you today. If you liked this quick version of our podcast, let me know in the comments. If you want to see more, we’ll make more of them. Drive safe.