Shipping and Logistics
Freight Volumes Play Catch-up After Deep Freeze
Written by Sandy Williams
March 12, 2021
The deep freeze last month across a large swath of the U.S. showed how fragile the U.S. freight system is, said DAT Freight and Analytics.
“In 2020, things bent but they didn’t break,” Ken Adamo, chief of analytics at DAT told Logistics Management. “In the last two weeks of February, things very much broke. Shipments weren’t being delivered on time. You couldn’t get space on intermodal rail. All those things came to a head, and all at once. The word I’d encapsulate everything under is ‘fragile.’ Shippers were getting into bidding wars to move freight.”
Shipping volumes were already robust entering 2021, so when the winter event hit it caused major disruption from ports to rails to trucking. Terminals were closed, traffic slowed to a crawl and backlogs piled up.
DAT data shows the week of Feb. 21 was a record for load postings with more than 10 million available loads. Postings broke the previous record set in 2018 by 42% and were 174% higher than the same week in 2020.
By the week ending March 7, load posts were falling although still higher than normal. DAT load posts were down 12.4% from the previous week, but spot truck posts jumped 10.5%. Catch-up volume pushed rates higher with van spot rates up 4.8%, flatbed rates up 1.1% and reefer rates up 3.2%.
“We’re catching up, but I won’t say we’re caught up,” said Adamo in comments to JOC.com this week. “We’re seeing (spot market) volumes come down for sure, but rates are higher than I’d expect. I think part of that is shippers are protecting service with price.”
Overall demand for flatbed trucks, often used for steel shipments, rose in February, jumping 29.7% from January, and 206.1% from February 2020.
Last week, flatbed load volumes moderated, down 5.6% for the week ending March 7. The national flatbed load-to-truck ratio was 73.88.
National spot rates for flatbeds rose to $2.67 last week from an average of $2.56 in February. Rates were highest in the Midwest, averaging $3.11 per mile compared to the lowest average rate of $2.22 in the Western U.S. National diesel fuel prices rose 3.3% to $3.07 per gallon as of March 7.
Sandy Williams
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