Overdrive Radio

The title of this Overdrive Radio podcast sounds a little like the set-up for an inside-baseball joke of sorts, but for owner-operator Mike Landis and Ezlogz head and former owner-op C.J. Karman, that day was a serious one indeed. Directly and indirectly in a variety of ways, its culimination of the three-week Mayday-begun protest vigil outside the White House has had material effects in terms of...

Answers to several hours of service questions in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, including: 1. Can I use a three-hour nap and not get penalized on it in the 14-hour rule? 2. How do you log a 20-load back and forth load/unload trip where there's scantly a mile between load/unload sites? 3. To use split sleeper, does it matter if the shorter period is longer than three hours? Is the pau...

Are you ready for September 29? In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we’re diving into the specifics of the hours of service changes going into effect on that date with FMCSA's Joe DeLorenzo, something of a recap from our GATS Week session in late August a month ago, for the podcast audience. The talk centers on the new flexibilities, the particulars of just what constitutes off-duty time for an ow...

Owner-operators across the country probably remember the LTL doubles and triples hauler Viking Freight, before a buyout by FedEx folded the company under the FedEx Freight umbrella with another, American Freightways, in the early part of this century. A special treat for you today in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast with Steve Sprenger, a commercial real estate broker for the last coupl...

You can catch the performances also in video via OverdriveOnline.com or at http://youtube.com/overdrivemag -- herein find audio of the entire show, building to Tennessee-based John Malayter performing his own "Take Me Back to Tennessee" for the win. Before we take a run through all the performances, including fellow talent search finalists Freddy French and Paul Cullers, "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer...

This year has no doubt been a wild ride in any number of different ways for every one of you, I’m guessing. Whether you’re leased to a carrier and newly dealing with regular customers’ facility restrictions and the necessity of new personal protective equipment on-site or at once routinely familiar and now sometimes ever-stranger-seeming truck stops along regular routes. Maybe you’re an independen...

So much can come from a song, and its connection to the work that its writer or performer does otherwise. The culture forged and re-forged by the connections between the individual performers who've taken part in Overdrive's Trucker Talent Search over the years, and hopefully those among you who have the opportunity to really make a similar connection with them through their work, well … for this...

With the Brake Safety Week upcoming August 23-29, tank doubles-pulling independent Martin Herman, based in Wyoming, is sure to be ready. In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we talk inspections, for sure, but more so his half-century-old 1970 Kenworth needlenose W925, quite an exceptional rig. Herman regular Overdrive readers may well recall as the owner-op who engineered replacement parts and even...

The complications that can be brought on by any overdimensional load’s permitted complexity are many, and extend to the routes those permits send you on, of course. The bigger or heavier the load gets, the more circuitous and lengthy the route, often enough. It can make for a cumbersome process when it comes to weighing whether the price of any load is worth the effort and cost put in. Owner-Opera...

You read a little about this week's podcast subject last week, likely, with reporting around the Operation Safe Driver Week traffic-enforcement event (focused on motorists as well as professional operators) ongoing as we speak. Namely -- the Level 3 inspection and Kansas Highway Patrol trooper and Public Information Officer Nick Wright, whose advice related to how to prep for an inspection was del...

In the first part of this two-part podcast, owner-operator and Rates & Lanes Podcast cohost Rico Muhammad detailed his views on policing issues and his personal experiences with unjustified actions throughout his life. In part 2, a discussion of opportunity barriers that exist for many in African-American communities where, as Muhammad says, kids are often counseled they must be "twice as good" as...

Atlanta-based Rico Muhammad regulat listeners may well recall from past Overdrive Radio editions covering a variety of issues, from electronic logging device choices ahead of the mandate back in 2017 to a variety of other business topics. Muhammad's also the host of a weekly audio program in the Rate & Lanes podcast available via http://BlogTalkRadio.com/rates. In this week's Overdrive Radio, Muha...

What does East Coast Transport Vice President of Logistics Paul Berman think about all the talk around potentially new requirements for freight-transaction transparency, and the existing regs? That was, after all, partly the question Berman joined me for this two-part edition of Overdrive Radio to answer to begin with. The answer is complicated, and involves honest questioning of the utility of af...

View from the broker, Part 1. East Coast Transport's logistics VP Paul Berman has been around trucking, and particularly the food-freight side of things, since the 1970s and also happens to be a former owner-operator himself. He sat down with Overdrive Radio for an expansive talk on the history of brokerage in trucking and the evolution of the spot market into a sort of market-within-a-market, wit...

A longer talk here with Maryland-headquartered Ed Miller, now retired from trucking and the author of a memoir called “A Trucker’s Tale: Wit, Wisdom and True Stories from 60 Years on the Road.” It’s an intimate portrait of a life lived in trucking, from a kid in Western North Carolina changing tires for his father and grandfather’s trucking company, to the driver’s seat himself stateside and in Vi...

This edition features a talk with Generations Express independent owner-operator Bryan Hutchens, and we’ll get to how he feels about the hours of service changes released just yesterday and set to go into effect es early as September. Regular listeners and Overdrive readers may well remember Hutchens from an organizing role he assumed with others around last year’s That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C. outrea...

Owner-operators Daniel and Phyllis Snow have been off the road refusing to run at a loss for going on a month now as rates and available freight volumes have fallen. The crisis spurred by the COVID-19 coronavirus' spread, though, comes after a rough year of its own. To put everything in context, Daniel says, on the same miles run in 2019, the Snows were able to gross only around 60 percent of reve...

Questionable offer of easy money 'without asking for any business equity' by Overdrive

In what has been perhaps the toughest week for trucking as an owner-operator in the last decade, this edition of Overdrive Radio offers some diversion via an interview with Haley Fohr of Chicago-based "Jackie Lynn," whose new record proceeds from a conception of the character for whom the band is named as a long-hauler with a particularly spectacular rig -- a mirrored vessel that carries the weigh...

Nearing the end of the first week of the SBA disaster-assistance loan programs available to owner-operators, insight in this Overdrive Radio edition from longtime owner-operator and now trucking-business coach Gary Buchs. In a time like this, look ahead to the relationships that you need to establish -- whether with a health-care provider, a broker or shipper customer, and indeed as Buchs suggests...

Special thanks to 13-year-old Logan Miller in this April Fool's Day edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, no kidding. Miller is the young man I wrote a little about on Friday, who's been serving sack lunches in appreciation of professional drivers at the I-79 rest area in West Virginia, southbound side just inside the Pennsylvania state line. Logan Miller has partnered on an "Orange Ribbon Campa...

Three examples of a new intensity of appreciation not only of professional drivers amid the COVID-19 crisis, but also from the professionals for those out there on the road with them in support, from fuel desk personnel to sanitary workers and so many more. Interviews: Ingrid Brown on hauling produce in and out of Hunt's Pont. Paul Marhoefer narrates the first two weeks' worth of the virus spread...

Owner-operator Chad Fowler's "Solar Peterbilt" 1996 379 springs from a motivation more owner-operators are acting on with the increasing availability of relatively affordable solar panels, whether like Fowler's of the type built for stationary use or the more flexible variety built for mobile application. A look on his mostly maintenance-free power system (a big step forward from diesel APU-type p...

Speaking to a gathering of the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association last week in Charlotte, N.C., while digging in on a view that the ELD mandate is a safety-positive rule, FMCSA Acting Administrator Jim Mullen made it clear he believed the flawed rigidity of the hours rules needed significant modification for drivers, and trumpeted the agency's efforts to promote the true safety-plus image...

Let’s hear it for the self-described "door-swinger," everybody. That’d be current reefer hauler and former and still sometime step-decker and flatbedder Rob Goodwin, based up in the Texas panhandle and today running leased to a very small carrier. We'll hear how he got there, following some years running a small fleet with his authority, a run-in with a bad broker that cost him well north of 10 gr...