Overdrive Radio

Dispatch here from the day the truck stop came to the U.S. Congress with Truckstop.com’s Chief Relationship Officer Brent Hutto. Hutto testitifed recently before a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee about the position of technology providers in the freight ecosystem, the potential for electronic permitting, the importance of funding road maintenance and more. Regarding the latter, his t...

Owner-operator Ingrid Brown started trucking as a teenager in 1979, and she's been on the road since. In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast: Her reflections on her 40-year career, many of those spent as a single-truck owner-operator, as well as her recent involvement in FMCSA's Our Roads, Our Safety campaign and her ongoing bout with various forms of skin cancer. Also — a listen to the th...

So says retired trucker Joe Jolly out of Kansas, who was recently treated for a small spot of aggressive skin cancer on his face. He has a message for young drivers who aren't thinking about their in-cab sun exposure. Put fairly succinctly, you might say the sun is “trying to kill you” from the day you’re born, as Joe puts it. Anything you can do to protect yourself from damaging ultraviolet radia...

Ride along with Overdrive Senior Editor Todd Dills and Nashville singer-songwriter Boo Ray on a tour through Ray's latest, named after a familiar site on I-24 anyone who's run west from Chattanooga will recognize. The record starts with a trio of road songs in which there's no shortage of mirth, pathos and more.

In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we get a clear window onto the fist Make-A-Wish convoy from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with former trucker George Ruelens. He was hauling for Ned Bard & Son at the time, with no idea what he and the 41 other truckers were doing that day would go on to become a veritable institution in the region around Lancaster County -- the annual Mother’s Day...

South Carolina-based owner-operator Lee Epling echoes retired veteran hauler Gordon Alkire's perspective in the previous edition of Overdrive Radio, in which Alkire spoke on the tragic Colorado crash several weeks back. Epling, in turn, likewise urged caution pointing the finger before all the facts are known. Along the way, Epling shares his own brake-failure story on Sandstone Mountain in W.Va./...

A week ago Thursday began no doubt no shortage of investigation into the fiery Lakewood, Colorado, crash of Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, who lost control of his truck on a downhill grade and, ultimately, crashed, killing multiple people and sending multiple others to the hospital. In the wake of the tragedy for all involved, including the driver, who was charged with vehicular homicide among oth...

If regular listeners don’t recognize the first voice you hear in this podcast, that of Daniel Snow, he and his wife and business partner Phyllis' rig you're certain you'll remember. Christened “The Goose,” it’s a 1996 Freightliner Classic with 140 inches’ worth of a custom-redesigned ICT sleeper the Snows located and outfitted themselves for the comforts of home on the road about 7 years ago. Anot...

Learn from the mistakes of others, because you can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself. Bill Ater’s words to live by. in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast we drop into the scene at the Junction truckstop in Blunt, S.D., round about mid-week last week, with the Landstar-leased owner-operator and a fellow hauler on a run from Midland, Texas, up to the Williston, N.D., oil...

An unfortunate reality in the 2018 year-end income averages from ATBS showed independent owner-operators with their authority earning on average less than some leased owner-op segments. In Kevin Rutherford's view, that just shouldn’t be the case for any full-time independent given the old greater risk equals greater reward truism. If you’re not beating the leased averages and are working full-time...

Today on Overdrive Radio, much of a conversation I had with former owner-operator Scott Grenerth, with whom regular listeners will be familiar from his moderation of our parking-issues-related panel at the Great American Trucking Show in August 2018. Grenerth’s currently with the Truck Specialized Parking Services company and is a former regulatory affairs director with OOIDA. At Mid-America last...

This edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast comes as the Mid-America Trucking Show continues in Louisville, Ky. In this edition, a couple of my conversations with two owner-ops with some commonality between them in a willingness to be the contrarian in this loud age, on a variety of things. That’d be Lexington, Kentucky-based owner-op Chad Boblett, running with one truck and using brokers. Likewis...

Mandi Jo Pinheiro, the winner of the 2018 Trucker Talent Search, and her father and fellow guitarist, Urban Roger Brown, were kind enough to sit down with Overdrive in Nashville earlier this week. They'd come all the way from Idaho Tuesday for an all-day Wednesday recording session at Jay’s Place, a studio long operated by Jay Vernali on Music Row. Conveniently, Vernali also offers up the apartmen...

In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, following last week's talk with Load One's John Elliott about significant challenges in the cargo-van-powered segment of the expedited trucking niche, owner-operator Darren Ayres details his own place within it hauling in a Mercedes Sprinter Van. He and his co-owner-op wife, Trish, run leased to Landstar and with (as suggested by the podcast's...

In this edition of Overdrive Radio find Max Heine's talk with owner-operator John Strong, recently off the road, about his involvement in the 1970s and beyond in advocacy efforts with Overdrive founder Mike Parkhurst, memories of the Mass 10 truck stop, and much more. Todd Dills' talk with Load One head John Elliott continues here, too, about the cargo van niche, which would seem to check the boxe...

Owner-operator Brian Bucenell's 2002 Peterbilt 379 was among the 100 or so trucks that participated in the "slow roll" event in Indianapolis last week. Bucenell's also helping put on a Virginia "slow roll" event tomorrow, March 2, with a gathering point in Doswell, Va. (The group plans to roll out from the Doswell truck stop on I-95 at 11 a.m.) Slow roll events follow in Ohio on March 8 and in the...

And, as the picture shows, more from Long Haul Paul Marhoefer from the stage at the Key Palace Theater in Redkey, Ind., this past Feb. 2. Otherwise, this edition of Overdrive Radio takes aim at combating increasingly proliferating online scams. High degrees of situational awareness are your best tools, says Safr.me consultant and author Robert Siciliano, who speaks here. Some such cases have seen...

There are a multiplicity of smartphone apps out there for leased owner-ops from their leasing carriers, but we hadn’t seen anything quite like the "Ultimate Advantage" app from expediter Load One before we first wrote about it this time last year. In the sort of emergency-freight service that is the expedited trucking business, having information about where to be to best set yourself up for the n...

This edition of Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor James Jaillet's conversation with Northeastern University academic Alex Scott, who with colleagues at Michigan State and the University of Arkansas completed a recent study around potential safety-sensitive impacts of the electronic-logging-device mandate. The upshot, which you know if you saw the headlines, is that a comparative ana...

This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features a talk with small fleet owner Dave Marti of Forrest, Ill. He's got six power units, including his own, leased to Transport Services of Sullivan, Ill., hauling fuel in the region around his home base, delivering in liquid-bulk hazmat tanks to fueling stations that see an uptick in volume this time of year. His is one of not many trucking n...

Today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features a long talk on subject matter in the headline, and more, with owner-operator Steve Bixler of Valley View, Pa., the relatively recently former OOIDA board member and hauler of sand to natural gas drilling and fracking operations in his region. He resigned from OOIDA board in 2017 amid business issues at that time, and today, he’s working with...

This edition of Overdrive Radio follows up with Andre Jackson, owner-operator with a business partner of the one-year-old Midnight Xpress small fleet, based down in Mississippi (partner in the business, owner-op Donte Ogletree, is based in Atlanta). Regular listeners will remember late last summer when Jackson was the principal guest on the podcast telling the story of his comeback from multiple h...

A talk here with the owner of and a contractor to Southern California-based Angus Transportation, a now three-truck business owned and operated by Jimmy Nevarez. Leased owner-operator Darril Lightburn is in a percentage-type comensation arrangement there as an independent contractor, and Overdrive spoke with he and Nevarez both given latter’s past experience hauling rail intermodal containers in t...

Take a look back on 2018 and, viewed through the lenses of time and the myriad of conversations and voices heard on the Overdrive Radio podcast, 2018 might well be dubbed the year of ticky-tack and more serious issues related to the implementation of, what else, the electronic logging device mandate. Owner-operators’ adjustments in light of that rule, which started being enforced in a significant...

This edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features Overdrive Senior Editor James Jaillet, who penned the piece we suspect many of you noticed in the last couple weeks at OverdriveOnline.com, or in the December print magazine, about new enforcement heat on emissions regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to post-2006 heavy duty diesel engines. The story was spurred on...