Drilling Deep with John Kingston

On this week's Drilling Deep, Michael Lemke talks about the mental strain on drivers who are keeping the U.S. supply chain afloat during the pandemic. Lemke is a professor at the University of Houston-Downtown and he is a former driver. So he's studied the profession from the inside and the outside. The pandemic has put a whole different sort of strain on those behind the wheel and Lemke joins Dri...

Amit Mehrotra, the chief transportation analyst at Deutsche Bank, was on numerous analyst calls during the recently-completed earnings season. He heard CEOs repeatedly report the same scenario: April was terrible, May was better, and the improvement continued into June and July. But now Mehrotra says he is hearing that the trucking market is "on fire." He joins host John Kingston on Drilling Deep...

One of the biggest arguments in favor of moving goods by rail in an intermodal service is that while it might be more complex and slower, there are efficiency gains that make it competitive with trucking in certain markets. With diesel prices at historically low levels, one of those advantages is eroded. FreightWaves contributor and rail economist Jim Blaze joins Drilling Deep host John Kingston o...

The untenable situation at the U.S. Postal Service is coming to a possible breaking point. It is carrying a significant amount of e-commerce traffic but other competitors want that business. It continues to lose money and has an enormous pension burden that no other entity in America has. It suddenly has an unexpected role in the Presidential election. And it has a controversial new leader. On the...

The last day to apply for funding under the Paycheck Protection Program is August 8. But that's when things will get busy for people like Michael Rofman. He’s a partner and leader of the New Jersey Transportation & Logistics practice at the national accounting firm of Mazars USA. Michael has been working with clients for months now who have gotten money or tried to get money out of the Paycheck Pr...

Whenever there's a transaction in the supply chain, there's an invoice. And a lot of those invoices get processed by US Bank, which has long had a large amount of business in the trucking sector. The bank puts together a quarterly summary known as the U.S. Bank’s Freight Payment Index, and it's a good barometer of the strength or weakness in the market. Bobby Holland, vice president and Director o...

Keith Dunlap is the senior vice president with the transportation group at Gallagher Basset, and one of his jobs is to head off nuclear verdicts before they hit the wallet and balance sheet of a trucking company.   Gallagher Bassett is what is known as a third party administrator, meaning his company handles the claims of thousands of carriers. It's from that perspective that he advises companies...

There were fewer people, some cancelled receptions but a whole lot of effort that looks like it pulled off a successful gathering without anybody getting sick. GMTA’s president and CEO Ed Crowell joins host John Kingston to talk about the steps the organization undertook to put together the meeting.and how it turned out. We’ll also be looking at how OPEC has managed to tighten the oil market, boos...

With the release of the identity of the biggest recipients of money under the Paycheck Protection Program, reviewing all the names of those who got money and figuring out how this will impact the industry's operations is now the hot topic of discussion in trucking.   On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston sits down with FreightWaves Director of Research Kevin Hill to talk about w...

On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, David Roush of KSM Transport Partners, with a wealth of experience in the sector, tackles several issues on the minds of truckers everywhere. Why do some companies take freight with a lousy price? What does it mean to get ready for a post-COVID world? And what does capacity look like for the end of the year? Host John Kingston interviews Roush and also takes a...

The LTL sector of the trucking sector is generally more stable than the truckload carriers it shares the road with. But that doesn't mean it has faced the pandemic without major upheaval. On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston speaks with Brian Thompson, the chief commercial officer of SMC3. His company sets the base rates for LTL shipments and he has a special insight into how t...

To watch the stock of Nikola Motors, the company that has raised millions to produce a hydrogen-produced truck, you'd think that the day of the diesel engine was going to end soon.     But that isn't the case. Allen Schaeffer, the executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, joins host John Kingston on the Drilling Deep podcast to talk about the work his group is doing to produce engines tha...

Steve Burks was a truck driver in an earlier professional capacity. He also got is Bachelor's degree, his Master's degree and then his PhD. He's a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota-Morris where he continues to research truck drivers and the markets where they ply their trade.     He joins the Drilling Deep podcast this week along with host John Kingston to offer his views on th...

When food trucks were allowed to start selling their products at rest stops on many of the nation's highways earlier this year, it marked a significant shift from years of policy that mostly kept the trucks on the road but the food off of an exit. Yes, there were vending machines at the rest stops. And in some states where the interstate was part of a road more controlled by the state, like the Pe...

Tolls on bridges, tunnels and roads are plummeting in the wake of the pandemic. Unlike the broader system of highways whose upkeep is funded by the rapidly depleting highway trust fund, infrastructure funded by tolls generally has a steady stream of income to keep them in workable condition.   But that is now being threatened by a dramatic collapse in revenues due to the sharp dropoff in traffic....

Steve Moss is the general manager of DTS Logistics in Montana. He's heard the fierce criticism being leveled by drivers against the 3PL industry as rates fall, with a great deal of blame being placed at the feet of the brokerage sector.  Moss reached out to FreightWaves to spell out his case as to why he believes this criticism is unfair and we speak to him on Drilling Deep about the complaints an...

The numbers are in: earnings for the quarter have been reported by all the trucking and other freight-related companies for the three months that ended March 31. And what a quarter it was, finishing up in the middle of a radically-changed scenario that nobody could have ever modeled for.   On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston talks with Todd Fowler, the transportation equity an...

There are plenty of trucking companies going bankrupt in the trucking world. We know that. But what if a change in the bankruptcy law last year could keep a lot of them alive?   On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston brings in attorney Matt Ferris from the firm of Haynes & Boone to talk about a changed provision in federal bankruptcy law that could keep a lot of smaller companies...

Airlines have suffered mightily from the loss of passenger traffic as a result of the pandemic. But there also has been a demand for its services to move a lot of freight including an area that has always been taken to the skies to move from point A to point B: medical supplies. On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston talks with his colleague Eric Kulisch of FreightWaves on how ai...

In the week that saw crude prices turn negative, host John Kingston on the Drilling Deep podcast tries to turn that once-in-a-lifetime occurrence into what it says about diesel prices. He also discusses the impact on the trucking sector that services the oil patch and how the negatives from that are going to outweigh the positives of cheaper diesel.   He’s also joined by Dan Cook of True North abo...

On this week's Drilling Deep, host John Kingston heard from Jack Rybicki, a managing principal at the accounting and consulting firm of CLA. Jack has been steering many clients through the process of trying to get money from the federal government under the CARES Act, in particular, the Payroll Protection Plan that will allow employees to be retained and a lot of the bills to be paid. It's good fo...

What do truckers on the road do if they're feeling sick, particularly in the age of the coronavirus? They often just suck it up. But they also can head to an urgent care center at a truck stop, like the UrgentCare Travel centers found at Pilot and Flying J truckstops. On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, we talk to Mitch Strobin of UrgentCare Travel on what his urgent care centers at those truck...

On this week's Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston welcomes Mike Baudensitel of FreightWaves to discuss whether the nation's rail and intermodal sectors are getting any sort of lift from the trends that have helped the trucking markets since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. John also discusses the desperate attempts to bring the collapsing oil market into some sort of balance and how t...

On this week's Drilling Deep, host John Kingston talks with Chris Henry of FreightWaves. Chris is the head of the TCA Profitability Program. It's a program designed to both benchmark best practices as well as share them among its members, helping ensure that trucking companies all over the country stay in the black. With such an uncertain market ahead, such guidance is particularly important. Chri...

It's shut down businesses and thrown planning into turmoil. No, it's not COVID-19. It's the insurance rates that trucking companies have been facing over the last few years. The problem seems to have gotten particularly acute in the last year or two and insurance rates have been cited by several trucking companies as a key reason why they've shut their doors. On this week's Drilling Deep podcast,...