Why The US Trucking Downturn Just Got Worse

The humming silence from the freight yards these days is starting to feel less like a temporary lull and more like a structural shift. I've been tracking capacity utilization figures for the last eighteen months, and the data coming out of the major Class 8 truck manufacturers is frankly concerning, even when accounting for typical seasonal variations. Remember the frenzy of 2021, where securing a trailer felt like winning a lottery? That pressure cooker environment seems utterly alien now.

What's truly interesting, from an engineering perspective, isn't just the drop in load volumes—we expected some normalization post-pandemic spending—but the sticky nature of the excess capacity. It suggests something deeper than just a cyclical inventory correction is at play in the North American logistics pipeline. Let's examine the variables that seem to be compounding the existing pressure on operators.

Here is what I think has tipped the scales from a manageable slowdown into something more protracted. The primary accelerant, surprisingly, appears to be the maturation of privately funded fleet expansions from the boom years. Many smaller and mid-sized carriers aggressively bought new or lightly used equipment between late '21 and mid '23, banking on sustained high spot rates and favorable financing terms. Now, those depreciation schedules are hitting simultaneously with stubbornly high insurance premiums and the rising cost of compliance related to emissions standards.

When the interest rates began their upward trajectory, those variable-rate loans suddenly became anchors instead of accelerators for growth. This has forced many owner-operators, who represent a huge chunk of the available capacity, into distress sales just to cover operating expenses, flooding the secondary market with available trucks. It’s a classic supply-side overreaction finally meeting a demand side that has settled back to pre-2020 velocity, but with a much larger installed base of available trucks. I’ve seen data suggesting the average age of active tractors has actually decreased slightly, meaning we have newer, more expensive machinery sitting idle, burning capital.

The second factor that seems to be worsening the situation involves the structural adjustments happening within major shippers, particularly in consumer goods and retail. They learned painful lessons about relying too heavily on the volatile spot market during supply chain chaos. Consequently, many large entities are aggressively locking in long-term, fixed-rate contracts with established, high-quality carriers, effectively freezing out the smaller, opportunistic players who rely on that immediate, high-margin transactional freight.

This shift towards long-haul contractual certainty creates a barbell effect in the market: the very large carriers are stable, and the very small, hyperlocal carriers survive on specialized, immediate needs, but the middle tier is being squeezed dry. Shippers are demanding better service metrics, often requiring fleet modernization or specific technology integration which many smaller operators simply cannot afford to implement right now, especially when revenue visibility is low. Therefore, the available transactional freight that used to keep those mid-sized fleets busy is drying up faster than anticipated because the contractual commitments are absorbing the baseline volume. It’s a structural reallocation of risk that leaves a substantial amount of underutilized, high-cost, independent capacity stranded.