PrivateFleets.com

Recently, I have been trying to tackle a difficult problem: how to measure the size of the backhaul market for private fleets. With some input from those who read this blog, and some research on my own, I would like to produce a periodic report and analysis of trends in this market. I’m confident it would be a very useful tool for private fleets with common carrier authority that use third-party shippers and brokerage firms to fill empty miles on outbound or inbound movements.

The first step is to determine how many private fleets have common carrier authority. This is difficult to determine for the following reasons. When a private fleet registers with the DOT, it can register in one of two ways: as a private fleet or as a common carrier. Private fleets that have their own authority register in either category, making it difficult to differentiate them.

Surveys I’ve seen that ask private fleets if they have for-hire authority, such as the annual benchmarking survey by the National Private Truck Council, are based on samples of 100 to 150 fleets. Results from the 2007 survey indicate that 50% of private fleets operate as for-hire carriers. Even if this sample were larger, because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, you can’t just say that half of the total number of carriers registered as private fleets have for-hire operating authority.

Once we know the approximate number of private fleets with for-hire authority and the average fleet size, we move to the second step: determining the number of inbound or outbound miles that are either 1) empty or 2) loaded but with loaded with freight from a third party.

According to the 2007 NPTC survey, 26 percent of private fleets have average length of hauls over 500 miles. Realistically, unless a haul is over 500 miles, it probably does not make much sense going out of route or locking up your equipment and drivers for a backhaul. The survey also found that 28 percent of private fleet miles are empty. Yet fleets with for-hire authority have 25 percent less empty miles and run nearly double the mileage compared to fleets without such authority.

Ideally, I’d like to determine 1) the average (for private fleets with for-hire authority) number or percentage of loaded miles with third-party freight for backhauls and 2) the percentage of empty miles excluding backhauls which are availble for loading. Since many private fleets routes are for interplant transportation, for example, a fleet with for-hire authority might not want to find freight to fill an empty run of 200 miles.

Getting to this level of detail might be nearly impossible from any public or survey data I’ve seen. I’m still looking for possible scenarios by which I could do this, though. One scenario is to do my own survey if I could get enough interest in the value of this data. Please let me know if you’d be interested in a benchmarking report that your fleet could use, for instance, to rank yourselves against other private fleets in terms of your success in growing your backhaul business.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on pulling this report together and provide the results soon.