Overdrive Radio

In this Veterans Day 2021 special edition of Overdrive Radio, we sat down with active-duty servicemember and small fleet owner Rob Ahlers, currently serving under the Chief of Logistics for the Pentagon out of D.C. With two military vets as partners, Ahlers launched the private MSR Transport Services with an intention to help fellow vets transition to civilian careers in trucking, and since the start in 2014 MSR's up to more than 30 power units, some owner-operated, hauling mostly expedited and Department of Defense freight with the fleet.

MSR is the latest recipient of Daimler Trucks' Cleveland, North Carolina plant's Ride of Pride series of patriotically decorated rigs, a 2022 Western Star 5700 XE pictured in the thumbnail with this podcast -- find more pictures from MSR via the post that houses this podcast: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15281342

What's Veterans Day mean to you? For Ahlers, in part it’s opportunity to continue to provide gainful employment to a bevy of military vets hauling for the company.

Hear much more about Ahlers and company’s bedrock business here, but also his reflections on the bedrock importance of Veterans Day.

The 2014 story about MSR just as Ahlers was getting started: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14887370/more-from-former-driver-military-logistics-pro-on-small-fleet-for-driving-vets

As mentioned in the podcast, here's former servicemember and owner-operator W. Joel Baker's recollection on how military service led him to trucking: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15281175/how-trucking-changed-this-military-veterans-life

Helping carriers dealing with the 'fun' that can come with safety and compliance during federal or state audits is at least a good part of the life of Fleet Safety Services consultant Jeff Davis, the principal voice in this edition of Overdrive Radio. After starting in trucking as a driver, Davis eventually made a career helping mostly small motor carriers through those compliance reviews.

At the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies this past week in Nashville, Davis offered information into new audit activity related to the relatively new drug and alcohol testing results Clearinghouse maintained by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration -- and common slip-ups carriers are making with required pre-employment and other checks there.

Too many, he said, are getting dinged by auditors for violations that are ultimately easily prevented, as he tells it. There’s a lot happening in terms of the Clearinghouse, too, that Davis rounds up in what follows here, certainly germane to those of you in the audience who employ or lease with one or more drivers or owner-operators.

Also in the podcast: We'll dive into the Small Fleet Champ awards presentation Thursday night to the record-setting group of NASTC attendees at its annual conference – according to President David Owen, attendance at the event nearly doubled prior years’ registrations, truly something to behold.

Congrats again to finalists Hallahan Transport and Professional Transportation Services Inc. – and the ultimate Small Fleet Champ in Silver Creek Transportation. This isn't the last we'll hear from owners Rob Hallahan, Nick Hewitt and Jason Cowan, be assured.

Read more about each of the finalist fleets:

Hallahan -- https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280238/hallahan-transport-thriving-on-lessons-learned-from-the-past

PTSI: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280537/trucking-legacy-of-nick-hewitt-and-platform-hauler-ptsi

Silver Creek Transportation: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15115043/diversification-silver-creek-transportations-growth-secret

Ruben Cardenas is one of the haulers involved with the Plus company, among the scads of tech companies dipping their toes into freight hauling as they work on ever-more-technically-capable advanced driver assist systems. And Plus isn't shy about using marketing terminology like "self-driving" and "autonomous driving" to describe their systems.

Cardenas speaks to his day-to-day on-highway testing of the Plus systems, helping refine system capabilities. The interview with Cardenas was conducted by my colleague over at fleet magazine CCJ, Editor Jason Cannon, for CCJ’s weekly video-centric 10-44 series of talks.

Cardenas is no stranger to the owner-operator world, with 11 years of truck ownership in his rearview before he joined up with Plus in his current role in 2018. His long experience begs the question, of course: Why would a career hauler get involved with a company that seems bent on the eventual removal of drivers from the steering wheel, maybe even the seat? It's complicated.

Hear more from Overdrive Radio: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio

Catch our final episode in the "Over the Road" series coproduction with PRX's Radiotopia, all about the hype around, and reality of, increasingly autonomous driving systems: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15064842/over-the-road-reality-creeps-toward-automated-future

Find CCJ's 10-44 series via the magazine's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPNPtn8aKWxAu-_f5e2zVsA3dmo5Yq8P4

Consider today's Overdrive Radio edition in the context of Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie’s reporting on the intermodal niche released a week and a half back, and the system-wide backlogs being experienced all around the container-moving supply chains, particularly evident at the nation’s West Coast ports. The feature was another entry in our "Niche Hauls" series of features on freight segments where owner-ops are in high demand: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15279445/intermodal-haulers-fight-off-a-system-collapse-at-ports

What we didn’t get in that three-part report was a perspective from among the top volume ports on the East Coast – for that, Overdrive Editor Todd Dills reached back to small fleet owner-operator George Berry, working out of the Port of Virginia principally. He’s a uniquely qualified source to voice owner-operators’ views on just where congestion issues at the ports originate. For years now he’s been a voice in a group called “For Truckers By Truckers” on social media around port and other intermodal drivers’ issues, and his small fleet leases with five owner-operators now out of Virginia. For Truckers By Truckers continues today as principally an intermodal informational source for drivers and owner-operators of all types: https://www.facebook.com/ForTruckersbyTruckers

Since the President of the United States raised port issues as a national concern almost two weeks ago, there’s been no small amount of finger-pointing to just who’s to blame among supply chain parties. Yet as George Berry tells it, the backlog issue is multifaceted, stressed by mismanaged sorting, pressure on intermodal haulers to pickup on the "last free day," a generalized, widespread shortage of chassis as they're tied up by various parties, and much, much more. Undue detention issues arise then at the warehouse receiving end more often than not if the hauler’s lucky enough to get an open chassis.

Yet among it all, there's good news for that common problem even in intermodal work, where "free" detention time is dwindling at receivers, and commonly low intermodal owner-operator revenue levels annually are rising. Berry estimates the current high-demand/relatively-shorter-supply situation could yield as much as a $50K revenue boost annually (or around 50%) for such operators.

Berry describes himself as a "California kid," and while his intermodal career has been centered in Virginia since early this century, he feels California's emissions regs and other restrictions have exacerbated ports' overload out West. That traces straight back to the California Air Resources Board’s Drayage and wider Truck & Bus rule restricting port operators and then the wider trucking community to running only newer-model-year vehicles. Those restrictions were put in place on pre-2007-emissions-spec engines serving the ports well before trucks running in the rest of the state, furthermore.

"They’ve kind of created this conundrum, in my opinion, on their own," he says in this podcast. "And when they say, 'You make it, you’re going to sit in it and stew," and that's basically what’s going to happen with Los Angeles/Long Beach."

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, a window on the narratives that emerged from the SHE Trucking Expo, where Overdrive Radio host and editor Todd Dills spent Day One of the conference speaking to attendees and organizers about goals of network-building within and outside of the minority-owned business community. Founded and spearheaded by Chattanooga-based longtime driver/owner-operator/SHE Trucking Facebook group founder Sharae Moore, the expo was not only diverse in terms of the backgrounds of people in attendance and participating. As Adam Wingfield, former owner-operator and current head of the Innovative Logistics Group consultancy, put it, Moore excelled in bring together a "diversity of thought" as well, no doubt.

The bulk of the podcast features an end-of-day discussion with these stakeholders, in addition to Wingfield, and all directly connected to Moore's efforts to build the Expo:

**Professional driver and trainer Shanna Sellers, Charlotte, North Carolina

**Pierre Laguerre, founder of Fleeting, Inc., Atlanta

**Tristen Simmons and Tawana Randall of the Leading Ladies of Logistix group, South Carolina, Atlanta

**Alix Burton of small fleet Good Energy Worldwide, Atlanta

**Sunny Vraitch, CFO of PrimeLink Express, Stockton, California

**Melanie Patterson, small fleet owner and proprietor at Team Integrity Knowledge Center, Chicago

Presentations by Wingfield and former NFL player and fleet/brokerage owner Thomas Johnson, of Memphis, are also featured.

What emerges ultimately is the importance to potential success of harnessing the power of community, of numbers, of basic teamwork of a kind.

Catch more scenes from the SHE Trucking Expo via this contemporaneous coverage of the September event: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/15114880/scenes-from-the-first-annual-she-trucking-expo

Heading up this Overdrive Radio special edition are the words and guitar of none other than Guy Archer, a professional driver with Airgas who’s on his way to Nashville early next month for the recording session that was the prize for his big win last month in the 2021 Overdrive/Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search.

In this edition of the podcast we give the podcast listeners the pleasure of running through the three Talent Search finalists’ excellent entries into that competition, this year having wrapped up its 8th year in existence. Before that, though, catch a window on a special program -- the gala awards presentation at the Truckload Carriers Association’s Truckload 2021 conference out in Las Vegas last week.

It features introductions to the Company Driver of the Year with Overdrive sister magazine Truckers News, and our own Owner-Operator of the Year. The convention center ballroom setting -- with a festive stage flanked by giant screens -- saw each contender telling parts of their stories, in their own words, reflecting on the difficulties imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year plus, and much more.

It’s a special program, ultimately, and one you're encouraged to take part in this year – the nomination period for owner-operator and company driver of the year is open now through October 25: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15114873/nomination-period-open-for-owneroperator-of-the-year-contest

Here's a big congrats to driver Betty Aragon and owner-operator Bryan Smith for their winning recognitions, and fellow finalists Dennis Cravener and owner-operators Glen Horack and Doug Schildgen. Read more about them all via http://overdriveonline.com/owner-operator-of-the-year

This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features an expansive discussion I had with longtime professional trucker Tom Kyrk about his involvement in the relatively new TNC Radio streaming station, gearing itself to speak directly to drivers -- predominantly but not entirely in trucking, as it were. As Kyrk tells, a sizable portion of the content tries to hit the intersection between pro four-wheeled drivers and all of you, Class 8 owners and drivers: https://tncradio.live/

Kyrk’s gotten involved interviewing guests and contributing in various ways after a decade and a half-plus trucking career, all of it as a company driver. As he tells in the beginning portion of today’s podcast, he spent 14 years with Stevens Transport before in recent years moving over in a team operation to IBI Secured Transport.

Also in the podcast: A bit of a public service announcement from Overdrive and the readership that’s directed to everybody’s four-wheeled friends about sharing the road -- at the very end. Here's a link to where that PSA originally aired: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/14897719/channel-onenine-special-from-over-the-road-drivers-ed

This edition of Overdrive Radio features the voice of an owner-operator you may well recognize – Debbie Desiderato, now principally out of Virginia, and sometimes Long Island, New York. She's had quite a year a half or so, moving to sell her long-running and quite recognizable Kenworth in 2020 in a turn back to hotshot car hauling for a time, before she capitalized on opportunity hauling in support of logging operations around her Virginia base with a used purchase of a 2017 Western Star 4900.

Less than a year after purchasing the rig, she’s now the recipient of a custom interior renovation by "Secret Celebrity Renovation" series star Jason Cameron. That was courtesy of the TransFix digital brokerage company after Desiderato won the TransFix My Rig sweepstakes, part of the company’s efforts to give back during National Truck Driver Appreciation week.

It’s a pretty spectacular upgrade, not only for a feature wall at the back of the sleeper with plenty of "wow" factor in it – in the conversation featured here between Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole and the owner-operator, Desiderato spends a good deal more time pointing out more purely functional additions. There's now a whole lot more cold storage space for food, for one. That comes with a real bottom line impact for the business, given the ability to better prep for cooking in the truck.

Read about Desiderato's brief 2020 turn to hotshot car hauling after trade-show freight she'd been hauling dried up with COVID: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/14897956/walkabout-transport-hotshot-as-refuge-from-the-pandemic

Also in the podcast:

FMCSA's last-week-promised answers to particular questions relative to the COVID-19 emergency declaration's hours of service waiver's now long existence. We've posted those answers in this post for last week's podcast with an update: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15114806/how-the-covid-hours-waiver-could-disentangle-hos-rigidity

Recently former Acting FMCSA Administrator Wiley Deck also offers his own perspective on the future likelihood (or not) of any tie between proven safety through data and increased hours of service flexibility.

Trucker Nation Director of Communications Andrea Marks is our guest for this edition of Overdrive Radio. Marks is no stranger to the regulatory process -- or the ins and out of running a small trucking business. She has livestock haulers in her family’s small fleet.

She's sharing here what she sees as a golden opportunity for hours of service flexibility advocates lying in plain view, in the form of the COVID-19 emergency declaration, waiving regs for emergency relief haulers of particular commodities since the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020.

There’s not just opportunity therein, though, but danger, given the September 1 changes to the emergency waiver seem to her to be designed to discourage use of the exemption and give regulators a way to control the narrative around its use. She wonders whether they anticipate a serious challenge to the efficacy of the hours of service rule itself.

Any serious challenge might depend on how many carriers are running under the exemption, and how often – a question we’ve been asking at Overdrive this week.

If you haven’t weighed in on your use of the COVID exemptions as yet, you can find the poll embedded in the post that houses this podcast here:

Also there, find responses to questions put directly to FMCSA that were promised at by end of day Friday the 16th by the agency -- early next week at the latest. Those questions:

1: What is the reasoning behind shifting the COVID-19 emergency and its waiver to exempting only the drive-time limits of the hours of service, and not the other regulations previously exempted?

2. With regard to the reporting requirement or ask of carriers – is it really a requirement or merely a voluntary ask?

3. What information exactly is being asked of carriers to report? Will FMCSA be requesting number of trips, specific logs of trips, or merely attestation that the declaration was relied on, period?

4: Has the agency considered examining crash rates of carriers who’ve used the declarations to date extensively versus other carriers who haven’t?

Andrea Marks truly believes that the COVID exemption could be hours flexibility advocates’ best chance to demonstrate the safety effectiveness of more permissive drive-time regulations, if only that data can be mustered.

Trucker Nation Director of Communications Andrea Marks is our guest for this edition of Overdrive Radio. Marks is no stranger to the regulatory process -- or the ins and out of running a small trucking business. She has livestock haulers in her family’s small fleet.

She's sharing here what she sees as a golden opportunity for hours of service flexibility advocates lying in plain view, in the form of the COVID-19 emergency declaration, waiving regs for emergency relief haulers of particular commodities since the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020.

There’s not just opportunity therein, though, but danger, given the September 1 changes to the emergency waiver seem to her to be designed to discourage use of the exemption and give regulators a way to control the narrative around its use. She wonders whether they anticipate a serious challenge to the efficacy of the hours of service rule itself.

Any serious challenge might depend on how many carriers are running under the exemption, and how often – a question we’ve been asking at Overdrive this week.

If you haven’t weighed in on your use of the COVID exemptions as yet, you can find the poll embedded in the post that houses this podcast here:

Also there, find responses to questions put directly to FMCSA that were promised at by end of day Friday the 16th by the agency -- early next week at the latest. Those questions:

1: What is the reasoning behind shifting the COVID-19 emergency and its waiver to exempting only the drive-time limits of the hours of service, and not the other regulations previously exempted?

2. With regard to the reporting requirement or ask of carriers – is it really a requirement or merely a voluntary ask?

3. What information exactly is being asked of carriers to report? Will FMCSA be requesting number of trips, specific logs of trips, or merely attestation that the declaration was relied on, period?

4: Has the agency considered examining crash rates of carriers who’ve used the declarations to date extensively versus other carriers who haven’t?

Andrea Marks truly believes that the COVID exemption could be hours flexibility advocates’ best chance to demonstrate the safety effectiveness of more permissive drive-time regulations, if only that data can be mustered.