This edition features a talk with Generations Express independent owner-operator Bryan Hutchens, and we’ll get to how he feels about the hours of service changes released just yesterday and set to go into effect es early as September. Regular listeners and Overdrive readers may well remember Hutchens from an organizing role he assumed with others around last year’s That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C. outreach effort on the National Mall in October. The last couple of months, he’s seen business slow down a good bit, as have so many, and sold the business’s second truck, a 2007 model, early in the pandemic period, reducing costs. His insurance renewal came up, too, and his agent was able to shop coverage around and found insurers rather aggressively competing with each other – he got a substantial reduction, so maybe, just maybe there’s a bright spot in all this. The owner-operator spent parts of Tuesday and Wednesday this week in D.C. with his 1996 Peterbilt 379 and 53-foot step deck parked with the assembled, he guesses, more than 100 trucks and probably double that of drivers and, in some cases, their families. Wednesday, notably, after Hutchens departed to pick up a load to take him back to his home base in Oklahoma, the group in D.C. was paid a visit by former North Carolina congressman Mark Meadows, President Trump’s Chief of Staff, and his security detail. As we reported yesterday at OverdriveOnline.com, Meadows pledged dialogue to continue, and insisted they had the administration’s attention on rates and transparency issues – though he stressed the reality, that, well, the entire country is hurting right now.

Owner-operators Daniel and Phyllis Snow have been off the road refusing to run at a loss for going on a month now as rates and available freight volumes have fallen. The crisis spurred by the COVID-19 coronavirus' spread, though, comes after a rough year of its own. To put everything in context, Daniel says, on the same miles run in 2019, the Snows were able to gross only around 60 percent of revenue they brought in 2013. Market deterioration has been the rule the past year, and they're not the only independent owner-op carriers who feel like the spot market is just broken. The pair have been in spend-reduction mode as they try to hold on for some return.

Owner-operators Daniel and Phyllis Snow have been off the road refusing to run at a loss for going on a month now as rates and available freight volumes have fallen. The crisis spurred by the COVID-19 coronavirus' spread, though, comes after a rough year of its own. To put everything in context, Daniel says, on the same miles run in 2019, the Snows were able to gross only around 60 percent of revenue they brought in 2013. Market deterioration has been the rule the past year, and they're not the only independent owner-op carriers who feel like the spot market is just broken. The pair have been in spend-reduction mode as they try to hold on for some return.

Questionable offer of easy money 'without asking for any business equity' by Overdrive

Questionable offer of easy money 'without asking for any business equity' by overdriveradio

In what has been perhaps the toughest week for trucking as an owner-operator in the last decade, this edition of Overdrive Radio offers some diversion via an interview with Haley Fohr of Chicago-based "Jackie Lynn," whose new record proceeds from a conception of the character for whom the band is named as a long-hauler with a particularly spectacular rig -- a mirrored vessel that carries the weight of the world it inhabits. The record, called "Jacqueline," is the group's second, among Fohr's other songwriting/performing projects. Also: Our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer offers two of his pensive, funny, and sometimes moving dispatches from the COVID-19 road, happy for the grocery, food and beverage loads but facing near impossible decisions in other ways ...

In what has been perhaps the toughest week for trucking as an owner-operator in the last decade, this edition of Overdrive Radio offers some diversion via an interview with Haley Fohr of Chicago-based "Jackie Lynn," whose new record proceeds from a conception of the character for whom the band is named as a long-hauler with a particularly spectacular rig -- a mirrored vessel that carries the weight of the world it inhabits. The record, called "Jacqueline," is the group's second, among Fohr's other songwriting/performing projects. Also: Our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer offers two of his pensive, funny, and sometimes moving dispatches from the COVID-19 road, happy for the grocery, food and beverage loads but facing near impossible decisions in other ways ...

Nearing the end of the first week of the SBA disaster-assistance loan programs available to owner-operators, insight in this Overdrive Radio edition from longtime owner-operator and now trucking-business coach Gary Buchs. In a time like this, look ahead to the relationships that you need to establish -- whether with a health-care provider, a broker or shipper customer, and indeed as Buchs suggests, a bank … those relationships you’ll need to be able to leverage when times get tough again. If you don’t have those relationships now, there’s no time like the present to establish them. You may not be able to meet face to face with your banker in the right here, right now, but pick up the phone and get things start. More detail here on both the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Disaster Injury loans, variously forgiveable, now standing up and available.

Nearing the end of the first week of the SBA disaster-assistance loan programs available to owner-operators, insight in this Overdrive Radio edition from longtime owner-operator and now trucking-business coach Gary Buchs. In a time like this, look ahead to the relationships that you need to establish -- whether with a health-care provider, a broker or shipper customer, and indeed as Buchs suggests, a bank … those relationships you’ll need to be able to leverage when times get tough again. If you don’t have those relationships now, there’s no time like the present to establish them. You may not be able to meet face to face with your banker in the right here, right now, but pick up the phone and get things start. More detail here on both the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Disaster Injury loans, variously forgiveable, now standing up and available.

Nearing the end of the first week of the SBA disaster-assistance loan programs available to owner-operators, insight in this Overdrive Radio edition from longtime owner-operator and now trucking-business coach Gary Buchs. In a time like this, look ahead to the relationships that you need to establish -- whether with a health-care provider, a broker or shipper customer, and indeed as Buchs suggests, a bank … those relationships you’ll need to be able to leverage when times get tough again. If you don’t have those relationships now, there’s no time like the present to establish them. You may not be able to meet face to face with your banker in the right here, right now, but pick up the phone and get things start. More detail here on both the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Disaster Injury loans, variously forgiveable, now standing up and available.