Key Currency Exchange Rates for Friday, 1/19/24

National Average Price for Regular – Current: $2.541; Month Ago: $2.601; Year Ago: $2.318. National Average Price for Diesel – Current: $2.954; Month Ago: $2.992; Year Ago: $2.524.

American Trucking Associations’ advanced seasonally adjusted (SA) For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index rose 0.7% in January after increasing 1% in December. In January, the index equaled 117.1 (2015=100) compared with 116.2 in December. ATA recently revised the seasonally adjusted index back five years as part of its annual revision. “Tonnage has increased nicely in the last couple of months,” said ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello. “I suspect that some of the gain is attributable to capacity coming out of the network, especially those carriers that primarily operate in the spot market and/or bought expensive used equipment in the last couple of years. This would push more freight to contract carriers, which dominate this index. "It could also be that freight bottomed and is coming up a little too. So, the gain is likely a little higher demand and a little less supply. Despite the increases in December and January, tonnage is still off 1.4% from its recent high in September," Costello said.

Coyote Logistics, a leading global third-party logistics (3PL) provider, expanded its Dynamic Route Optimization program that aims to streamline supply chain operations and reduce uncertainty for carriers by maximizing the efficiency of their fleets and delivering load consistency through optimized weekly routing plans. Dynamic Route Optimization builds suggested weekly route plans that optimally direct drivers to and from their domicile location by taking numerous parameters into account, including drivers’ hours provided by the carrier, load attributes, average load and unload times, market cost, mile per hour bands by region, home base city, among others and layering them over Coyote’s open and available loads.