Insights
Articles for brokers who'd rather have the data than the pitch.
Evergreen pieces on broker operations, surety filings, FMCSA data, and the parts of the industry that don't get written about because they don't trend.
The Biggest Carriers You've Never Heard Of Aren't Trucking Companies
Sort the FMCSA fleet-growth winners 2022–2026 and the top is dominated by equipment rental, waste, ag distribution, and big-tech logistics — not household-name carriers. HERC Rentals added 7,600 trucks. J.B. Hunt was flat.
81% of the Brokers Who Boomed During COVID Are Gone
Cohort survival analysis of every FMCSA broker authority granted 2014–2022. The 2021 entrants had a 19% survival rate. The 2014 entrants had 77%. The boom killed brokers, not carriers — and the total count obscures the meat grinder underneath.
Truckers Hate NY, NJ, and Boston. They Aren't on the FMCSA Map.
Boston isn't in the top-50 FMCSA freight-forwarder cities. NYC isn't top-10. Texas has four times the brokers of New York with the same population. Either freight is wildly misallocated, or the data measures something different than what most readers assume.
Brokers Boomed and Busted. Carriers Tripled. Freight Forwarders Didn't Move.
Chart FMCSA authority counts from 1990 to 2026 and three lines tell familiar stories. The fourth — freight forwarders — is mostly flat. The pandemic boom that produced 100K new carrier grants in a year produced almost no movement in FFs. The reason is land.
220,000 'Active Carriers' in the FMCSA Database Have One Truck or Fewer
Eagle Express Lines had 2,152 trucks in 2022. They have 1 today. FMCSA still calls them active. Walking the database surfaces a population of ~220K shell carriers whose DOTs are alive on paper only — and the reasons they don't die matter.
The #1 US Land Port You've Never Heard Of
Laredo, Texas — population 256,000 — has the second-highest absolute concentration of active freight forwarders in the US and nine times the density of Los Angeles. The infrastructure built around the Mexico land border is freight geography most analysts miss.
The Trucking Insurance Gap Doesn't Exist — Here's Where the Real Gap Is
99.5% of active US motor carriers carry the BIPD coverage they're required to. The insurance fragility everyone should be talking about is on the broker side — a $75,000 bond unchanged since 2013, getting pro-rated 5 cents on the dollar across defrauded shippers and carriers.
One Wyoming Address, Eight Lost Brokers, One Survivor: Anatomy of a Chameleon Pattern
Eight broker LLCs lost their FMCSA authority between 2022 and 2026 at one Wyoming registered-agent address. One sibling at the same address is still active. FMCSA's chameleon flag caught zero of them.