Truckers Hate NY, NJ, and Boston. They Aren't on the FMCSA Map.

The puzzle

Ask any driver with five years on the road which US cities they hate working. New York metro. North Jersey. Boston. The traffic is dense, the receivers are hostile, the streets weren’t designed for trucks, the parking is illegal everywhere, and the fuel is expensive. Drivers who can avoid the Northeast do.

So you’d expect the FMCSA freight industry to be heavily based there, right? That’s where the freight goes. That’s where the population is. That’s where the receivers are.

Pull the FMCSA database. Boston isn’t in the top-50 cities for active freight forwarders. NYC isn’t in the top-10. New Jersey’s biggest freight city (Newark, with 23 active FFs) is barely on the chart. Texas, by contrast, has six cities in the top-20. New York State has 672 freight forwarders. Texas has 1,279 — nearly twice as many — despite roughly the same population.

Either the freight industry is wildly misallocated (unlikely), or the FMCSA data is measuring something different than what most people think it is. The second one is what’s actually going on.

The state-level totals

State	Active FFs	Active Brokers	Active Carriers
TX	1,279	14,151	173,229
CA	1,207	11,292	311,326
FL	954	10,253	141,778
NY	672	3,424	122,934
GA	608	6,676	98,579
NJ	540	3,282	44,455
PA	367	3,054	76,793
IL	366	5,878	48,558
MA	363	1,181	37,300

Look at NY and TX side by side. TX has 4x as many brokers as NY. NY has 28 million people. TX has 30 million. The populations are comparable, the consumer-spending levels are comparable, the freight demand is comparable. The broker count is not.

What FMCSA actually measures

The FMCSA database tracks supply of trucking capacity — who is licensed to haul, where they’re physically based, who can be hired to move a load. It does NOT track where the freight actually goes, what got delivered, or which consumer market received it. Those are different questions answered by different datasets (BOL data, customs records, shipper surveys).

So when you see “1,279 active freight forwarders in Texas,” that means 1,279 freight forwarders are headquartered in Texas. It doesn’t mean Texas is where 1,279 forwarders’ worth of freight gets delivered. Those forwarders are dispatching freight to all 50 states, plus Mexico and Canada. The destination of their cargo isn’t in the data.

Similarly, “672 freight forwarders in New York” means 672 FFs have NY mailing addresses. The freight industry that serves New York is much larger than that — it’s everyone in TX, CA, GA, FL, and the rest of the country who has dispatch capacity into the Northeast. NY doesn’t have to host the carriers in order to receive their loads.

Why this happens structurally

Freight tends to be dispatched from the supply side, not the demand side. A pharmaceutical shipment from a manufacturing plant in Indiana to a hospital in Manhattan is booked by an Indiana broker, hauled by an Indiana-or-Ohio carrier, and consolidated by an Indiana FF. The Manhattan receiver doesn’t dispatch the load — they just receive it. From an FMCSA perspective, none of the entities involved show up in New York’s count.

This is true for most US freight. The Northeast is heavily a consumption / destination market — high population density, expensive land, regulated zoning, no manufacturing base to speak of relative to size. The Sunbelt (TX/CA/FL/GA) and the central states (IN/IL/OH) are heavily origin / production markets — manufacturing, ports, intermodal hubs, ag. Capacity gets built where production is.

There’s also a fragmentation issue specifically with NYC. The five boroughs report separately in FMCSA data: Brooklyn (44 FFs), Manhattan (36), Bronx (28), Queens via Jamaica and Flushing (38), Staten Island (16) — plus port-adjacent NJ cities Newark (23), Elizabeth (14), Paterson (11). Aggregated, NYC + immediate NJ port area has roughly 210 active FFs, which would slot at #2 nationally between Houston and Laredo. The administrative geography is hiding what the metro actually has.

What to do with this insight

A few practical takeaways:

1. Don’t read “carrier-count by state” as a freight-demand indicator. It’s a dispatch-supply indicator. Trade press regularly conflates the two.

2. Shipper sourcing of inbound capacity should look elsewhere. If you’re a New Jersey shipper trying to source carriers for inbound product, looking at NJ-based carriers is the wrong filter. Look at TX/GA/IL/CA carriers who have proven dispatch capacity into NJ. The capacity that actually shows up at your dock is mostly coming from out of state.

3. State and city policy levers on freight are weaker than they look. New York City can’t reduce truck traffic by regulating “NYC’s trucking industry” because the trucking industry causing the traffic isn’t headquartered there. Restrictions on local carriers don’t catch the inbound capacity from Texas. Real levers (congestion pricing, time-of-day restrictions, dedicated truck routes) affect the trucks regardless of where they’re based.

4. Anyone building freight analytics needs to label which direction the data flows. “Top 10 freight cities” in an FMCSA report means top-10 by origin. The top-10 by destination would be a completely different list — and we don’t have that data in any FMCSA table.

The FMCSA dataset is a phenomenal record of the trucking industry as a supply phenomenon. It is not a record of the freight economy as a whole. Confusing those two leads to most of the wrong conclusions the industry’s analytics consumers reach.

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Receipts: State-level totals computed from FMCSA.dbo.CompanyCensus filtered for PHY_COUNTRY='US', IsActive=1, and IsDeletedAt IS NULL. Borough fragmentation observed in city-level FF count aggregation.