Trucking sector continued slow recovery in June

After two years of freight recession conditions, the U.S. trucking sector in June continued to claw back ground as the freight market slowly becomes more balanced, according to a report from transportation analyst firm FTR.

FTR’s Shippers Conditions Index (SCI) for June fell to 0.3 from the May reading of 4.5 as moderating fuel costs kept the index out of marginally negative territory. Looking into future months, FTR’s SCI forecast is for a prolonged phase of near-neutral readings, indicating a mostly balanced freight market between shippers and carriers.

“The days of consistently favorable freight market conditions for shippers are over, but the market does not really look tough for them, either,” Avery Vise, FTR’s vice president of trucking, said in a release. “Over the forecast horizon, we do not expect the market to be even remotely as challenging as the one that shippers endured from late 2020 through mid-2022, and shippers might even fare better than they anticipate. The biggest wild card in the near term probably is the cost of fuel.”

The SCI tracks the changes representing four major conditions in the U.S. full-load freight market: freight demand, freight rates, fleet capacity, and fuel price. Those individual metrics are combined into a single index number that shows good, optimistic conditions when positive and bad, pessimistic conditions when negative.