Happy Birthday, Self

Incredibly, I’ve spent a third of my life with you guys. A full third. Nearly half if you count my previous trucking incarnations before a few of us launched Today’s Trucking — and came to know the true meaning of work.

It’s gone by like a flash, if you’ll pardon the cliché. A fun flash, mind you, full of all the things that make a job worth doing, not least of which is the great bunch of people that I do it for. You lot.

I rise to this level of heightened nostalgia because this is my magazine’s 20th anniversary. We’ll save the big splash for number 25 — a quarter century sounds so much better than a fifth — but I didn’t want to let this one go without a little bit of fanfare.

It was the July/August issue of 1987 that saw the birth of Today’s Trucking, an inauspicious beginning as they say. I slaved for weeks and weeks getting it ready, never having created a magazine from scratch before. Let alone a business. Along with my partners in that fledgling enterprise, I had the concept down pat but the execution… well, let’s just say that what you’re holding in your hands right now is a lot better in every respect. We learned a few things along the way, you see.

But as much as I’m congratulating myself and my partners and colleagues here, I’m also lifting a glass to all of you for hanging in. It’s actually amazing how many people and companies have lasted the whole stretch, 20 years and longer.

Back in 1987 we had yet to see the wonders of deregulation that launched about a zillion new trucking enterprises, almost all of them truckload operations. Many had ‘gypsy’ roots and were marked by extreme flexibility, a keen understanding of the market, and a wily approach to attracting freight. Quite a few were run by very smart people who now lead the industry.

As an aside, I find it very odd that many of those same folks who flourished because the entry-control rules were lifted are now prepared to entertain the intrusion of government in terms of mandatory speed limiters. As ideas go, this may be the worst one I’ve seen in all my trucking years. In my humble opinion, mine alone, it flies so squarely in the face of common sense that even some civilians I come across — including women who drive Volvos and are scared of trucks — ask me what the heck’s up with that? They don’t get it either.

But back to the real topic here, in 1987 we had also yet to see free trade and its huge implications. Really, ‘huge’ is too small a word to apply here and I don’t know one that’s big enough. Along with the shrinking Canuck buck, it brought opportunities galore for Canadian manufacturers and carriers alike, though the recent rise of the loonie is destroying those opportunities even while the border remains open to us. Mostly open, anyway.

Speaking of the border, I was recently extended an invitation by the Ambassador Bridge’s owner, the Detroit International Bridge Company — by way of its president Dan Stamper. He wanted to tell his side of the everlasting debate about how best to get trucks and cars across the river, and I sure wanted to hear it after many years of trouble getting him to answer the phone. So there’s his twin-the-Ambassador project, already begun, and there’s another plan slowly forming to build a publicly owned bridge a mile downriver. It’s really quite a mess, politically speaking, but I won’t get into that here.

The point I wanted to make is that truck traffic across the bridge ballooned after NAFTA. It’s been shrinking in the aftermath of 9/11 and the high-priced loonie has torn some away as well, but the numbers are interesting — total bridge traffic peaked at just over six million vehicles before free trade but doubled to 12.5 million 12 years later in 2000. Most of that huge growth was trucks. Last year traffic had dropped to 9.5 million.

There’s another numbers theme that’s persisted throughout the 20 years I’ve been sitting in this editorial chair, namely freight rates. As deregulation hit and power was transferred from carrier to shipper, we found cut-throat competition like we’d never seen before. Rates plummeted. Many outfits didn’t know how to respond and they died. Many others flourished, all the while complaining that rates had to be made compensatory. A couple of years ago, quite rightly, industry leaders started charging for wait time and the like and claimed they were going to get a decent rate or drop the contract altogether.

It seems the tune has changed. The rate-cutting is back in full swing by all accounts, and I don’t think it bodes well. I understand why it’s happening, of course. But when a specialized load at $5.00 a mile is ‘stolen’ by another carrier for $2.75 — at which rate a profit can’t be made, I’m told by the ‘victim’ here — then I wonder if we’ll ever succeed in digging ourselves out of this rate ditch.

That sour note notwithstanding, I look forward to the next 20 years. Well, hold on here, let’s call it five and see where we are.