Every year, the same thing happens. Shippers lock in Q4 freight plans in September or October, assuming the market will look roughly the way it looked when they last checked. Some years, that works out fine. This year, that assumption is likely to be expensive.
The capacity picture in intermodal drayage and over-the-road freight is changing — not because freight demand has suddenly surged, but because the supply side of the market is contracting. Understanding why matters, because it changes what you should be doing right now.
The Market Is Tightening From the Supply Side
When most shippers think about capacity crunches, they picture a spike in demand — peak season volume, a port disruption, an inventory surge. What’s happening now is different.
Carrier capacity is leaving the market.
New carrier authority applications are declining. Fleet counts are falling. Enforcement action targeting non-compliant operators — carriers running with improper licensing, gray-area employment structures, and cost structures that only work when corners are being cut — is pulling trucks off the road. These weren’t the carriers you’d want handling your freight anyway, but they were absorbing market volume and keeping rate pressure down. As they exit, that buffer disappears.
Dry van load-to-truck ratios have been trending higher on a year-over-year basis. Intermodal drayage is not immune to those dynamics — the same driver pool, the same equipment market, the same structural pressures apply across modes.
This is a supply-side correction. It moves differently from a demand spike, and it doesn’t reverse quickly.
Why October Is Too Late
The traditional procurement calendar wasn’t built for a market that moves this fast.
Annual RFQs lock in rates at a moment in time. When the market shifts between the time you set your rates and the time you need capacity — and in the current environment, it is shifting — the rates on your spreadsheet may no longer reflect what it actually costs a carrier to move your freight. When that gap widens enough, carriers prioritize freight that pays closer to market rates. Yours waits.
By October, Q4 capacity commitments are largely spoken for. The shippers who secured relationships and confirmed capacity in August and September are the ones whose freight moves on schedule in November and December. The ones who waited are working the spot market at whatever rate the market sets — which, in a tightening supply environment, is rarely favorable.
This isn’t a theoretical risk. It’s the pattern that plays out in tightening markets, and the current market is exhibiting the conditions that precede it.
What This Means for Landed Cost
Procurement teams tend to evaluate freight cost at the line-haul level. That’s where the comparison is clean and the spreadsheet sorts easily. But when capacity is tight, and a carrier can’t fully cover your freight, the costs that don’t show up in the line-haul rate start to accumulate fast.
Rolled cargo means delayed delivery — and delayed delivery carries its own cost in customer commitments, inventory buffers, and production schedules. Emergency spot freight is expensive. Per diem and rail storage charges accumulate while you’re waiting for a carrier who said they had capacity to find a truck. These aren’t hypothetical risks. They’re the predictable consequence of entering a tightening market without confirmed capacity.
The landed cost of “waiting to see what October looks like” tends to be higher than securing freight now.
What Shippers Should Do
The practical response isn’t complicated, but it requires acting before it feels urgent — which is precisely when it doesn’t feel necessary.
A few things worth doing now:
Confirm your Q4 capacity. Don’t assume your carrier relationship automatically translates into confirmed truck availability in November and December. Have an explicit conversation. Know what’s committed and what’s aspirational.
Revisit rates if the market has moved. If your current rates were set months ago against a different market, they may not be generating the coverage you expect. A secondary RFQ isn’t a sign the first one failed — it’s a sign you’re paying attention to how the market actually works.
Think about which freight has to move on time. Not all Q4 volume carries the same consequences if it’s delayed. Identify the freight where timing is critical — time-sensitive imports, holiday inventory, agricultural exports with hard cut dates — and prioritize confirmed carrier capacity for those lanes specifically.
Know your carrier’s actual capacity. A carrier relationship means something different depending on whether that carrier owns trucks or coordinates them. In a tight market, asset-based carriers have more tools to protect committed freight. Knowing what you’re working with matters before the pressure is on.
The Mark-it Perspective
We operate roughly 200 trucks across terminals in Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, and Indianapolis. We’re not immune to market dynamics — no carrier is — but the way we’re built gives us more ability to absorb them.
When capacity tightens, organizational structure matters. Dispatch, operations, and customer service working as integrated functions — not one person managing all three out of a small yard — means we have the bandwidth to protect our committed customers when the market gets difficult. We know what it costs to run a truck. We price accordingly. And we don’t play games with rates when things get tight, because the relationship we’re building is more valuable than the margin we could squeeze out of a bad market.
If your Q4 drayage capacity isn’t confirmed, this is a good time to have that conversation — before October, when the options narrow and the leverage shifts.
We’re easy to reach. That’s kind of the point.