Truck capacity isn’t vanishing — it’s moving toward whichever mode and lane pays best this month. Drayage, flatbed, reefer, over-the-road: they all draw from the same driver pool, and that pool follows the money. For shippers, the effect can appear to be a shortage even when there isn’t one.
That’s the diagnosis. Here’s the part that actually matters: what to do about it.
What This Means Practically
A rate you locked in at the beginning of the year reflected the market at the beginning of the year. If the capacity landscape has shifted since then — and in intermodal drayage, it often does — that rate may no longer support the level of service you’re expecting.
This is worth understanding before it becomes a service problem rather than after.
One practical response: if your initial RFQ rates are no longer generating the carrier coverage you need, a secondary RFQ may be warranted — not as an admission that the first one was wrong, but as an acknowledgment that the market has moved. Waiting for annual renewal to address a coverage gap that exists today is a choice, but it carries real cost. A rolled load doesn’t just cost a day. It costs expedited fees, missed delivery windows, and the kind of scrambling that adds real dollars to your landed cost — well beyond whatever number sits on the original rate confirmation.
Why Scale Matters Here
Not every carrier is equally exposed to this kind of market movement — and that’s where organizational structure starts to matter more than it might in a normal market.
Smaller carriers — and in intermodal drayage, the vast majority of carriers are small, with FMCSA data showing 99% of registered motor carriers operating fewer than 50 trucks — have limited flexibility when capacity gets tight. When a better-paying opportunity pulls a driver or owner-operator in another direction, a small carrier may not have the bench depth to absorb that. Their coverage thins. Their customers feel it.
Larger, more structured operations have more bandwidth to absorb cyclical fluctuation. Dispatch, customer service, and operations working as integrated functions — rather than one person managing all three — means there are more hands on the problem when the market gets difficult. It means capacity decisions can be made strategically rather than reactively.
At Mark-it Express, we operate roughly 200 trucks across terminals in Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, and Indianapolis. That scale doesn’t make us immune to market forces — no carrier is — but it gives us more tools to manage them. It also means we can standardize the things that make a multi-market relationship easier to manage: consistent technology, billing procedures, and points of contact across every terminal, so you’re not relearning how to work with us city by city. And when something needs a decision fast, it’s not stuck in a queue — leadership is accessible and involved in the accounts that matter, not buffered behind layers of account management.
The Reset Is the New Normal
The capacity reshuffling happening across transportation modes right now isn’t a temporary anomaly waiting to correct itself. It reflects something more durable: a transportation market where the competition for drivers and equipment across sectors is ongoing, where rates respond faster than annual procurement cycles, and where the carriers best positioned to help shippers are the ones built to handle the ebbs and flows — not just the easy markets.
That doesn’t mean freight can’t move. It means the shippers who stay ahead of it are the ones who understand what’s actually happening, who they’re working with, and whether their carrier has the structure to keep them covered when the chairs start moving.
If you’re not sure whether your current drayage carrier has the capacity to protect your freight in a tighter market, that’s a conversation worth having before you need it — not during the scramble.
We’re happy to be part of that conversation.