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How to Cover Hard Lanes When Truckload Capacity Is Tight

How to Cover Hard Lanes When Truckload Capacity Is Tight

You know the lanes. The rural pickup that never has a truck nearby. The one-way run where carriers can’t find a load back. The flatbed shipment that sits while the spot quote climbs.

A year ago, those lanes were a nuisance. Now, with truckload capacity shrinking, they’re the loads that keep logistics managers up at night. One rejected tender can turn into a missed delivery, a line-down call, or an expensive spot load.

You’re not doing anything wrong. The market changed. Here’s what’s happening and how you can keep your hardest lanes covered.

Trucks are leaving the market

The freight hasn’t gone anywhere. The trucks have.

Fuel is squeezing carriers out. Diesel is above $6 a gallon, and fuel has passed driver pay as the biggest cost for many fleets. (Our November freight market update breaks down the numbers.) Carriers whose rates can’t keep up are parking trucks or leaving.

Enforcement is taking drivers off the road. Stricter English-proficiency and CDL enforcement is removing drivers from service. In a single 48-hour enforcement blitz in Arkansas, 393 drivers and trucks were placed out of service, 183 of them for English-language proficiency violations. A separate 15-state operation led to the arrest of more than 40 CDL holders.

Even large fleets are shrinking. Covenant’s average truckload fleet fell 8.9% from a year earlier in the third quarter, according to FreightWaves. PAMT reported its 12th straight quarter of truckload operating losses.

Fewer trucks chasing the same freight means carriers can be choosy. Easy lanes still get covered. Hard lanes are the first to feel it.

Why some hard lanes stay covered anyway

You’d expect coverage to suffer in a market like this. At RJ Logistics, it’s moving the other way.

“You would think with the maps as red as this… that our coverage numbers would be suffering. They’re not. In fact, they’re getting better,” said Tyler Franks, Director of Revenue & Strategy at RJ Logistics. “So that’s just further evidence that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing and getting better.”

(The “red maps” are freight market heat maps, where red marks the markets with the fewest available trucks.)

The difference isn’t luck. It’s relationships, built carrier by carrier and lane by lane. Here’s what that looks like day to day.

Carriers who commit to the tough lanes. “[Our team] has a lot of good carriers dedicated to tougher lanes, and they’re holding their rates,” said Connor Heflin, Account Manager at RJ Logistics. For a shipper, that means a steadier price and a truck that shows up, even when the spot market jumps.

Daily work on the lanes nobody wants. Hard lanes don’t get solved once. They get worked every day. Connor pointed to one example, a run from Three Rivers, Michigan to Louisville, Kentucky: “That’s always been more of a struggle one lately. He’s been looking for winners every day this week.” In freight terms, a “winner” is a carrier who fits the lane and will run it again.

Clean handoffs, so coverage doesn’t stall. When someone on the team is out, their carrier contacts and lane notes get passed to a teammate. Connor described one of those handoffs: “[He] made it really easy with your pass-down to get his carriers on our loads. So we’re not scrambling for coverage.” Your freight shouldn’t depend on one person being at their desk.

5 ways to keep your hard lanes covered

  1. Name your hard lanes. Tell your freight partner which lanes have struggled and why. A known problem lane can be planned for. A surprise one goes to the spot market.
  2. Offer consistency. Steady volume and predictable tender times give carriers a reason to commit to a lane. Random, last-minute loads don’t.
  3. Be easy to load. Quick dock times, flexible appointments and clear instructions get noticed. Carriers remember the shippers who don’t hold them for hours, and they come back.
  4. Price the lane for the market you’re in. A rate set below today’s market gets rejected. The load then lands on the spot market at a higher price, or doesn’t move at all.
  5. Work with a partner who covers lanes, not just loads. Look for a team that knows its carriers by name, works your hard lanes daily, and hands off cleanly when someone is out.

Your hard lanes, covered

Tight capacity doesn’t have to mean missed pickups. Your dedicated RJ Logistics team builds carrier relationships around your toughest lanes, whether you ship dry van and reefer truckload or flatbed and heavy haul.

Have a lane that keeps giving you trouble? Request a quote and tell us about it. We’ll show you how we’d cover it.

Carriers: looking for consistent freight on lanes like these? Join our carrier network.

LinkedIn caption

Every shipper has that one lane. The rural pickup, the one-way run, the flatbed load that sits while the spot quote climbs. With fuel costs and enforcement pulling trucks off the road, those lanes are harder to cover than ever. Here’s what keeps them moving, and five things you can do this week.

The market got tighter. Our coverage got better. Here’s why.

[link to post]

Before publishing

  • Tyler Franks and Connor Heflin approve their quotes
  • Publish Blog 1 first. This post links to its slug (/freight-market-update-november-2026/); update the link if the slug changes
  • Re-verify the Arkansas, 15-state and PAMT figures by opening those three links. I couldn’t open them today, so the numbers come from the idea bank’s Nov. 2–3 check
  • Upload team confirms all 10 links open (5 sources, 5 RJ pages)
  • Add featured image and alt text from the SEO package

Editing note: I left out Connor’s “break-even winners” line because “break-even” points to margin, which we don’t share publicly. I also kept Jake’s name out of the quote; the lane example carries the point without it.

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