Truckers, firms shift to compete

It was not a job his dad could brag about to his friends. There wouldn’t be a white-picket fence or neighborhood barbecues. If he had children, he wouldn’t be there when they took their first steps.

But at 20 years old, Donald Cook didn’t care.

He wanted to be a truck driver. He wanted to live life truck-stop-to-truck-stop and put his eyes on all the country in between.

“It was up to me. I had control, said Mr. Cook, a driver for J.B. Hunt out of Jacksonville, Florida. “I was drawn to the coast-to-coast (drive), the traveling.”

Thirty years later, Mr. Cook, now 50, sat in a musty drivers’ lounge off Interstate 85 in Greenville, S.C., and spoke about lost miles. In the last six months, his familiar 2,800-mile to 3,100-mile cross-country routes have been shortened by more than 1,000 miles and his paycheck is less than what he earned 15 years ago.

“I have lost all the love I had for trucking,” he said. “I am sick of it. You are not seeing the U.S. like you used to.”

Trucking companies today, faced with record high fuel prices, a slowing economy and a shift in freight patterns and regulations, are scrambling to survive. Thousands of trucking companies have declared bankruptcy already this year and others are cutting hundreds of miles from drivers. Cross-continental truck drivers such as Mr. Cook are watching their numbers dwindle.

The economic storms rocking the trucking industry also are reshaping two of the nation’s biggest long-haul companies — Chattanooga -based U.S. Xpress and Covenant Transportation Group.

“You had the most perfect storm that could have ever been created. It has just been a compounding over and over and over again,” said Lana Batts, former president of the Truckload Carriers Association and managing partner with Transport Capitol Partners, a mergers and acquisitions company.

THE PERFECT STORM

Nearly 1,000 trucking companies declared bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2008, and another 2,000 to 3,000 are expected to either go bankrupt or teeter on the edge of bankruptcy in this year’s second quarter, Ms. Batts said.

The industry has seen its way through many ups and downs, but few trucking executives have seen worse times, said Pat Quinn, co-chairman of U.S. Xpress. Complete Story.......