Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
> Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs.
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.
Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these.
Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.
Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.
What does this have to do with internalizing costs to businesses? By your logic, the government should just subsidize all consumer goods... Which, okay maybe I actually agree with you? (Jk I'm not that much of a socialist. I think markets are great, and we should leverage them by fully pricing externalities like road damage or pollution, enabling the market to solve some of our big problems)
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
If the costs of trucking is internalized, it then factors into the cost of goods shipped by truck. This makes it possible for competitors like rail or local produce to complete, which then allows consumers to save money. On the other hand, if the cost is externalized, we secretly pay more without even having the possibility of paying less.
The annual net profit of the trucking industry in the USA is $30-$40 billion dollars. They aren’t scraping by and could certainly pay for their proportion of the damage trucks inflict on roads.
It is NOT the profits of trucking industry, the trucking industry will remain intact and fine. It is the profits of ALL the companies using trucking, they get to upgrade their businesses with the new model. And the innovative businesses which figure out how to do logistics better will survice.
This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich?
It might be more economical for cargo to be moved by other means or for many people to live closer together than they do.
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
So should we then makes buses also pay their fare share? I know you will then respond with second-order effects of buses and public transportation without considering that for trucks.
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
I did a quick check to see how unusual this is. According to LLM-assisted research on actual U.S. trucking companies filing Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 (rather than carriers simply shutting down) the number isn't especially remarkable.
16 trucking bankruptcies in 30 days looks elevated, but it's not unprecedented. FreightWaves counted more than 20 trucking-related Chapter 7/11 filings in another 30-day period earlier in 2026, while previous downturns have produced much larger waves of failures.
What's happening here is that a sudden cost shock (like a diesel price spike) is probably clustering failures that might otherwise have been spread over several months. So 16 filings in a month may say something about timing, but by itself doesn't seem strong evidence of an extraordinary increase in the underlying rate of trucking bankruptcies.
That isn't to say higher fuel costs are a non-event; clearly they're bad for an industry already operating on thin margins. But we'll need longer-term statistics before we can tell whether fuel prices caused a sustained, systemic increase in trucking bankruptcies.
Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.
Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....
We didn’t start a war. That is a thing that Congress has sole authority to declare, and that hasn’t happened.
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
That's assuming that this article is pointing to a new trend and not merely a clustering event, where the price shock is simply bringing future failures forward in time.
I thought after previous fuel price shocks that freight companies had a separate line item on their invoices for fuel that was actual cost or close to it.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
Sounds like your previous LTL had market headroom to be merely twice as expensive while still beating the next cheapest option. And if they'd done so who knows, they might have stayed in business.
We've been the target of a stochastic economic sabotage campaign for years. I've been surprised the US economy has been in as good of shape as it is, considering all the obvious sabotaging events/trends.
Mind you there's a hefty tax surcharge on Diesel that could easily be lowered if the trucking economy was that important to states like California. Two years ago Diesel was at 8$ when it was 4 everywhere else, last year 9$, 5-6 in most other states. Now 10$? Haven't been there lately but it's still at 6 in MO/AR. It's not the oil price that's the problem with the Diesel price.
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
See the problem is the flawless and totally Autopilot Full Self-Driving systems somehow got excluded from the Tesla Semi for some inexplicable /cought crashes with big explosions and potential of tens of fatalities /cough reason, so cant really enter trucking market without hiring humans and admitting something is not right with a "tech company".
I don’t want this to imply that autopilot is somehow flawless and not allowing/including it is the wrong choice. However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen so I’ve always found it shocking just how much they’re highlighted and focused on when a computer causes them. I just think these things need to be looked at from a much more statistical angle than they currently seem to be. Innovation has kind of always been dangerous and risky throughout history with unfortunate lessons learned. Mitigating them should obviously be the goal but some level of risk kind of has to be acceptable.
These are the people who presume all undocumented aliens are dangerous, and that voting fraud is statistically meaningful, and that sports leagues with 0 trans players are consumed by trans players’ problems. Quietly moving quickly will probably work better than a long, thoughtful campaign of Carter-esque nagging.
p.s. as for waymo vs tesla - tesla has 10x less vehicles so far and only recently significantly added to the fleet. Given the scrutiny they receive and faux pass waymo has been getting, I don't think robotaxi crash rate will outnumber waymo. but of course there are people with mental health issues that crash into them on purpose, so idk.
...to move in and sell innovative new products in a healthy, vibrant and mature marketplace? In direct competition with Mack, Freightliner, Kenworth and Peterbilt? Selling products which only get sold if people choose to buy them?
...to sell products which could keep trucking affordable and potentially save some future trucking companies from bankruptcy?
...to reduce the country's exposure to global energy shocks by transitioning to a form of energy with a diverse means of production?
Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.
Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.
Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.
Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere.
(The super rich will still be super rich.)
I said this in another comment:
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich?
I suspect many commenters here work in companies that expect their profit margins to be 10× that.
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
Unless it’s last minute which a surprising amount of it is, but consumers love overnight access to stuff
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
16 companies seems like standard churn (if not a significantly lower than what I'd expect in a low margin business like trucking).
16 trucking bankruptcies in 30 days looks elevated, but it's not unprecedented. FreightWaves counted more than 20 trucking-related Chapter 7/11 filings in another 30-day period earlier in 2026, while previous downturns have produced much larger waves of failures.
What's happening here is that a sudden cost shock (like a diesel price spike) is probably clustering failures that might otherwise have been spread over several months. So 16 filings in a month may say something about timing, but by itself doesn't seem strong evidence of an extraordinary increase in the underlying rate of trucking bankruptcies.
That isn't to say higher fuel costs are a non-event; clearly they're bad for an industry already operating on thin margins. But we'll need longer-term statistics before we can tell whether fuel prices caused a sustained, systemic increase in trucking bankruptcies.
--
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freight-market-pushes-anot... (Early 2026)
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/bulmaks-files-chapter-11-ba... (Late 2025)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/an-unusually-terrible-frei... (Mid 2023)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-trucking-bloodbath-isn... (Mid 2022)
https://www.truckingdive.com/news/trucking-fleet-bankruptcy-... (Early 2021)
https://www.propertycasualty360.com/fcs/2020/01/13/another-o... (Early 2020)
I don't expect "trucking" to fail, I expect stronger players to push price that will eventually show up in inflation stats.
Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.
Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
We've had wars since then.
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
https://www.skool.com/the-logistics-war-room-1319/trucking-b...
I expect these are small companies surviving month to month without the ability (or skill) to plan for catastrophic changes in the future (present).
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
Have they? https://robotaxireport.com/data/waymo-vs-tesla-safety-record...
p.s. as for waymo vs tesla - tesla has 10x less vehicles so far and only recently significantly added to the fleet. Given the scrutiny they receive and faux pass waymo has been getting, I don't think robotaxi crash rate will outnumber waymo. but of course there are people with mental health issues that crash into them on purpose, so idk.
...to sell products which could keep trucking affordable and potentially save some future trucking companies from bankruptcy?
...to reduce the country's exposure to global energy shocks by transitioning to a form of energy with a diverse means of production?
Correct, it's a good opportunity.