7. Road / truck

Picture a single ocean container that crossed the Pacific and got drayed to a transload yard in Long Beach. The 40-foot ocean box gets stripped, and its contents get repacked into two 53-foot domestic trailers. Those trailers ride a train to a ramp outside Dallas. They get drayed to your DC. The pallets get unloaded. Done.

Even on that mostly-ocean lane, the cargo spent its last 50 km on a truck. Trucks moved 72.7% of US freight tonnage and 76.9% of revenue in 2024 [ATA American Trucking Trends 2025], and in the EU the share is similarly dominant intra-continentally. Road is the connective tissue of every modern inbound flow.

Understanding road means understanding three products (FTL, LTL, parcel-adjacent partial) and the capacity economics that determine what they cost.

Starting cold? Road is the part you actually see, the trucks on the highway. Inbound uses three flavors: full truckload, less-than-truckload, and the gap between them.

The three products

Imagine you’re shipping 22 pallets of finished goods from Dallas to Atlanta. Three options, depending on whether you fill a trailer:

FTL — Full Truckload

You rent the whole trailer for one origin-destination pair.

Typically a 53’ US dry van (~4,000 ft³, ~45,000 lb payload) or a 13.6 m EU tautliner / curtainsider (~90 m³, ~24,000 kg payload).
Single pickup, single delivery (with some exceptions for multi-stop). The trailer goes directly.
Pricing: per-mile in the US (DAT national van spot averaged about $2.68/mi in early 2026 [DAT Trendlines]; ranges $1.70–$3.50/mi all-in depending on lane and cycle), per-km in the EU, per-trip in most of Asia.
Transit: predictable. Driver HOS rules [FMCSA HOS] cap a US driver at about 660 mi/day solo, 1,100 mi/day team. EU drivers are tighter under [EU 561/2006] (9 hrs driving/day, with strict rest rules enforced by digital tachograph).

LTL — Less-than-Truckload

Now imagine you’re shipping just 4 of those pallets, not 22. You don’t need a whole trailer. You need a portion of one.

You pay for a portion of a trailer, typically 150–10,000 lb (US) or 100–2,500 kg (EU) shipments.
The carrier consolidates your shipment with others at an origin terminal, line-hauls between terminals, and deconsolidates at destination. Hub-and-spoke network.
Priced by class ( NMFC , 18 classes from 50 to 500) [NMFTA NMFC] and density in the US; by LDM (loading meters) or Euro pallets in the EU. Dim weight rules apply if classification is unclear.
Transit: 2–7 days depending on distance and network. Each terminal touch is a damage + visibility event.
Carriers: in the US, Old Dominion, XPO, Estes, Saia, ABF, FedEx Freight, TForce; in the EU, DHL Freight, DSV, DB Schenker, Geodis, Raben, GLS Freight.

Partial / Volume LTL / Shared-truck

Now imagine 12 pallets — too much for LTL pricing tiers, not enough to fill an FTL. You’re in the gap product.

For shipments of 5,000–20,000 lb.
Shipment moves on the same trailer as another shipper’s shipment, but without the terminal hub-and-spoke touches of LTL. Fewer handoffs, less damage, but pricing is spot-market-heavy.
Increasingly enabled by digital load-matching platforms (Loadsmith, Convoy-legacy, Transfix, uShip for shippers; GreenScreens, Sylectus for brokers).

Drayage (again)

Drayage is technically road freight but operationally its own universe. It moves containerized cargo short distances (typically under 200 miles) between a port, rail ramp, or transload facility and the next node. We covered its US chassis complexity in the Ocean chapter. A few road-side additions:

Near-dock vs. off-dock. Near-dock yards are inside or adjacent to the port complex; off-dock are regional. Near-dock reduces dray cost and turn-time but is capacity-constrained.
Transloading. Stripping a 40’/40’HC ocean container into two or three 53’ domestic trailers at a port-adjacent facility. Adds a touch but cuts rail/truck cost per unit by leveraging the larger domestic cube.
Clean Truck Programs. LA/LB and several EU ports enforce emissions-tier mandates on drayage trucks, which concentrates capacity into large dray carriers with capital for newer fleets.

Cross-border flows

Imagine a Mexican-built auto part that has to get to a US assembly plant. The truck drives north on Mexican Highway 85, hits the Laredo border, swaps tractors, clears US customs, picks up a US tractor, and continues to the plant. That whole sequence is cross-border trucking: domestic trucking with a customs event embedded in the middle.

Three major cross-border complexes:

US-Mexico ( USMCA region): Laredo, El Paso, Otay Mesa are the highest-volume crossings. Trucks moved ~85% of US-Mexico surface trade in 2024 [ATA 2025]. Typically a transfer model: Mexican tractor brings trailer to a transfer yard at the border, a licensed cross-border drayage tractor pulls it across, US tractor picks it up on the US side. US FAST and Mexican CTPAT certifications accelerate clearance. This is the highest-volume cross-border lane in the world by value.
US-Canada: trucks moved ~67% of US-Canada surface trade in 2024 [ATA 2025]. CSA / CBP relatively integrated; drivers typically do through-moves with a FAST card. Commercial driver bottlenecks at Windsor-Detroit and the Peace Bridge Niagara during peaks.
EU cross-border: post-2004 accession, most intra-EU moves are drive-through with no customs event. Brexit re-introduced a customs line at GB-EU that added 1–3 days of friction; the Northern Ireland Protocol / Windsor Framework keeps NI inside the EU customs area.

Other cross-border complexes with distinct rules: ASEAN (patchy harmonization; Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore is the cleanest), GCC (cleaner in theory than in practice), Mercosur (lots of friction), intra-Africa (TFTA and AfCFTA in progress but slow).

Cabotage: the rule you’ll trip over

Imagine an EU carrier from Poland delivering goods to a customer in France. After the delivery, the empty truck is going back to Poland anyway, so a French shipper offers to give it a paid load on the way. Sounds simple. It might be illegal.

Cabotage is the legal restriction on a foreign carrier performing domestic transport inside a country. Why you care:

EU cabotage: a non-resident EU carrier can do up to 3 cabotage operations within 7 days after an international delivery, under the Mobility Package rules [EU Mobility Package]. Exceed this and the carrier faces fines and impoundment.
US cabotage: a Canadian or Mexican carrier can haul cargo into the US but cannot perform point-to-point within the US (narrow exceptions under USMCA for specific commodities).
UK post-Brexit: GB carriers lost EU cabotage rights; EU carriers have limited GB rights.

If your lane structure has a foreign carrier positioned for a return load, cabotage rules can invalidate it. Forwarders sometimes ignore this and you inherit the penalty exposure.

Driver economics: the real capacity constraint

Trucking capacity is fundamentally a driver-availability question, not an equipment question. The industry has been in a structural driver shortage on developed-market lanes for 15+ years. Key variables:

HOS / working-time regulation. US FMCSA HOS caps, EU 561/2006 with digital tachograph enforcement, and the EU Mobility Package posted-driver rules all reduce productive road hours per driver.
ELD mandate. US has required Electronic Logging Devices since 2017; the EU equivalent is the smart tachograph. Elimination of paper-log cheating structurally reduced available driver hours by 5–10%.
Spot-contract mix. Spot market absorbs overflow at 2–3× contract rates during peak; shippers with high contract-compliance forwarders move better in tight markets.
Dedicated vs. common. Dedicated fleet (your carrier parks tractors at your DC) gives guaranteed capacity and consistent drivers at a 10–25% premium. Worth it for high-volume, fixed-origin lanes.

Accessorial charges: where quotes turn into bills

The headline rate is rarely the total. A driver shows up at your DC at 8am and your dock isn’t ready until 11am. That’s three hours of detention you owe the carrier. Multiply across hundreds of loads and you have a real line item.

Common accessorials:

Detention. Driver waits more than ~2 hours at pickup or delivery. $75–$125/hr in US, higher in EU.
Layover. Driver forced to stop overnight waiting on load/unload.
Lumper. Third-party unloading at the receiving DC. $150–$400 per trailer; you’re paying for somebody else’s DC staffing decision.
Driver assist / inside delivery. Beyond curbside drop.
Liftgate / residential / limited-access. Relevant for LTL delivery to non-traditional receivers.
Reconsignment / redelivery. If the delivery fails and a second attempt is needed.
Fuel surcharge. Indexed to weekly DOE diesel price (US) or similar in other markets. Always a separate line.

A mature shipper’s LTL and FTL benchmarking isolates the base rate from the accessorial profile. A bad carrier has cheap linehaul and expensive accessorials.

Equipment types beyond dry van

Reefer (refrigerated trailer): the intra-country counterpart of ocean reefer. Temperature integrity, pre-cooling, and HACCP compliance matter.
Flatbed / step-deck / lowboy / double-drop: for oversize, machinery, construction materials.
Tanker: liquid / dry bulk. Each tanker is food-grade or chemical-grade by classification; cleaning costs are non-trivial between cargoes.
Intermodal domestic container: 53’ US domestic container (not ISO) that moves interchangeably on truck and rail. Underutilized by non-IMC shippers.
Hazmat / DG road: governed by US DOT 49 CFR, EU ADR. Placarding, routing restrictions (tunnels, populated areas), driver endorsements (HME in US, ADR license in EU).

Digital freight: brokers, platforms, and what they changed

The 2017–2022 wave of digital freight brokers (Convoy, Uber Freight, Transfix, Loadsmith, Sennder in EU) compressed the US FTL spot market’s take rate and dramatically improved visibility for small-mid shippers. Convoy collapsed in 2023 but the capability survived; most traditional brokers (C.H. Robinson, Schneider, TQL) now operate modern digital capacity platforms. Shippers with 200+ loads/month can extract 3–8% savings by running a parallel digital brokerage next to a traditional 3PL.

Putting it together

Road is where the tactical gains in inbound mostly live. Ocean and air hide their wins behind contract-level negotiation; road rewards execution discipline within the contract.

How to think about road on your own network

Five decisions worth revisiting:

When detention is consistently elevated: the fix is dock scheduling, not a different carrier. A free inbound trailer pool is a free load the next day. Best-in-class is 45-minute dock turn times.

When LTL invoices are creeping up: pull 90 days of shipments and validate NMFC classification. Routine finding: 10–20% of shipments are misclassified, with material rate impact.

When you’re allocating between FTL contracts and spot: match contract share to your most stable demand, leave spot for overflow. Carriers with high tender-acceptance rates beat carriers with cheap quoted rates that don’t accept the tenders.

When you have meaningful US-Mexico volume: invest in CTPAT/FAST certifications. 10–30% reduction in border exam rates and 15–60 minutes saved per crossing.

When you have lanes over 800 miles: evaluate intermodal mode-share. Many shippers are 10–20 points under the optimum on qualifying long-haul lanes.