Trucking Is Booming Again, And Drivers Aren't Happy About It

The core argument. Reid Lustolo, chief marketing officer at Truck Parking Club, says the trucking rebound underway — Knight Swift (KNX) and J.B. Hunt shares both sharply higher, KNX outperforming Meta year-to-date, and the Internet Truck Stop Van Rate Index climbing from roughly $1.94/mile in December to above $3/mile before pulling back slightly — looks different from prior cycles. Historically trucking is an extreme boom-bust business: low barriers to entry mean any rate spike floods the market with new owner-operators, rates collapse, capacity exits, repeat. This time, Lustolo argues the move is being driven at least as much by supply leaving the market as by demand returning, which could make the cycle less reversible than usual.

The mechanism. Two regulatory shocks are doing the work. First, the DOT under Secretary Sean Duffy has since roughly June 2025 intensified enforcement on English-language proficiency and non-domiciled CDLs — licenses issued to foreign nationals legally working in the U.S. Scrutiny built after "FreightX" internet sleuths found irregularities: CDLs issued to "No Name Given" applicants, hundreds of trucking companies registered to single apartments or P.O. boxes, and states like California and Minnesota showing roughly 10x spikes in CDL issuance around COVID. The government said in March 2025 that non-domiciled CDLs would no longer be easy to renew, so the pool shrinks as they expire rather than through a hard cutoff. Lustolo says the effect is real and immediate: he cites a friend running a Ukrainian-staffed trucking company who is now losing his entire non-domiciled driver network. Second, a Supreme Court ruling in the Montgomery case opened the door to freight brokers being held liable for carrier negligence — historically brokers, who move roughly 30% of freight volume, were shielded from this. He cites C.H. Robinson facing a $600 million judgment (under appeal) after hiring a carrier the FMCSA had rated "satisfactory" that was later involved in a wreck. Because brokers lack a clear standard for what counts as adequately vetted, he expects brokers to tighten hiring and potentially pay a premium for carriers with the best safety ratings — a shift away from freight-as-commodity pricing. This matters structurally because the vast majority of trucking companies — he estimates close to a million total, with a long tail under ten trucks — depend on brokers for freight access; they can't sell directly to large shippers. If the brokerage model contracts under liability pressure, that capacity may not have a route to market even if trucks and drivers technically exist.

Separately, cargo theft has become a compounding cost: Roadmaster Group data cited on air shows theft up 60% year-over-year, with organized rings spoofing carrier identities, setting up fraudulent entities, and disappearing with freight — not petty pilferage.

What has to be true, and what could break it. Lustolo is explicit that this is anecdotal rather than data-driven and that hard confirmation would come from data people watching the spot-versus-contract rate spread, which he notes has begun to shift. He also flags that the durability of the whole thesis depends on policy continuity: non-domiciled CDL restrictions and broker-liability exposure are current-administration and current-court-driven, and he explicitly declines to predict what a future administration might do, saying "who knows how permanent any of this is." He also concedes the safety-rating stratification he expects among carriers hasn't been confirmed. His stronger-conviction claim is that even if a COVID-scale demand shock hit again, the market likely could not onboard capacity as fast as it did in 2021 because the barriers to entry are now structurally higher.

Adjacent structural point — truck parking. Lustolo's own business thesis: public truck parking (roughly 700,000 spaces across rest areas and truck stops) is far short of demand from millions of trucks, and new government-built spaces cost $200,000–$300,000 each and take years. Truck Parking Club, leveraging private-property space via an Airbnb-style marketplace, is adding 1,000–1,500 spaces a week, already exceeds the largest truck-stop chain's footprint at roughly 90,000 spaces, and expects to eventually surpass all public parking infrastructure combined. He argues this is a pay issue, not just a lifestyle one: drivers are paid by the mile under a 14-hour on-duty/11-hour-driving electronic-logging-device limit, so hours spent searching for parking are uncompensated lost productivity for both driver and fleet.