In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, we’ll hear from Captain Jon Olsen of Minnesota State Patrol's truck enforcement unit, one of many sources for Overdrive's reporting about the federal DataQs system that went live earlier this week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15063803/criticism-of-dataqs-review-system-continues-to-rise Overdrive Editorial Director Max Heine and Senior Editor Todd Dills dug into the FMCSA's data around the DataQs system, doing scads of interviews over...
Feb 19, 2021•30 min
In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, another in the run through our eight-episode Over the Road podcast series, coproduced for 2020 with PRX's Radiotopia podcast network. "Back home" featured our own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer, host of the show, and Over the Road contributing producer Lacy Roberts on a haul back through Lacy’s childhood as a daughter of a trucking family growing up in Montana. The tale, among the most-listened-to within the trucking community (the podcast was broadcast out to a ...
Feb 12, 2021•57 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, take a tour down I-75 in Kentucky in search of an answer to the age-old question: Who has the best nanner pudding among the truck stops along that route, and which one of them was the first to advertise it on the CB? This week, we run back through some trucking micro-history with our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer via another edition in the Over the Road podcast series, originally produced by PRX’s Radiotopia in collaboration with us here at Overdrive. It’s a ...
Feb 05, 2021•54 min
In April 2019. Kenyette Godhigh-Bell was a company driver at Grand Island Express. Our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer met her for the first time at the company headquarters in Nebraska when researching and recording for what would become the Over the Road podcast. If you’re a regular Overdrive Radio listener, you heard that episode and met Godhigh-Bell from that time. Part of the episodes featured the sound of a class intended for drivers at the company who were considering the decision to buy a...
Jan 29, 2021•40 min
For today’s episode of the Overdrive Radio podcast, brace for a long run through the history of trucking with former household-goods-hauling owner-operator Finn Murphy, also a well-versed student of that history. Murphy is interviewed and much of the story is narrated by Overdrive contributing writer and reefer hauler "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. This brief history of trucking in America tracks the rise of the business from the 1920s up through today -– and the owner-operator's central role in it...
Jan 22, 2021•57 min
What was the first recorded trucking song? According to Todd Uhlman, an assistant professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio, “Wreck on the Mountain Road,” recorded by the Red Fox Chasers in 1928, may well have set the stage for many such songs to come. Such trivia is only a small part of what Uhlman academic specialty has uncovered -- he places trucking songs in the context of U.S. socio-cultural history, explaining how each song reflects something of the trucking industry and culture at the...
Jan 18, 2021•6 min
In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Chief Patrol Agent for the Laredo, Texas, sector Matthew Hudak has a message for the trucking community about what he’s seeing in the numbers since October 2020 when it comes to busted human smuggling operations. There's been a dramatic uptick in instances of drivers moving strange cargo in their dry van or reefer trailers -- actual human beings. In some cases, the drivers involved may have been initially...
Jan 15, 2021•27 min
A note for Overdrive Radio subscribers using some podcasting apps: We’ve got a new, redesigned website coming at http://OverdriveOnline.com – if you regularly listen via a podcasting app other than those offered by Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, or Apple or Google podcasts, we’re transitioning to a different principle RSS feed for Overdrive Radio. If you need to in your app, you can update the settings with this feed URL and be certain to get all of the episodes going forward: https://feeds.soun...
Jan 07, 2021•42 min
Happy New Year! For this final 2020 edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Daniel and Phyllis Snow are here, as is Rico Muhammad and Joe DeLorenzo and Jim Mullen and all the owner-ops and government administrators and brokers and drivers and others we talked to this year. We’re going to hear from a lot of them as we tour back through this oh-so-chaotic and pivotal of years trucking in America. We’ll be counting down the top 10 podcasts of the year along the way, and hearing from some other edit...
Dec 31, 2020•1 hr 7 min
With this edition of the podcast, just two days out from Christmas, we’re starting a run back through a little high-quality road listening with Overdrive's podcast coproduction with PRX’s Radiotopia network. The Over the Road podcast ran originally between February and June 2020, and the principal eight-episode series was hosted by our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. Therein, we hoped to give mainstream, general-public listeners an intimate portrait of the wide array of voices and issues emanati...
Dec 23, 2020•55 min
Today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast runs through the variety of hours of service issues addressed yesterday in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's third Q&A relative to the changes put in place as of Sept. 29. One particular question addressed a subject we've taken up before -- namely what happens if you need the 14-hour-clock pause value of a berth period to avoid a violation and you're inspected before you can pair that period with another berth period to complete ...
Dec 18, 2020•42 min
The 11 tracks on Long Haul Paul Marhoefer's new "Songs from a Truck" album -- available now via the streaming platforms and on a CD you can order via http://longhaulpaulmusic.com/merch -- cap what’s been quite a year for Marhoefer, as most of you will know pretty well. He was the voice of the Overdrive/Radiotopia coproduction of the Over the Road podcast earlier this year, which reached millions of listeners both inside and out of trucking. His stories of hauling in the midst of the COVID-19 pan...
Dec 11, 2020•34 min
The Transportation Intermediaries Association's August-filed petition is well-known for its request to FMCSA to essentially throw out the transparency reg in place since the early 1980s, and in other forms earlier than that. What's been discussed far less, however, is the second part of the broker group TIA's petition, that having to do with independent dispatchers. TIA asks the agency to provide formal guidance officially limiting dispatchers to working with just a single carrier and, in cases ...
Dec 04, 2020•35 min
In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, a little music and storytelling to take you through the weekend and into next, whether you're still off for Thanksgiving or on the road: **A tour through the Nashville session at Jay Vernali's Jay's Place studio on music row with our 2020 Trucker Talent Search winner, John Malayter. Hear the results of that session, as Malayter tells the stories behind four tracks any fan of folk-blues and bluegrass is likely to enjoy. The Jordan Carriers ha...
Nov 27, 2020•53 min
For this edition of Overdrive Radio, we sat down with Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association President Todd Spencer and Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh in an attempt to forecast some answers to the question in the title. The conversation touched on potential Congressional and/or administrative initiatives around infrastructure (parking infrastructure being a principal component), interest (or not) things few in trucking want to see like insurance hikes and speed-limiter mandates, the...
Nov 20, 2020•35 min
Regular Overdrive readers may well recall the case of a William Hickey of Maryland last year -- Hickey was convicted of operating as a U.S. runner for a mostly overseas ring of identity thieves targeting both brokers and carriers in a double-brokering scheme that's sucking hundreds of thousands in freight payments out of trucking. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, U.S. postal inspector Steve Cohen of the federal U.S. Postal Inspection Service offers clarity on how the scheme operates, and j...
Nov 13, 2020•41 min
Is there an ideal size for an owner-operator as he/she adds trucks, drivers and freight? The answer to that question is probably, well, "it depends." It's certain, though, that whether leased or independent with carrier authority, any owner is bound to reach a point where administrative and/or sales/operational demands outstrip his/her ability to handle everything -- and still haul. Cadle Trucking owner Ben Cadle is just about at that breaking point, and feels he may have reached his "sweet spot...
Nov 06, 2020•32 min
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s listening session on brokered freight transactions this past Wednesday, October 28, shone light from multiple viewpoints on regulation that today exists and that some feel is being circumvented by brokers to owner-operators', shippers' and the public's detriment. Others -- brokers, principally -- voice the view that the reg has outlived its usefulness and applicability in today's freight market. In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, tra...
Oct 30, 2020•1 hr 16 min
An owner-operator's over-reliance on the path of least resistance to freight will like as not get him/her in trouble in a down market, notes longtime independent Artie Daniel, out of McKinney, Virginia. Not that he doesn't understand the attraction of today's online marketplaces and the speed and convenience they offer for freight. But he's built his business over time and through the years with a mind on serving a customer (whether broker or shipper) toward building a solid connection, with clo...
Oct 23, 2020•23 min
The title of this Overdrive Radio podcast sounds a little like the set-up for an inside-baseball joke of sorts, but for owner-operator Mike Landis and Ezlogz head and former owner-op C.J. Karman, that day was a serious one indeed. Directly and indirectly in a variety of ways, its culimination of the three-week Mayday-begun protest vigil outside the White House has had material effects in terms of getting the conversation going around enforcement and potential enhancement of the 49 CFR 371.3 tran...
Oct 16, 2020•26 min
Answers to several hours of service questions in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, including: 1. Can I use a three-hour nap and not get penalized on it in the 14-hour rule? 2. How do you log a 20-load back and forth load/unload trip where there's scantly a mile between load/unload sites? 3. To use split sleeper, does it matter if the shorter period is longer than three hours? Is the pause value for the duty clock still there? Also: a peculiarity of some ELDs that makes it seem as if t...
Oct 07, 2020•29 min
Are you ready for September 29? In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we’re diving into the specifics of the hours of service changes going into effect on that date with FMCSA's Joe DeLorenzo, something of a recap from our GATS Week session in late August a month ago, for the podcast audience. The talk centers on the new flexibilities, the particulars of just what constitutes off-duty time for an owner-operator, a variety of scenarios posed by those who were participating live in the discussion, a...
Sep 25, 2020•46 min
Owner-operators across the country probably remember the LTL doubles and triples hauler Viking Freight, before a buyout by FedEx folded the company under the FedEx Freight umbrella with another, American Freightways, in the early part of this century. A special treat for you today in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast with Steve Sprenger, a commercial real estate broker for the last couple of decades following work in trucking with about a decade hauling for Viking from the mid-1980s. S...
Sep 22, 2020•23 min
You can catch the performances also in video via OverdriveOnline.com or at http://youtube.com/overdrivemag -- herein find audio of the entire show, building to Tennessee-based John Malayter performing his own "Take Me Back to Tennessee" for the win. Before we take a run through all the performances, including fellow talent search finalists Freddy French and Paul Cullers, "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer returns to the podcast mic, as it were, via a 2019 interview with Keeler Custom Truck Restoration o...
Sep 11, 2020•33 min
This year has no doubt been a wild ride in any number of different ways for every one of you, I’m guessing. Whether you’re leased to a carrier and newly dealing with regular customers’ facility restrictions and the necessity of new personal protective equipment on-site or at once routinely familiar and now sometimes ever-stranger-seeming truck stops along regular routes. Maybe you’re an independent who’s experienced the topsy-turvy rate situation along with that, from the highest of highs of lat...
Sep 04, 2020•52 min
So much can come from a song, and its connection to the work that its writer or performer does otherwise. The culture forged and re-forged by the connections between the individual performers who've taken part in Overdrive's Trucker Talent Search over the years, and hopefully those among you who have the opportunity to really make a similar connection with them through their work, well … for this podcaster's money, this effort since its very first year has always felt in a way perhaps the most m...
Aug 26, 2020•31 min
With the Brake Safety Week upcoming August 23-29, tank doubles-pulling independent Martin Herman, based in Wyoming, is sure to be ready. In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we talk inspections, for sure, but more so his half-century-old 1970 Kenworth needlenose W925, quite an exceptional rig. Herman regular Overdrive readers may well recall as the owner-op who engineered replacement parts and even used a turbo from a Cummins N14 to retrofit to the Big Cam 3 that powered the KW. Since we last che...
Aug 21, 2020•26 min
The complications that can be brought on by any overdimensional load’s permitted complexity are many, and extend to the routes those permits send you on, of course. The bigger or heavier the load gets, the more circuitous and lengthy the route, often enough. It can make for a cumbersome process when it comes to weighing whether the price of any load is worth the effort and cost put in. Owner-Operator of the Year Kevin Kocmich has mastered such deliberations over his decades in business. For more...
Aug 06, 2020•28 min
You read a little about this week's podcast subject last week, likely, with reporting around the Operation Safe Driver Week traffic-enforcement event (focused on motorists as well as professional operators) ongoing as we speak. Namely -- the Level 3 inspection and Kansas Highway Patrol trooper and Public Information Officer Nick Wright, whose advice related to how to prep for an inspection was delivered in this conversation from early March. He and I were talking in the context of the three-day ...
Jul 13, 2020•31 min
In the first part of this two-part podcast, owner-operator and Rates & Lanes Podcast cohost Rico Muhammad detailed his views on policing issues and his personal experiences with unjustified actions throughout his life. In part 2, a discussion of opportunity barriers that exist for many in African-American communities where, as Muhammad says, kids are often counseled they must be "twice as good" as white counterparts to achieve the same level of success. Cynical though the adage may be, the t...
Jul 02, 2020•17 min
