Sources and methods

Every number on this site comes from somewhere, and every source is wrong in a specific, knowable way. Both are written down here.

OpenTrucker News is assembled from public datasets published by United States government agencies. Nothing here is proprietary, nothing is scraped from a competitor, and nothing sits behind a subscription — which is also why some of it is coarser than the commercial feeds a large carrier buys.

Routine copy is written by code directly from the stored figures, so a brief cannot misquote a number it computed. Longer pieces are drafted against a machine-readable briefing of the same figures rather than from recollection. Where a story was not written by a person, the byline says so.

USDA Agricultural Marketing Service

Agricultural Transportation Open Data

USDA AMS Market News collects and publishes truck rates, volumes and market sentiment for agricultural freight. The refrigerated truck rate series is the only lane-level dollar rate published free in the U.S.

UpdatedWeekly and quarterly
LicencePublic domain (U.S. Government work)
Homepagehttps://agtransport.usda.gov/
Series from this source
Bureau of Transportation Statistics

Freight Analysis Framework, version 5

A modelled estimate of freight moving between 129 domestic regions by commodity and mode, benchmarked to the Commodity Flow Survey.

UpdatedAnnual
LicencePublic domain (U.S. Government work)
Homepagehttps://www.bts.gov/faf/
Bureau of Transportation Statistics and ATRI

Freight Mobility Initiative

Derived from anonymised GPS pings from roughly 350,000 truck tractors collected by the American Transportation Research Institute. The ping database itself is restricted to federal users; the county-to-county travel time products are released publicly.

UpdatedAnnual public releases
LicencePublic domain derived products; source pings are ATRI property
Homepagehttps://www.bts.gov/explore-topics-and-geography/topics/freight-trans…
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Producer Price Index

The PPI measures the average change in prices that domestic producers receive for their output. For trucking it is the closest free public equivalent of a rate index, published monthly by industry under NAICS.

UpdatedMonthly
LicencePublic domain (U.S. Government work)
Homepagehttps://www.bls.gov/ppi/
Series from this source
U.S. Energy Information Administration

Weekly Retail On-Highway Diesel Prices

EIA surveys retail diesel prices every Monday and publishes a national average plus five Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts. It is the reference nearly every fuel surcharge in the industry is written against. Redistributed here via USDA AgTransport.

UpdatedWeekly, Mondays
LicencePublic domain (U.S. Government work)
Homepagehttps://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/
Series from this source