Service
Freight's Capacity Crunches: Produce Season, Q4, and the DOT Blitz
Three predictable capacity crunches hit shippers every year. Here's how to plan around produce season, the Q4 rush, and the DOT Blitz.
If you ship freight for a living, you already know capacity isn’t a flat line. It tightens and loosens in patterns you can set your watch by. The trucks don’t disappear randomly. They get pulled toward higher-paying freight, parked for inspection, or booked solid because everyone else waited too long. Three of those crunches come around every single year, and none of them should surprise you.
Here’s what they are, when they hit, and how to keep your load moving when everyone else is scrambling.
Produce Season: Spring Into Summer
When produce starts moving out of the growing regions, reefer capacity gets expensive and hard to find fast. Carriers chase the premium rates that come with time-sensitive fruit and vegetables, and a lot of dry van capacity gets absorbed too, because a reefer can haul dry freight when it isn’t full of strawberries.
What that means for you: if you move refrigerated or frozen freight, your usual rate is going to look optimistic for a stretch of the year. And if you move dry freight in or near the big produce lanes, you’ll feel the squeeze secondhand.
What helps:
- Book earlier than you think you need to. The load you tender three days out during produce season is a different animal than the one you tender the same way in January.
- Stay flexible on pickup timing where you can. A little give on the appointment opens up more trucks.
- Talk to a carrier who runs both dry and refrigerated at LTL and truckload size, so you’re not stuck when one mode tightens.
Q4: The Everything Rush
The fourth quarter is when retail freight, holiday inventory, and end-of-year push all pile onto the same road. Capacity tightens across the board, and it doesn’t care what you’re shipping. Flatbed, dry van, and reefer all feel it.
Open-deck freight has its own Q4 problem. Construction and industrial shippers are trying to close out projects before winter, so demand for flatbeds stays high right up until the weather shuts things down in the north. If you’ve got a long, heavy, or oddly shaped load and you wait until December to find a deck for it, you’re competing with everyone else who did the same thing.
What helps:
- Get your Q4 open-deck moves on someone’s radar early. A specialty load that needs tarping, strapping, and maybe a permit isn’t something to arrange at the last minute in the busiest quarter of the year.
- Watch the linear-foot and density charges on partial shipments. When capacity is tight, big LTL networks apply those accessorials hard, and a clean quote can turn into a bill nobody approved.
- If you’re moving one to several pallets of open-deck freight, partial flatbed keeps you off the crowded LTL system. Our sister brand FlatbedLTL (flatbed.delcoe.com) is built for exactly that, with pricing that doesn’t ambush you.
The DOT Blitz: A Few Days That Move the Market
Every year, roadside inspection agencies run a concentrated enforcement push, usually in late spring. For a short window, a large share of the truck fleet goes through intensive inspection, and a lot of drivers simply park rather than risk being pulled out of service. Available capacity drops for those days, and rates jump in response.
It’s short, but it’s real, and it lands right around the time produce season is heating up. The two stacked together can make a normally easy lane feel impossible for a week.
What helps:
- Know the dates and build them into your calendar the same way you’d plan around a holiday.
- Move what you can before the window opens. If a shipment has any flexibility, get it ahead of the crunch.
- Work with a carrier whose equipment and drivers are ready to pass, so a Blitz doesn’t take your capacity off the board.
The Real Lesson: Plan Around the Pattern
The cheapest quote in a tight market is often the one that falls through, because the truck gets a better offer and your load sits. When capacity is scarce, service is what actually gets your freight delivered. A human who answers the phone, owns the problem, and finds you a deck is worth more than a rate that looked good until it evaporated.
Comet National has been moving freight since 1995, across all 48 states and Canada, through every produce season, Q4, and Blitz in between. We handle flatbed and open-deck, partial flatbed, full truckload, partial dry van, and dry or refrigerated freight at LTL and truckload size. When one mode tightens, we’ve got another lever to pull.
Got a load that has to move during a crunch, or a freight spend that keeps getting blown up by seasonal surprises? Call Comet and let’s map it out before the calendar forces your hand.