Diesel fuel was at $4.39 a gallon Friday evening in Walton. It had been $4.24 during the day and $4.15 just hours earlier. Oneonta truck driver Glenn Knapp said "everybody talks about the high price of gas, but diesel prices are just going out of sight.''Speaking by cell phone Friday as he was delivering a load of cleaning supplies at the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, Knapp said a tractor-trailer gets just 5 to 6 miles per gallon, and, at current prices, it costs between $600 and $700 to fill an empty tank.
Knapp, who works for Shearer's Express in Oneonta, said he knows independent truckers who are going out of business and as he travels the highways he is seeing more and more big rigs parked with ``For Sale'' signs on them.
Ballard said his highest cost in running his business is the cost of fuel to run their own trucks to make the fuel deliveries.
"Who would ever have thought that the cost of 100 gallons of heating oil was going to cost $400," Ballard said. "And diesel is very similar to heating oil.
"We are in this with everyone else and it's affecting the customers," Ballard said. taken From the http://thedailystar.com/
The trucking industry is the life blood of the economic body. The rising fuel prices it is facing may make us all sick in the wallet.
The American Trucking Association (ATA) once estimated that for every ten cent increase in fuel cost one thousand fleets go bankrupt. This may have been a bit of an extreme, and it certainly is not true today. Trucking fleets have developed some basic policies for coping with the ever increasing cost of fuel. The most important of these is the fuel cost surcharge.
It is a basic fact of life that trucks need fuel to operate. Fuel makes up around 25% of the operating costs for the average truck fleet. This is the second highest operating expense trailing only labor costs. Here is an idea of how much impact a rise in fuel prices can have on trucking operating expenses. In 2004, trucks consumed a total of 32 billion gallons of diesel fuel. At that figure, a one cent increase in diesel fuel cost would result in a 320 million dollar increase in operating expense.
check it out
http://www.todaystrucking.com/news.cfm?intDocID=20379&CFID=1932453&CFTOKEN=11344135
No comments:
Post a Comment