The Routing Guide Is A Market Sensor, and Most Shippers Are Reading It Too Late

Transportation teams can do everything right and still watch costs climb. They negotiate hard, maintain their routing guides, hold carriers to performance standards, and recover freight when a tender fails, and the freight still gets more expensive and harder to move than it used to be. When that happens, the instinct is to work the transaction harder. The more useful move is to ask what changed upstream, because by the time the cost lands in a report, the decisions that produced it can be months old and the cheapest options to address them are already gone.

One of the first people to see when the transportation network starts signaling change is Jonathan Croft, Sr. Business Development Executive for Strategic Accounts at Echo Global Logistics. Working on the third-party logistics side of roughly a decade of short-lead-time tenders and off-contract spot moves, Croft sits where upstream business decisions finally meet the transportation market. What he sees from that vantage is that cost is rarely a transportation problem alone, and that the earliest evidence of a shift shows up in operational behavior long before it appears as a number.

"I still care tremendously about rates, but I increasingly view the rate as information too. Sometimes a high rate tells me we need to negotiate harder. Sometimes a repeated pattern tells me there may be value in asking the customer whether something upstream deserves another look," he says.

Physical capacity and the capacity you can actually reach

The backdrop that makes this urgent is a market behaving unusually. Croft describes much of 2026 as a stretch of rising transportation rates despite unremarkable freight volumes, which is a combination that doesn't fit the textbook. "Excess capacity has been removed, utilization has increased, and carriers have regained more ability to decide which freight makes sense within their networks," he explains.

That shift exposes a distinction he thinks most strategies ignore. "Trucks can physically exist without being economically or operationally available for a particular shipment," he says. He refers to the accessible portion as 'effective capacity,' and it's smaller than the raw truck count suggests. Destination, deadhead, dwell, equipment type, pickup windows, lead time, and network balance all shrink the pool of carriers that actually want a given load. When capacity is loose, that inefficiency stays hidden because someone usually needs the freight. When it tightens, every one of those characteristics starts getting priced.

Reading the routing guide as an instrument

The reason cost increases feel sudden is that the business is often watching the wrong indicators. Published data like tender rejections, spot and contract pricing, and capacity indexes describe the environment, but Croft treats no single index as a trigger. He reads signals in three layers instead: the broad market, carrier behavior, and what actually happens when his customers' freight hits the market.

The last layer moves first. "Tender acceptance, routing-guide depth, how many carriers we need to work through before securing capacity, lead time, spot exposure, recovery cost, dwell and regional service failures can begin changing before a national index fully describes what's happening," he shares.

That reframes a routine operational document as an early-warning instrument. "I've actually come to think of a routing guide as a kind of market sensor. If freight that historically clears the top of the routing guide suddenly starts going three or four carriers deep, my first responsibility is to solve today's shipment, but if it keeps happening, I want to bring the pattern back to the customer."

When operational change outruns the budget

Even when the transportation network is generating this information daily, it often fails to reach the people whose decisions created the exposure. Croft is careful about prescribing how a customer should route information internally, but he names the failure pattern directly. "Transportation often experiences changes before the full financial consequence becomes obvious," he says. "A carrier starts rejecting freight. A lane that historically covers easily suddenly requires several recovery attempts. Spot premiums appear in one region. Lead time becomes more valuable. A pickup window that never caused problems before suddenly limits the available carrier pool." If the significance of these indicators isn't recognized until freight spend misses budget or service slips, the easiest solutions are already gone.

He calls it a signal-latency problem, and part of his job is closing it. Telling a customer a lane is getting harder to cover isn't insight by itself. The value is in explaining what appears to be changing underneath it, whether the same behavior is showing up elsewhere, and whether the broader market supports that read. From there the customer decides whether the information needs to travel to finance, sales, procurement, or operations. "The important thing from my perspective is getting them useful intelligence while they still have choices rather than simply reporting what went wrong after the fact," Croft says.

When the obvious truckload lane no longer fits

Reading the signal early is only useful if it changes a decision, and the decision Croft returns to most is whether a lane's mode is still the right one. Routing guides accumulate habits. A lane gets established as truckload, for example, because at the time, truckload clearly made sense. "Maybe average orders were larger, truckload was inexpensive, the customer wanted frequent replenishment or the distribution network looked different," Croft offers. "It works, so there isn't much reason to revisit it." A few years later, though, the freight might consistently be 10 or 12 pallets, or multiple orders leave the same facility for the same region on consecutive days, and truckload is no longer the obvious answer. "When I look at what's actually moving, I start asking questions."

Croft is deliberate about the limits of his view here. He sees the transportation side, not the inventory, production, or customer-service requirement that might make the existing strategy entirely correct. So he brings the customer a pattern rather than a prescription, and he warns against optimizing the wrong variable. Shaving a $2,000 truckload to $1,900 creates $100 of measurable value; recognizing that the shipment could move as LTL, partial, consolidation, or intermodal can be worth far more. "The point isn't to push freight into another mode. It's to make sure the current solution is still being chosen for today's reasons rather than simply inherited from yesterday's."

Capacity a shipper can create without a single truck

The most counterintuitive turn in Croft's thinking is that a shipper can widen its own access to capacity without adding anything to the market. More lead time doesn't build another tractor, and neither does faster loading, predictable volume, appointment flexibility, or reduced detention. "But all of those things can increase the number of carriers willing and economically able to handle a particular customer's freight," he notes.

That reframes the whole exercise around access rather than raw supply. "When I think about transportation strategy today, I'm increasingly interested in more than how much capacity physically exists," Croft says. "I'm interested in how much of that capacity a particular piece of freight can realistically access."

It is also where he draws the line on his own role. Croft doesn't control how a customer's freight is designed, and he's firm that he shouldn't, but sitting on the 3PL side gives him a clear window into how the transportation market reacts to those design choices. Paying attention to the reactions, asking the questions, and carrying the patterns back to the customer is where the relationship stops being transactional. "If that leads them to ask us for a case study, test an alternative or reconsider an assumption internally, then I think I've provided considerably more value than simply quoting the next shipment."