Florida drayage, counted: what the federal record says about the carriers

Where these numbers come from

Every carrier with federal operating authority files an MCS-150 form: how many trucks, how many drivers, what kinds of cargo. The FMCSA publishes the whole census, all 4.4 million records, as an open dataset. Nothing here is scraped, estimated or private. We filtered it to carriers registered in Florida, marked active, with the intermodal cargo classification, which is the box a drayage company ticks.

One honest warning before the numbers: the filings are self-reported, and self-reported data contains typos. The largest fleet in the raw file was a towing company declaring ninety thousand trucks and two drivers. A truck does not move without a driver, so we exclude any filing above twenty trucks that claims more than five trucks per driver. Twenty-six records fell to that rule. A ranking without it would be ranking the typos.

The market is one truck deep

There are 2,872 active intermodal carriers registered in Florida. The median fleet is one truck. Not ten, not five. One.

That is not a weakness of the market, it is the shape of it: drayage runs on owner-operators, and most of the capacity that moves containers out of the South Florida ports on any given morning is a driver who owns the tractor under them. Only 361 carriers in the state declare five or more trucks, and only 31 declare fifty or more. When a company tells you about their vast fleet, this file is where you check.

Almost nobody has a safety rating, and what that means

Of the 361 Florida intermodal carriers with five or more trucks, 297 have never been rated by the FMCSA at all. Sixty-two hold a Satisfactory rating, and two are rated Conditional.

An unrated carrier is not an unsafe carrier. A rating only exists after a compliance review, and the agency does not get to most companies. But it does mean the word of the carrier is most of what a shipper has, and it makes the few Satisfactory ratings genuinely worth something: somebody from the government went in, looked at the logs, the maintenance and the drug-testing program, and signed off.

The fifty largest, and who is actually in them

The table below is the fifty largest active intermodal fleets in Florida, ranked by the size each declared in its own filing. The top of it is instructive: the biggest names are national operations that happen to be registered here, tank fleets, and dedicated distribution fleets. The largest pure container-drayage operator in Miami sits at number six with six hundred and sixty trucks, and it is a company most shippers outside the port have never heard of.

Notice what is absent. The websites that dominate a Google search for Florida freight are, with few exceptions, not in this table, because most of them do not own trucks. We measured seventy freight websites serving this market earlier this year; the highest-ranking ones hold one truck between them. The companies that win the search and the companies that own the iron are almost entirely different companies. Neither list is wrong to exist, but a shipper should know which kind of company they are talking to.

How to check any carrier in two minutes

Ask for the carrier's USDOT number. Every legitimate carrier knows theirs cold, and hesitation is itself an answer. Then put it into the FMCSA's SAFER search, which is free and public.

Read three things. First, that operating status says AUTHORIZED and active: an inactive or revoked registration means the vehicle is not legally a for-hire carrier today, whatever the truck says on the door. Second, that the power-unit count roughly matches the story you were told. Third, the safety rating if one exists, knowing that most carriers legitimately have none.

If the load is placarded hazmat, there is a fourth check: the carrier needs a hazmat safety permit for certain classes, and the placarded-load rules we wrote about for the PortMiami Tunnel apply to the routing. None of this takes longer than making the coffee, and it is the single cheapest piece of due diligence in freight.

Why we publish this

We coordinate moves across this market, which means the capacity we put on a load is chosen from exactly the file you just read about. Publishing the numbers does not cost us anything, because the numbers are public and always were. What it changes is who bothers to look.

The data on this page refreshes from the census file, and the date under the table tells you when it last did. If your carrier is not who they said they were, the two minutes above would have told you.