FTR Transportation Intelligence
FTR Transportation Intelligence is a freight transportation forecasting firm based in Bloomington, Indiana. Specializing exclusively in the North American freight economy, FTR forecasts freight demand by mode, truck and trailer production, railcar deliveries, rail carloadings and intermodal volumes, and publishes the Trucking Conditions Index and Shippers Conditions Index that transportation trade media report every month. Its analysts — long led by the Starks family, with Eric Starks as chairman and Jonathan Starks as chief executive — are among the most quoted independent voices on whether the freight market is tightening or loosening, and what that means for carriers, shippers and equipment makers.
Origins and the Freight-Cast Model
FTR's intellectual foundation is a forecasting methodology developed in the 1970s, when freight markets were seeking a better understanding of the overall transportation system. According to the company's own account, FTR founder Ed Graham, with significant input from transportation economist Noël Perry, built a methodology tying transportation demand to economic activity — the approach that became the Freight-Cast model. That economically derived demand framework remains the firm's core asset: it connects macroeconomic and commodity data to the freight that each industry generates, and then to the equipment needed to haul it. Eric Starks, who began his career at FTR and spent nearly three decades there, helped shape the model into its modern form and became a leading researcher in freight modal-share analysis.
Leadership and Organization
FTR is a compact specialist consultancy — industry profiles place it in the range of a few dozen to under two hundred employees — headquartered at 1720 North Kinser Pike in Bloomington, Indiana. Eric Starks, chairman, is a graduate of Indiana University in Bloomington, taught transportation and distribution strategy to MBA students at the university's Kelley School of Business, and helped create the Indiana University Transportation Board. Jonathan Starks serves as chief executive and previously as chief operating officer, presenting the firm's model and outlooks. Vice presidents lead modal practices, including Avery Vise for trucking — an analyst with decades in trucking journalism and research before joining FTR in 2017 — and Don Ake for commercial vehicles, whose Class 8 truck and trailer forecasts are fixtures of equipment-industry news.
Forecasting Coverage
The firm's principal business is forecasting United States freight by mode of transportation, North American commercial vehicle sales and production, U.S. trailer factory shipments, North American railcar deliveries, and U.S. rail carloadings and intermodal loadings originated. In practice this spans truckload and less-than-truckload trucking, rail and intermodal competition, and the equipment cycle that supplies all of them: Class 8 truck orders, backlogs and build rates, medium-duty trucks, trailers and railcars. FTR forecasters collect and analyse everything likely to affect freight movement, from manufacturing and construction output to retail sales, driver supply, fuel prices and regulation — in 2017, for example, publicly warning shippers that the electronic logging device mandate would tighten capacity even as federal rhetoric favoured deregulation.
Signature Indexes and Publications
FTR's most visible products are its monthly conditions indexes. The Trucking Conditions Index combines freight volumes, freight rates, fleet capacity, fuel prices and financing into a single reading of the environment for carriers — positive scores signalling favourable conditions, negative scores the opposite — and at its extremes it has recorded the strongest carrier conditions since 2004 during the post-pandemic freight boom. A companion Shippers Conditions Index reads the same market from the buyer's side, so the two series move in rough opposition. FTR publishes its analysis through subscription services including Trucking Update and its commercial vehicle outlook reports; in September 2008 it launched the North American Commercial Truck Outlook Report, carrying forward two decades of outlook work previously supplied to ACT Publications after that report was discontinued at the end of 2008.
Conferences, Webinars and Commentary
Beyond publications, FTR operates as an educator and convener for the freight industry. It holds an annual transportation conference and runs a regular programme of webinars explaining its forecasts and methods — including sessions devoted to walking clients through the components of the Freight-Cast model. Its experts are frequent presenters at Wall Street analyst meetings, association events and industry conferences such as the INFORMS Analytics+ conference, and they appear in podcast and trade-media interviews dissecting truckload and LTL conditions, pricing, nearshoring and peak-season expectations. This public commentary is a deliberate part of the firm's model: by explaining the market constantly and on the record, FTR builds the credibility on which a forecasting subscription business depends.
Clients and Uses
FTR's clients are the planners of the freight economy: trucking fleets deciding how many trucks to buy, shippers negotiating contracts and budgeting transport spend, railroads and intermodal providers allocating capacity, truck, trailer and railcar manufacturers and their suppliers scheduling production, and financial institutions following the transport cycle. The firm says its forecasts and specially designed reports have produced advanced planning and cost savings throughout the transportation sector. A fleet reading the Trucking Conditions Index can judge whether rate momentum favours buying equipment; a shipper warned a year ahead of a capacity crunch can secure contracts before spot rates spike — the practical, money-saving uses that distinguish FTR's outlooks from general economic commentary.
Geographic Scope
FTR's scope is North America, with its deepest coverage of the United States. Its freight forecasts are modal and national, its equipment forecasts cover North American production for the U.S., Canadian and Mexican markets, and its analysis of cross-border dynamics — such as nearshoring shifting freight from ocean and east-west lanes to north-south truck routes — reflects trade across the continent. The firm's Bloomington base places it in the American Midwest's manufacturing and logistics heartland, close to Indiana University's transportation research community, while its audience of carriers, shippers and manufacturers is distributed across every freight corridor on the continent.
Digital Presence
FTR operates from ftrintel.com, where it publishes analyst blogs and videos — including its Today at FTR interview series — promotes its reports, indexes and events, and fields its subscription services. Its monthly index releases are distributed through the transportation trade press, including The Trucker, Overdrive, Truck News, CCJ and Logistics Management's Supply Chain 24/7, whose editors interview FTR analysts regularly. That syndication pattern makes FTR's numbers the common reference points of freight journalism: a single index release, written up across a dozen outlets, sets the terms in which the month's market is discussed by fleets and shippers who may never subscribe to the underlying report.
Significance
In an industry measured by far larger data companies, FTR's significance is its independence and longevity of method. Its forecasting framework descends from work begun in the 1970s, its leadership has spent entire careers inside one small Bloomington firm, and its monthly indexes and equipment forecasts have become shared vocabulary for North American freight — cited when Class 8 orders set records, when carrier conditions peak, and when shippers are warned that the market is turning. For a directory of news agencies and information services, FTR represents the specialist forecaster as news source: a firm whose product is judgement about the future, sold by subscription and validated in public, month after month, in the trade press.
Reading FTR's Forecasts
FTR's publications are designed to connect a headline number to the decisions behind it. A Class 8 forecast, for example, is not presented only as a production total; it is linked to freight demand, fleet capacity, replacement needs, order backlogs and the economic activity expected to generate loads. Likewise, its conditions indexes combine several inputs, so a decline can be traced to rates, volumes, capacity, fuel or financing rather than attributed vaguely to sentiment. Company presentations on the Freight-Cast model emphasise that chain from economic activity to commodity movement, modal choice and equipment demand. For subscribers, that transparency makes the forecast actionable and contestable: a fleet or manufacturer can substitute its own assumptions, see which link in the chain matters most, and plan orders or capacity around a view it understands rather than a black-box prediction.
