Z-Day (Getting To Zero Day) - What Does That Really Mean?

Illinois - 97.53%
Maine - 96.38%
Indiana - 92.71%
Alabama - 91.97%
Kentucky - 89.77%
Oklahoma - 89.65%

Now that I've declared on/about June 17th to be Z-Day, I've decided to give some thought as to what GTZ actually means in practical terms. Can we really get to zero on/about that day? Probably not.

Here's why:

On any given day, we are "blindsided" by a set of carrier data I have labelled "sideways adds". These are carriers who show up on today's unregistered list, but who weren't on the list yesterday. For those of you who may have forgotten, these additions can happen a couple of different ways.

First, a carrier may have gotten re-classified. In other words, they were classified as something other than an active, interstate carrier yesterday. Perhaps they were labelled as intrastate, inactive or a registrant.

Second, some state may have uploaded to MCMIS an inspection or a crash where there were none for a carrier yesterday. This creates carrier "activity", which moves the carrier into the hallowed inner ring of the UCR Universe.

On a typical day, we here in Illinois generate a "sideways add" list of about 6 carriers. Some days it's a dozen and some days it's two, but 6 is about the norm.

So .... even if we register the last ten carriers on today's list, we will probably get some new carriers via the "sideways add" process tomorrow morning. It's kind of like the half-life of uranium.

And so it goes ... "Getting to Zero" probably really means "Getting To Six", but that's OK --- we're going to call it "Getting To Zero" anyway!

And if we get fees, who knows?!?

Have a great holiday weekend!