IN Brief:
- Regional truck trips increased 3.8% while vehicle miles travelled rose 5.4% across Q4 2025 to Q2 2026.
- Geotab analysed activity from more than six million connected commercial vehicles across interstate corridors, cities, and ports.
- Last mile trip volumes increased while average trip distances fell, indicating changing distribution patterns closer to major markets.
Geotab has published a new analysis of US commercial vehicle movements showing regional freight activity growing faster than long-haul traffic, while last mile routes are becoming shorter across several large cities.
The Health of the U.S. Supply Chain report draws on aggregated telematics data from more than six million connected commercial vehicles across the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first two quarters of 2026. Geotab says the sample represents about 12% of US commercial traffic and covers major interstate corridors, large cities, and the country’s two busiest container port complexes.
Regional truck trips increased 3.8% across the three-quarter study period, while vehicle miles travelled rose 5.4%. Long-haul activity remained comparatively steady, indicating that the freight network continued to move without the same rate of expansion seen in shorter regional movements. The difference changes where fleets, terminals, and distribution capacity are being used even when national traffic appears broadly stable.
The report separates activity into long-haul, regional, hub-and-spoke, door-to-door, and drayage operations. Geotab analysed more than 1.2 million long-haul journeys per quarter and about one million regional trips, alongside roughly 230,000 hub-and-spoke movements. Its city analysis covered more than 50 million door-to-door delivery trips per quarter across Los Angeles, Denver, New York, and Atlanta.
Hub-and-spoke utilisation reached a three-quarter high of 84.3% after the normal post-holiday fall and recovery. Higher utilisation can improve asset productivity, but it also narrows the spare capacity available when demand changes quickly or a node is disrupted. Warehouses and cross-dock facilities connected to those networks therefore have less room to absorb late arrivals or sudden changes in outbound volume when equipment is already working closer to its available limit.
Last mile patterns moved differently again. Door-to-door trip volumes increased from the fourth-quarter baseline in all four cities, while average miles per trip fell between the first and second quarters. Los Angeles recorded the largest increase in trip volume, reaching nearly 40% above the Q4 baseline by Q2, while Atlanta posted a 24.5% increase in the second quarter. Denver’s average miles per trip fell 6.7% in Q1 and a further 19.7% in Q2.
The data is consistent with more localised delivery activity and denser routing, although the figures do not establish a single cause. Inventory may be positioned closer to demand, route planning may be improving, or customer mixes may be changing. The operational result is a larger number of shorter movements, placing more emphasis on local fleet scheduling, driver productivity, and the ability of distribution centres to process frequent dispatches.
Port activity produced another split. Geotab analysed roughly 254,000 port entries per quarter at Los Angeles and Long Beach and New York and New Jersey. Cargo activity at Los Angeles and Long Beach reached its strongest month of 2026 at around 12% above the previous year, while Geotab’s drayage data remained broadly flat. The company says that divergence points towards rail absorbing more of the additional port volume.
A modal shift of that kind can move pressure away from local drayage without reducing the amount of freight entering inland networks. Congestion and equipment constraints can instead reappear at rail ramps, inland terminals, or destination warehouses. Recent North American freight conditions have shown the same uneven pattern, with capacity pressure varying by mode, gateway, and commodity rather than moving uniformly across the market.
Geotab’s corridor analysis covers I-10, I-35, I-80/90, and I-95, giving the study east-west and north-south views of heavy truck movement. Because the source data comes from vehicle activity rather than invoices or survey responses, it provides a physical measure of how fleets are being used. It does not replace trade statistics, freight indices, or inventory data, but it can identify changes in route length, utilisation, and traffic mix before those shifts are obvious in broader economic measures.
The report also shows how fleet telematics is moving beyond vehicle management. Aggregated movement data can now be used to examine freight corridors, delivery density, port access, and modal changes across large networks. The quality of that analysis depends on sample composition and consistent definitions, but the dataset gives planners another way to test whether changes reported in rates or volumes are also visible in physical vehicle activity.
Geotab plans to publish the report on a recurring basis. That will make subsequent quarters more useful than the first snapshot because seasonal effects can be separated more clearly from persistent changes. If regional trips continue to rise while long-haul activity remains steady, warehouses, terminals, and fleet capacity closer to end markets will carry a larger share of the adjustment in US freight flows.
The first three quarters already show that aggregate freight volume can conceal very different operating conditions inside the network. Stable long-haul movements, higher regional activity, denser last mile routes, and flat drayage alongside stronger port volumes point to a supply chain changing shape rather than simply expanding or contracting as one system.
