April freight stats show “substantial recovery” from post-covid delays, project44 says

The kinks and wrinkles that have bedeviled many pandemic-era logistics flows are finally beginning to get ironed out, according to data from supply chain visibility provider project44 that shows an April trend towards a “substantial recovery” from post-covid disruptions.

Among other data points, project44 found an 8% improvement in on-time truckload (TL) deliveries since November 2022. That data came from the “State of Full Truckload-April” section of the Chicago-based firm’s April 7 Supply Chain Insights report.

Despite that improvement, full truckload performance in the U.S. has not yet recovered to pre-Covid levels. “Prior to Covid-19, less than 20% of all loads were late. In the post-Covid environment, we have yet to see numbers return to these levels. In November 2021, we saw a low of 69.3% on-time loads. Thankfully from there, the market has steadily increased back to 77% in March 2023. This rate is still 11% lower than pre-Covid, but it is an 8% improvement from November 2022,” the firm said.

By another measure, February 2023 was the highest on-time performance in February for the past three years, and 2023 continues to be substantially better than 2022. “It appears that the worst is over, but there is still a long road to recovery,” the report said.

Project44 also tracked an improvement in ocean freight processing, noting that import dwell time decreased significantly from March 2022 to March 2023 across the Port of Los Angles (5.2 to 3.4 days), Port of Long Beach (5.9 to 2.5 days), Port of Houston (4.0 to 2.5 days), Port of Savannah (3.1 to 2.2 days), and Port of New York (3.9 to 2.0 days).

The firm defines “import dwell” as “the time from when a container arrives to its destination port to when it discharges,” according to the “State of Ocean-April” section of the same report.

Editor's note: This story was revised on April 12 to clarify the definition of terms in the report.