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The primary reason that trucking companies go out of business is same reason there are so many trucking companies in the first place that is to say it does not take much capital to gain entry into the market relative to a railroad, airline or ocean carrier. One starts off with a truck as an owner/operator and then when there is sufficient capital built up buys a trailer and goes out on your own. Then one truck becomes two trucks etc. In order to gain business one only has to offer rates a few cents a mile lower than the competition. If you can control your overheads then you can make money at a lower margin. As companies grow the overheads grow and the complexity of the organization grows requiring higher margins thereby always leaving traffic available for the low cost carriers. Since the margins are so slim for most carriers it only takes a spike in one or two items such as insurance rates or fuel prices to cause many of them to go out of business. <br /> The previous comments have been quite right about working for a low rate of pay per hour. Truckers like most railroad operating crews get paid by the mile and as a result there is a lot of unproductive time that they are really on duty for and should be showing on their logs that they don't get paid for. They usually have to fight to get paid for waiting time getting loaded, unloaded, clearing customs and sitting in traffic. This causes the rate of pay per hour of work to be significantly lower from what it appeared to be when they signed on with a carrier. The result of this coupled with long periods of time away from home is a high turnover rate. Unless a company has a steady stream of new recruits coming on line it is then saddled with the cost of under utilized equipment. <br /> Keep in mind that the legal hours of service per week is 60 hours and in Canada this is being increased to 84 hours per week. <br /> When the trucking industry tries to counter the railroad industry's claim that it doesn't pay its fair share it always likes to include fuel taxes in the amount of tax money paid for infrastructure. In most jurisdictions' fuel tax money goes into general revenue to fund many government programs if for no other reason that the other programs have no tax base to provide a similar amount of money. They fail to remember that railroads also pay fuel tax to most jurisdictions and practically none of that money goes back into paying for railroad infrastructure. <br /> The infrastructure costs of a railroad are sunk costs that cannot be easily moved if the flow of traffic changes unlike the trucking industry which just puts more trucks on to handle the volume in any direction. It is then up to the funding authorities to expand the infrastructure to meet up with the demand. With governments becoming more strapped for cash and the highway system basically being built more and more new highways will be built as toll highways.
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