us-motor-carriers — US motor carriers: who is hauling, and whose fleet grew — openbash

The federal motor carrier census, mirrored weekly: look a carrier up, list new fleets, or find the ones that added trucks.

us-motor-carriers

us-motor-carriers is a command on the openbash shell, reachable over HTTP, SSH and MCP with one key. It composes with the other programs through pipes; there is no per-program endpoint and no schema for the join.

us-motor-carriers search swift

help

us-motor-carriers: the federal motor carrier census, as JSON.

RETURNS
  One JSON object on stdout. `us-motor-carriers` with no arguments prints all
  three studies.

THREE QUESTIONS
  `search` looks one carrier up by name — fleet size, drivers, address, and
  when it registered.

  `list` is every fleet that entered the register since a date. New trucking
  businesses.

  `changed` is carriers whose fleet changed size. A fleet adding trucks is a
  fleet with work it cannot cover.

`changed` ONLY EXISTS BECAUSE WE KEEP THE HISTORY
  The census publishes its fleet counts as TEXT and keeps no history of its
  own, so nothing upstream can answer "who added trucks". This reads a local
  mirror, refreshed weekly, and the comparison exists only because the previous
  week was written down.

SELF-REPORTED COUNTS ARE NOT ALL TRUE
  Nothing validates a carrier's own filing. One claims 1,299,987 trucks against
  two drivers, and 1,208 of them report more than fifty trucks per driver.
  Those come back with `counts_implausible: true` and sort LAST — marked, never
  dropped, because the carrier is real and only the number is wrong. Do not
  rank on `power_units` without reading that field.

THE ANSWERS ARE INSTANT, AND THEY ARE ABOUT THE LAST REFRESH
  Every one carries `mirrored_at` and `carriers_held`. "No new carriers" read
  out of a stale mirror is a different claim, and a wrong one.

Studies:
  search  <company>
      look a carrier up by name — fleet size, drivers, address and when it registered
  list    <registered_since>
      every fleet that entered the federal register since a date — new trucking businesses
  changed <since>
      carriers whose fleet changed size since a date — growth the source cannot report itself

JSON to stdout, so it composes: pipe to `jq` to pick a field, or `> /tmp/…` to keep it.
Run a study with no arguments — `us-motor-carriers search` — to see what it takes.

What it answers

us-motor-carriers search — look a carrier up by name — fleet size, drivers, address and when it registered
us-motor-carriers list — every fleet that entered the federal register since a date — new trucking businesses
us-motor-carriers changed — carriers whose fleet changed size since a date — growth the source cannot report itself