Oh Maine! Why must you be so heartless.
Your frigid temperatures scare away any truck drivers.
No one wishes to venture into your vast wildernesses.
Except a few unlucky residents.
In the winter they want to travel somewhere sunny.
But no, Oh Maine! You stop them in their tracks.
You tell them if you want to leave, you must do so yourself.
I will not let a truck driver pick up your car in my commonwealth.
-uncredited
One of our dispatchers here was bored while I was writing up this article and wrote this “poem”.
Maine has a hard time letting people go, and Vermont to an extent as well. Most of our customers have experienced either extremely high prices or just a lack of available drivers when trying to ship from this area. We call this an auto transport dead zone.
What we do is a sort of hybrid option for our customers in Maine. We do our best to find a transporter coming from Maine (don’t be misled by this article, it does happen). Once we’ve exhausted all of our options we switch over to Plan B which is to meet a carrier coming from Boston. Often times it’s necessary to bite the bullet and meet the driver in Boston, but it can sometimes take a while to find a carrier from there also, especially in the middle of winter.
My recommendation to anyone shipping from Maine is plan ahead and be flexible. Give your broker at least 2 weeks before any scheduled flight or departure. It makes the process a lot easier for everyone.