Meet Transfix, a start-up that fashions itself "Uber for trucks"

[thelakelander]

Transfix is a digital freight marketplace that CEO and co-founder Drew McElroy hopefully but not naively calls the "Uber for trucks." Last week the company won the Six Minute Pitch contest for transportation start-ups held at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board. The previous winner, TransitScreen, has since gone on to big things, and with nearly $2 million raised to date and Barnes & Noble an early adopter, Transfix is already charting its own course for success.

"If you read the studies, they tell you a tremendous amount of money is lost every year from people sitting in traffic," McElroy tells CityLab. "Obviously having trucks in that traffic that are empty is wasteful and ridiculous."

At its core, Transfix is a logistics company. The traditional style of matching drivers here and loads there through a series of phone calls takes a freight broker several hours, says McElroy. Even after all that effort trucks end up with the types of inefficient matches shown above; using a rather generous assumption of 8 percent empty miles, McElroy calculates that U.S. commercial trucks drive 19 billion needless miles each year, clogging roads, wearing down infrastructure, and burning fuel.

Full article: http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/01/the-trucking-of-tomorrow-is-here-and-its-a-huge-win-for-city-traffic/384672/