Cargo shift is one of the rarest things that happens to a truck. It is also, by one federal measure, the single most dangerous. Those two facts together explain why load securement spending is so hard to justify inside a company, and why the justification is usually built on the wrong number.
Read also: Global Air Cargo Tonnages Rise 5% in August 2026
The number that should change the conversation
FMCSA’s Large Truck Crash Causation Study examined a nationally representative sample of 141,000 large trucks involved in fatal and injury crashes over 33 months. Cargo shift was coded for around 6,000 of those trucks, roughly 4%. On frequency alone it looks like a rounding error next to brake problems, which showed up in 29% of cases.
Then there is the relative risk ratio. The study calculated one for each of 19 factors, measuring how much more likely a crash becomes when the factor is present. Brake problems scored 2.7. Cargo shift scored 56.3, the highest of all 19 factors examined. It was the least common factor with the most severe association.
I want to be careful with this figure, because it gets quoted loosely. The LTCCS data covers crashes from April 2001 through December 2003 and the analysis brief was published in July 2007. Trailer design, telematics and enforcement have all moved since. FMCSA has not published a comparable causation study since, which means the best available number on this question is also an old one. That is a real limitation and anyone building a business case on it should say so out loud rather than presenting 2003 data as current.
What has not changed is the shape of the risk. Low frequency, high severity is the category that budgets systematically underfund, because the annual expected loss looks small right up until the year it does not.
Rare enough to feel safe
The frequency data is consistent across modes and it consistently argues for complacency.
In the 2002 rulemaking that produced the current securement standard, FMCSA noted that shifting or falling cargo was a contributing factor in less than one percent of accidents self-reported by motor carriers. On the rail side, the Federal Railroad Administration’s accident database tells a similar story. In 2025, across the four primary cause codes covering shifted loads, loads falling from cars, improperly loaded cars and improperly applied trailer or container tiedowns, FRA recorded 31 train accidents. That is 1.3% of the 2,343 train accidents reported that year.
A plant manager looking at 1.3% will not fund much. Which is the trap, because the same dataset carries the severity figure alongside the frequency figure.
Severity per event, which is where the money is
Those 31 rail accidents in 2025 carried $3,977,455 in reported damage between them. That is an average of about $128,000 per accident, and it counts only track, equipment and structures. It does not include the lading itself, the clearing operation, or the traffic held behind the incident.
Widen the window and the pattern holds. Taking only the primary cause code for a shifted load, FRA recorded 100 such train accidents between 2015 and 2025, with $17,039,864 in reported damage. That works out near $170,000 per accident across eleven years.
Compare that to the cost of filling the void. This is the arithmetic that makes the case, and it is not close. A load’s worth of dunnage air bags is a consumable expense measured in tens of dollars. One prevented incident at the FRA average pays for the bags on several thousand loads. You do not need the safety argument to reach a decision. The maintenance-of-way repair bill gets you there on its own.
The damage bill that never reaches an accident report
Crashes and derailments are the visible tail. The larger, duller cost is freight that arrives broken, and almost none of it appears in any government safety statistic.
TT Club, the transport and logistics insurer, reports that 66% of incidents related to cargo damage in the intermodal supply chain can be attributed in part to poor practice in the overall packing process. It estimates the cost to marine, aviation and transport insurers at more than USD 500 million each year, and notes that total economic losses run substantially higher than the insured portion.
Read that 66% carefully, because it is the most useful number in this article. It does not say packing causes two thirds of cargo damage. It says poor packing practice is a contributing factor in two thirds of damage incidents. For anyone deciding where to spend a securement budget, contributing factor is the right frame. It means the load-securing step is present in the causal chain of most damage events, which makes it an unusually efficient place to intervene compared with fixes that address one failure mode only.
The National Cargo Bureau put numbers to how common poor practice is. Across 500 containers inspected for its container inspection safety initiative, 55% had at least one deficiency and 43% had cargo securing deficiencies specifically. Among imported dangerous goods containers, securing failures ran at 44%. NCB also published a telling comparison: containers it inspected in the ordinary course of business failed at 7.9%, against 38% for the targeted US dangerous goods export sample. Targeted looking finds far more than routine looking does, which is worth remembering before treating any low internal defect rate as reassurance.
That study reflects roughly 2018 conditions on a 500-container sample, so it is a signal about practice rather than a current industry-wide rate. It remains the most specific public figure available, and a 43% securing deficiency rate is not a rounding error.
The out-of-service cost that budgets ignore entirely
There is a third cost line, and it is the one most likely to hit a P&L this quarter.
Cargo securement was the vehicle focus area for the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s 2026 International Roadcheck. Across 54,575 inspections, inspectors wrote 1,724 cargo securement out-of-service violations, a 12.4% out-of-service rate that ranked securement fourth among all vehicle violation categories. In 2025 it ranked fifth with 1,549 violations. The rank moved up.
An out-of-service order is not a fine. It is a truck that stops where it is until the load is corrected, with the driver’s hours running, the delivery window gone, and the carrier’s safety score taking the hit that follows it into future insurance negotiations. That cost is immediate, quantifiable, and entirely absent from most conversations about whether to spend money on void fill.
Four numbers to build the internal case
If you are trying to fund a securement standard rather than argue about one, gather these before the meeting.
- Your damage claim rate per thousand shipments, split by lane and by whether the load was braced. Most operations have the claims data and have never cut it this way.
- The fully loaded cost of one out-of-service event on your worst lane, including driver hours, the missed appointment and the reload.
- Consumable cost per load for the bracing method under consideration, which for dunnage air bags usually lands in the noise next to a single claim.
- Tiedown labour per load. Under FMCSA’s minimum-tiedown rules, bracing an article against forward movement reduces the required count to one tiedown per ten feet of length, against a floor of two for unbraced articles over five feet. That is a recurring labour saving, not a one-off.
The fourth one surprises people, because it means the bracing method can partly pay for itself in strapping time before any claim is avoided.
Where dunnage air bags fit, and where they do not
Dunnage air bags address one failure mode: freight with room to move. It does that well and cheaply, and the regulation names it directly, since 49 CFR 393.106(b) lists dunnage bags among the acceptable means of immobilising cargo.
It does not address overloading, a poorly built pallet, a load that was too heavy for its packaging before it left the line, or a tiedown at the wrong angle. A securement standard that consists only of bags is a standard with holes in it. Material choice matters too: paper bags suit dry domestic over-the-road moves, while polywoven construction is the usual choice where there is moisture, rough handling or an intermodal leg, and suppliers of Dunnage Air Bags split their ranges on that basis.
The honest version of the pitch is narrow. Bags remove the gap. Removing the gap is implicated in most damage events and is cheap to do. Nothing about that claim requires the 56.3 figure to be current.
FAQs
Is there a published ROI figure for load securement spending?
Not one I can point to from an authoritative source. TT Club’s USD 500 million annual insurer cost and FRA’s per-accident damage figures are real and citable, but neither is a return-on-investment calculation, and I would treat any vendor claiming a specific payback multiple as marketing rather than data until they show the underlying method.
Does a low internal damage rate mean the current method is adequate?
Not necessarily. NCB’s 7.9% routine failure rate against 38% on targeted inspection suggests that how hard you look determines what you find. A low rate measured by nobody looking closely is weak evidence.
Which cost line usually moves a decision fastest?
In my experience the out-of-service event, because it lands on an identifiable lane, in an identifiable quarter, with a name attached to it. Claims data is more accurate and less persuasive, since it arrives as an average.
How current is the 56.3 relative risk figure?
It comes from crashes between April 2001 and December 2003, published July 2007. It is the most authoritative figure available on cargo shift’s crash association and it is more than two decades old. Cite it with the date attached.
