U. S. public policy toward for-hire transportation activity has undergone profound changes with dramatic rapidity in the past five years. A succession of Congressional legislation aimed at curtailing or eliminating federal economic regulation has reversed a tradition of increasingly complex and comprehensive controls which began formally with the Act to Regulate Commerce of 1887. The new policy environment is expected to have important impact on both users and providers of for-hire transport

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... vice, as well as upon the general public which both parties serve. It is subjecting the arguments of both advocates and opponents of transportation regulatory reform to the acid empirical test. This paper presents some of the initial findings of an empirical research effort designed to identify and evaluate the impacts of transportation deregulation, or regulatory reform, on selected aspects of the distribution activities of shipping and receiving organizations. The results to date reveal that the policy change has already had several clearly discernible affects on the distribution activities of the 251 respondents who participated in the survey upon which this paper is based. A large majority of the respondents reported that the impacts experienced thus far have been to their firm's advantage, and a smaller majority expressed the opinion that the affects will be positive for their firms over the course of the next five years.