As a non-asset-based carrier, US 1 Network needed visibility into a fleet it doesn’t own amid the industrywide challenge of thin margins. Its long-running partnership with Transflo and Geotab turned compliance, safety, and paperwork into a single ecosystem.

US 1 Network is a non-asset-based carrier that has operated on the agency model for the past 21 years. Founded by two industry veterans from Landstar, the company represents 12 operating authorities and works with 75 to 80 agents across some 200 locations nationwide.

Those agents span flatbed, intermodal, drayage, and freight brokerage, and they contract with independent owner-operators. US 1 Network provides the backbone those independent businesses need to compete: insurance, safety and compliance, and working capital.

Because US 1 owns no trucks, everything depends on managing a network that’s unlike a traditional asset-based carrier. As Executive Vice President Mark Chandler puts it, the company is “successful when the agents are successful.”

The Challenge: Accountability Without Assets

A non-asset-based carrier faces a structural problem: how do you maintain safety, compliance, and visibility across a fleet of independent contractors whose cabs you don’t own?

Two pressures made the job harder. Insurance, the single largest cost US 1 passes through to its agents, kept climbing in an increasingly litigious environment, and every incident on record raised the stakes. At the same time, driver turnover across non-asset carriers runs punishingly high, making retention a constant battle.

The safety technology US 1 started with didn’t help much. Before adopting Geotab GO Focus cameras, the company relied on SD card-based dash cams. When an accident happened, US 1 had to mail the driver a shipping label, wait for the card to arrive, and hope the footage was there. It often wasn’t. “A lot of times the SD card, it didn’t maybe record that accident,” Barry Hass, Vice President of Contractor Services at US 1 Logistics, said. “It was lost in transit with UPS.” The success rate on capturing an incident sat at just 5 to 10%.

On the back office side, the picture was similar. Dispatchers had little ability to track trucks in real time, as the legacy setup required installing add-ons. Many dispatchers had no idea where their trucks were without calling the driver. Paperwork had to be physically carried to a dispatcher and scanned, slowing billing and frustrating owner-operators who needed payment.

The Solution: One Ecosystem Across Safety, Compliance, and Operations

US 1 Network’s relationship with Transflo began more than a decade ago with simple document processing and has grown into a full partnership spanning the Transflo Mobile+ app, Geotab ELDs, GO Focus AI dash cams, GO Anywhere trailer trackers, and a custom TMS integration. As Geotab’s No. 1 reseller, Transflo and Assured Telematics brought the two systems together into a single stack.

GO Focus cameras have been especially important. US 1 now runs 750 of them across its contracted fleet. Unlike the old SD cards, GO Focus is cloud-based and triggers an incident automatically after experiencing a set amount of G-force, so footage is available within minutes whether the driver presses a button. The company chose it after seeing it at a Geotab convention: cost-effective and far more capable than what it replaced.

The rollout reshaped onboarding, too. Installing and verifying each camera gave US 1’s team a natural opening to talk with every new owner-operator to walk through Hours of Service, safety, and compliance. That turned hardware installation into a relationship.

Beyond cameras, the Geotab and Transflo ecosystem now handles Hours of Service monitoring aligned to FMCSA rules, document management and workflow, IFTA and idling reports, and live GPS tracking. Custom development from Assured Telematics by Transflo even flags when a camera is unhealthy or has been unplugged, so US 1 can bring drivers back into compliance quickly.

Crucially, it all lives in one portal.

Having an ecosystem that is customizable is key … we can access it in one spot, but we can also customize it on how we want to access it. And that really has changed how we do things.

—Barry Hass Vice President of Contractor Services, US 1 Logistics

From an IT standpoint, that consolidation is the win. “We’re decreasing the amount of vendors that we’re having to utilize,” said John Sellers, VP of IT services. Meshing Geotab and Transflo means US 1 isn’t juggling multiple APIs, data streams, or support teams and isn’t worrying about whether an owner-operator is on Android or Apple, which drives adoption up.

When US 1 made Transflo aware of a problem with drivers missing expiring CDLs and medical cards, Transflo built a live expiring-credentials screen backed by escalating push notifications. The custom TMS integration delivered live dispatch and full-lifecycle document flow faster than US 1 expected.

The Results: Higher Retrieval, Fewer Accidents, Faster Billing

  • Accident-footage retrieval up roughly 8x. GO Focus took US 1 from a 5-10% success rate on SD cards to 40-50% almost immediately, and to 75-80% two years in.
  • Fewer accidents. Since deploying telematics and cameras, US 1 has seen a reduction in accidents, which the team attributes to more focused, aware drivers.
  • Driver exoneration on questionable claims. Cloud footage has cleared US 1 drivers in staged “insurance scam” rear-end incidents that would otherwise have been ruled their fault.
  • Faster, cleaner billing. Proof-of-delivery paperwork that once took days now flows back live, with higher image quality reducing chargebacks and kickbacks, so agents get paid faster.

For US 1, the payoff shows up where the business is hardest — claims and insurance. Faster, clearer visibility into what happened on the road lets the team resolve claims professionally and quickly. It also demonstrates to shippers and brokers that US 1 is a safe, established carrier that isn’t risky to work with.

The industry is struggling to determine what is a safe carrier. So, providing statistical analysis, providing the metrics, we’re able to demonstrate that we meet those criteria.

—Mark Chandler Executive Vice President, US 1 Network

“I would strongly recommend Geotab and Transflo,” Chandler said, offering advice to another executive weighing up a telematics platform. “I would highly recommend it to anybody looking to enhance their operation, their fleet, and communication.”