Noël Perry
Noël Perry
Provoking the transportation market for more than 40 years.
Transport Futures is a North American Heavy Freight Consulting firm headed by the transportation economist, Noël Perry. It is the third iteration of the consulting firm founded by Mr. Perry in 2008. The previous two are Transport Fundamentals and Transportation Economics. The services provided by the three iterations are similar, although this latest version is explicitly focused on the rapidly changing future of transportation and supply chain operations.
Mr. Perry performs the bulk of work within the firm but will engage similar experts when the subject matter or scope of work requires. His most significant collaboration is with Larry Gross of Gross Consulting on matters pertaining to intermodal transport.
Transport Futures deals with all matters of freight transport within North America, with special emphasis on truckload, rail, intermodal and domestic water markets. The firm follows all aspects of transportation, from strategy, to market sizing, to operations, to technology, to modal competition, to pricing, to regulation and public policy. It maintains an extensive historical database and will forecast out to 2040. In addition to transport economics, Transport Futures has an abiding interest in macro-economics and its interaction with transport as well as the intersection between transport and supply chain design.

Although independent, Transport Futures has a close relationship with Inbound Logistics; Truckstop.com, the Internet load board; TransSafe Consulting; Gross Consulting; and Women in Transportation. It also maintains working relationships with a wide range of logistical organizations, including the Transportation Intermediary Association and Tucker Worldwide. It is no longer affiliated with FTR Intelligence, a partner organization from 2008 until the end of 2017.
Transport Futures is physically located in Cornwall, Pennsylvania about 30 miles east of Harrisburg. It accepts engagements throughout the United States and Canada, having served customers from Southern California to Washington State, to Ontario, Canada, to Maine, to Florida. Normal business hours are 8 AM to 5 PM Eastern Time, although Mr. Perry will gladly accept calls from 7 AM to 10 PM, seven days a week.


Read More About Noël
Noël Perry continues to be endlessly fascinated by transportation.
By the time he w
as born—1946, Summerville, New Jersey—he already had transportation rolling through his DNA. His father and grandfather both were Pennsylvania Railroad employees. His brother was a railman. His early memories also fueled his passion for transportation. Among the first:
“We lived on the first floor of an old Victorian house in Flemington, New Jersey. Behind it was a roundhouse. In the evening, when the commuter engines would come back into the roundhouse, my mother would prop me up on the sink and we’d watch the trains go by. I was about two. I also remember waiting at the station in Lambertville, north of Trenton. My father was coming up from Philadelphia, and the train was pulled. By steam locomotive. And I remember riding behind steam on the Redding.”
At five, after his father died, Noël grew up in roadhouse Philadelphia, spending his school years in a very good yet, nonetheless, charity school (“like Hogwarts without the magic”) that was reachable by trolley cars.
Noël took his first job, in 1968, as a loading dock manager. Soon after, joining the Air Force, he trained and stationed around the country—San Antonio, Sacramento, Merced, northern Maine, Westover—before tours of duty in Vietnam.
“In essence,” he says, “I had a logistics job in the service. I learned about fuel load, efficiency, timing, geography, planning and teamwork. That’s the advantage of the military: responsibility and work habits. As an officer, you’re responsible for managing yourself.”
By his last year in the service, Noël knew he wanted to study logistics at Harvard. Never one to bide his time, he took a job as a trucker for most of a year before studies began.
At Harvard, Noël was the research assistant to the assistant dean at the Department of Economics, John Meyer, who is acknowledged as creating the discipline of transportation economics. That connection opened doors to government work, studying productivity in mass transit. (“We were the guys who recommend articulated buses, back in 1975, that we use today in New York City.”)
Walter Gropius, architect and founder of The Bauhaus, taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. During Noël’s time there, the school moved away from design and toward economics. This combination created an interesting situation: is economics a design discipline like architecture? Noël will tell you economics is more an analytical discipline, one with design aspects to it, of which he references and uses frequently. Still, economics has an efficiency affect rather than an aesthetic effect.
Harvard’s combination is one example of many: cross-disciplines, clashing and melding, with students and experts campaigning to make order from seemingly disparate disciplines that often have competing agendas. Noël thrives in such a milieu.
“Harvard is one hundred percent the case method,” he says. “You’re graded heavily on your class participation. I was graded on my ability to speak about transportation. A large difference was that others were book smart, whereas I knew a lot about transportation, from experience.”
That participation solidified for Noël’s passion for public speaking. Today, it serves as one of the many reasons why audiences appreciate his provocative, engaging and insightful presentations.
His endless fascination with transportation combines with a true passion about his work and a thorough grounding in the details. From that, he explores the edge of the envelope: the extreme elements of the industry that grab his attention. “My specialty,” he says, “is the counterintuitive hypothesis.” Though sometimes he may seem to provoke just for the sake of provoking, he always has statistics and analysis to back up the provocation.
Brent Hutto, Chief Relationship Officer of Truckstop.com puts it simply and directly: “You’re gonna be less wrong if you use Noël.”
Another way to look at the arc of Noël’s career: Since 1976, he’s been an analyst, sometimes closely connected with operations. Before that, he was in operations. With deep study in the disciplines of observation, he’s trained to see things other people don’t.
Through Public Speaking engagements and Market Research: Transport Futures has become the perfect synthesis of Noël Perry’s work experience and analytical expertise.
Susan Collins
Susan Collins
Consultant.
Susan Collins is President of 63rd & Eliot, a marketing firm in Gainesville, GA, established in 2015, and serves as a Business Development Consultant to Transport Futures.
Susan is a transportation and logistics professional with more than 15 years of leadership experience. Her focus includes deepening relationships with associations, media companies, financial institutions and interest groups that serve the carrier, broker and shipper markets and developing beneficial interactions between these markets that will lead to improved customer access to and understanding of Transport Futures’ products.
Prior to joining Transport Futures, Susan served as Director of Industry Relations for Truckstop.com, the Internet’s first load board, and Vice President of Agent Relations for GTO 2000 Inc., a non-asset based transportation brokerage.
Susan resides in Gainesville with her husband Tim. They have raised two daughters, Erin and Jillian.
Contact Susan HERE.
