Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Bob Labick, with CJS Securities.
Bob Labick – CJS Securities
Good afternoon.
Aaron Todd
Hi, Bob.
Bob Labick – CJS Securities
Hi, a couple questions. First, I wanted to touch on Same-Base Transports, and I am trying to do this quickly, obviously, but if you take out weather and the hurricane impact that you gave us a range for, it might have been down in the 9% to 10% range in October appears to be, if you back out weather maybe 8%-ish, so it appears to be improving a little bit, but it’s still a big number, and I think miles driven and accidents on the highways is probably the main driver there. Could you tell us what the other drivers are, and what you’re seeing in those trends?
Aaron Todd
Well, we know that certainly, miles driven is a key factor. It’s kind of hard to estimate perfectly, but somewhere between 50% to 60% of our transports are directly or indirectly related to road travel, so any reduction in miles driven is going to have a commensurate impact, and certainly over the summer months, with the spike in fuel prices and certainly softness in the economy, the Department of Transportation was showing mid-to-high single digit reductions in total miles driven by Americans on rural highways and in totality, so we know that’s having some impact.
The hope would be that with the fairly significant reductions in fuel prices, we’ll start to see some restoration of road travel that, obviously, has a bearing on the demand for our service. Certainly, as we’ve talked with many of our hospital customers, they certainly are experiencing a reduction in ER admissions, just generally speaking.
So there is also, I’m sure, a component of that softness that’s related to just a lower activity level within the US population as the economy slows, but certainly, I think it’s fair to say that we saw a bottoming out in September and we started to see some improvement, some of that obviously was weather-related and it’s hard to say, but I think we’ll still see some softness in Same-Base Transports for a season while we see how quickly lower fuel prices has an impact, and to what extent.
I think the good news, as we mentioned is that we also are going through pretty easy comp months relative to weather cancellations as was evidenced in October as that significantly improved our Same-Base Transports were only down 4.5% partly because of improved weather cancellation variances.
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