You have a shipment that doesn’t fit anywhere. It’s more than a couple of pallets, so regular LTL either won’t take it or wants to surcharge it. But it’s nowhere near enough to fill a whole trailer, so paying for a full truckload feels like setting money on fire. You’re stuck in the gap, and nobody built a lane for you.
Except somebody did. This in-between spot is exactly what shared-space shipping is for. The trick is picking the right kind of shared space for the freight you actually have.
Why the gap exists in the first place
Traditional LTL is built around dry-van terminal networks. It works great for a few standard, stackable pallets. Push past that and the system starts to strain. Big LTL networks commonly reject or surcharge shipments of roughly six or more pallets, or anything long and hard to handle. Their pricing rules, the Density Minimum Charge and the Linear Foot Charge chief among them, exist to price out low-density and long freight or to recover cost after the fact. That’s how a quote you thought was settled balloons on the invoice.
A full truckload solves the handling problem but creates a new one: you pay for the entire deck whether you use it or not. If your freight takes up a third of the trailer, you’re covering the other two-thirds for no reason.
So the real question isn’t “LTL or full truck.” It’s “which shared-space mode fits my freight.”
Two ways to share space
There are two clean answers, and they split on one thing: does your freight need an open deck?
- Volume LTL (shared dry van). Your pallets are standard height, they stack, and they fit inside a dry van. You’ve got more than a normal LTL shipment but less than a full truckload. Volume LTL gives you shared-truckload economics without the full-truck price, and without bouncing through the terminal network the way small LTL shipments do.
- Partial flatbed (open-deck LTL). Your freight is tall, long, heavy, or oddly shaped. It loads better from the side or top than through the back of a van. Think machinery, structural steel, tanks, or a crated unit that won’t play nice inside a box. Partial flatbed puts your load on shared deck space alongside other partial loads, and you pay only for the deck space you use.
Here’s the quick gut check.
| Your freight | Best fit |
|---|---|
| Standard pallets, stackable, fits in a van | Volume LTL |
| Tall, long, heavy, or open-deck by nature | Partial flatbed |
| Genuinely fills a whole trailer | Full flatbed or FTL (Comet National) |
The partial flatbed sweet spot is roughly under ten feet of deck space and under about 10,000 pounds. If your load lives there, you’re in the right place.
The part that saves your budget
The reason partial flatbed matters isn’t just that you share the deck. It’s that the quote is locked in. Your partial flatbed quote is not subject to the Density Minimum Charge or the Linear Foot Charge. We quote a number, and that is the number. A locked-in quote is a feature, not a favor, and you shouldn’t need a logistics department to get one.
There’s a speed benefit too. Partial loads can dispatch direct from origin to destination instead of sitting through hub-and-spoke terminals. Fewer handoffs means less handling, less damage exposure, and less time lost on a dock. If you want the full picture on the charges that wreck flatbed-type freight bills, our breakdown at /blog/ltl-accessorial-charges-explained walks through how a modest quote can balloon.
When it really is a full truckload
Sometimes the honest answer is that your freight has outgrown partial. If you’re filling a trailer, or you need oversized specialty open-deck, reefer, or a dedicated full van, pointing you to shared space would just slow you down. That’s when we hand you up the menu to our parent company, Comet National Shipping, which handles full flatbed, full and partial reefer, oversized open-deck, transload, and distribution. Recommending the right mode, even when it isn’t the flagship, is the whole point.
That’s how everybody wins. You pay for the space your freight actually needs, the carrier fills deck space that would’ve run empty, and your load moves on schedule.
Stuck in the gap? Send us the load that LTL won’t take and we’ll price it for the space it needs. Get a locked-in quote at /get-a-quote or call (800) 831-5376.