We have long-term margin targets that are not being changed, and we’re confident in our ability to win and grow with our customers at acceptable returns.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from Chris Wetherbee with Citigroup. Please proceed.Chris Wetherbee Hey, thanks. Good afternoon. Darren, may be sticking with you here, just in terms of just the outlook for Intermodal for 2023, you’re pretty clear on the last conference call about your expectations for growth from the business. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but just want to make sure I understand sort of what your expectations are for whether it be revenue loads, profit for the segment for 2023 and what maybe has changed if anything?Darren Field So listen, on the first — on the fourth quarter call back in January, I did say I expect it to grow revenue loads and income.
J.B. Hunt’s growth company, that’s our expectation around here every day, no matter what the conditions. That statement wasn’t intended to be guidance, but clearly that’s how it was interpreted. Again, as we go through the year, we’re working with customers, talking to them about what their expectations are and that largely defines our own.And as we go through — as we were coming into the year, we’ve probably had a lot of confidence in demand growth as 2023 went on. At this point, our customers have been less accurate than ever before. And so, we’re still waiting to see what happens. As far as an update to that statement, I don’t have an update for you. I know our system is built to handle 15% to 20% more as I said in my prepared comments and we look forward to growing with our customers through the rest of the year.Operator Thank you for your question.
Our next question is from Justin Long with Stephens. Please proceed.Justin Long Thanks. Good afternoon. Maybe I’ll just take a step back from Intermodal and John Roberts. I had a high level question for you. So, if we see weakness in the freight market and the economy persists into the second half, how does that change the way you think about managing the business in terms of both your growth plans and the cost structure? And are you already making any pivots today based on how your expectations for the rest of the year have evolved?John Roberts Hey, Justin. Well, I think the real question is the timing, Darren, said it. I talked to Shelley earlier today about the same idea that it’s not really a question of if the freight demand will come back to normal.
It’s just really a question of when. And having the experience that we have around this table has really helped us position our thinking and our direction because we’ve been through freight cycles in the past. Some of us have been through quite a number of freight cycles in the past. And so, we know these times are coming. And if you look at what we’ve done with the company over the last maybe 10 years or so, every time we go through a cycle, we learn something about how our business runs up and then back down. And we have made very serious and intentional decisions about, for instance, how we place assets. You’ll note that, I think Brad in your comments, we’ve transitioned essentially all of the power into dedicated where we can monitor it differently because we can see things in dedicated business model in a way that we like differently than we can sometimes see in a network mode.And so, if we look at where we are right now, and we think, oh well, maybe this timing we didn’t quite get that right.
That’s going to be part of the reality that we live in. And because we have the experience and because the folks that are around this table have made mistakes and made good decisions, I think we’re really just questioning how we — how we time our reentry into a more normalized system. Now we are in leadership positions in many of our businesses. And our customers really appreciate that. We can handle scale. And so we don’t want to lose any of that positioning value. I can say that right now, as we started to see the year presented itself a little differently than we had expected from our planning sessions, immediate action and intense focus has been taken on elements of cost. As Darren pointed out, we’re running our playbooks through bids.
I think Nick will comment on what his business looks like, what we’re seeing in the world Highway Services. Those things are teaching us that we got to be a maybe a little bit more fluid. It’s a word that Shelley used with me earlier today. And I am aware, of course, we’re not going to speak of details, but I’m aware of many efforts and elements that are ongoing today that will really continue to help us stay healthy. While we get to that other side which we know is not a question of if it will present itself but when. So we just have to be patient and careful and thoughtful.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question is from Amit Mehrotra with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.Amit Mehrotra Thanks, operator. Hey, Darren. I just want to circle back on the bit compliance.
I think a couple of quarters ago you talked 60% to 70%. Where is that number now? Just trying to get a sense. And then just you’ve always talked about a lot of cost in the system that can come out. And so, I guess, another way to ask that, when I look at operating profit dollars per load, it’s basically almost doubled from 2020 to 2022. And I guess the question is, how much of that gain do you think you can hold on to as the volume environment remains challenging and that there’s like a pricing reset really at the start of the back half of the year. So bit compliance and then kind of talk about your ability to maintain the line on operating profit dollars per load?Darren Field And it is impressive how you guys get more than one question in.
So bit compliance is sub 60, middle 50’s. It’s terrible. It’s an all-time worst. So we’ll see when that improves. Obviously, our transcontinental business is largely tied to imported goods and there’s real significant challenge with bid compliance on that business is pretty poor. The cost takeout, one of the thoughts there has been, hey, we had weakness in velocity, so spreading the fixed cost of owning the equipment over more loads with better velocity is a cost takeout, but that comes with volume. We had driver productivity challenges as a result of poor rail service. And as rail service improves, we get stronger driver productivity and better utilization of our drayage assets. That’s a cost takeout on per load economics.And then just staffing and overhead and how do we pour more loads over the system without adding overhead?
And all of those actions are available to us that come with volume. Will we sustain the current op income per load? I don’t have any idea. I know this that we’re going to be happy with the return profile on our business. And our customers want more of our product, and I think that gives us an opportunity to price it fairly and anticipate a fair return for the work that we do. We must provide them an excellent customer service experience and we have to be good at communicating what their experience should be like, but I don’t have any guidance on income per load. What I know is, we have a long-term margin target. We’ll live within those boundaries and we expect that our return is going to be warrants reinvestment in our business.Operator Thank you for your question.
Our next question comes from Brian Ossenbeck with JPMorgan. Please proceed.Brian Ossenbeck Hey, good afternoon. Thanks. Just a follow-up on the, I guess, normalization of operating profit per load. Can you just talk about the congestion fees? It sounds like the costs are still there to come out, but what about the congestion fees if you’re not really seeing the detention times as high as they were at the customers? And then if you can just talk broadly on safety, you did mention a few times. I think it might be a little hard to move the needle but it has been a challenge in the past. So be curious to hear your thoughts on how quickly you can make some improvements there? Thank you.John Roberts Okay. I’ll quickly touch on the storage fees [indiscernible] is really what I think you’re getting at.
We highlighted many times we’re not going to break that out. I don’t think that — we’ve said before, don’t over assume how much of a factor that is in terms of our income. Clearly customers are unloading faster. That revenue was down in the quarter year-over-year. And the results are the results. The cost takeout does come faster with volume [indiscernible] system.I’ll let Nick come in on safety.Nick Hobbs Yes, I’ll take the safety question. We were faced with some challenges clearly in Q1, saw some last year. We had a tremendous growth. In the meantime, we have tremendous growth across the organization with new managers, new drivers. It presents some challenges to us. We’re encouraged by the progress we’re making. Still got a long way to go.
