In addition to that, the inward facing cameras, we’re rolling that out. And so, we think that’s going to — well, we know it’s going to take us another year and a half to two years to get fully implemented, but we’re encouraged by the progress we’re seeing there. So I would just say we’re focused on it and we’ll keep chipping away on our safety numbers. And we’ve seen good results so far at the end of Q1 from what we’ve seen.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question is from Allison Poliniak with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.Allison Poliniak Hi. Good evening. Just on Intermodal volumes, could you maybe talk about the sequential trends you saw in the quarter and how they compare with what you would typically see in terms of seasonality in Q1?
Just any thoughts there?John Roberts Well, I mean, we highlighted negative two in January, negative four in February, negative eight in March. I think that we would normally anticipate our volumes to be improving year-over-year every month of the year. And then historically, the first quarter might actually trail the fourth quarter in terms of volume and then you build back up over the course of the year. And I would call that very normal that Q2 is growing over Q1, Q3 even over one and then four is going to be your strongest quarter, take a little step back in the first quarter of the next year and then keep growing. That is — that’s probably a 15 year historical view. That would be very normal.Right now when I go back to a year ago, volumes were really strong.
I think the second quarter last year was probably our record volume quarter at any time in any year. And imports were strong and as the second half last year continued import flows began to change and so we’ll have to see what that means this year. But as we move into the rest of the year, we do anticipate that we can get back on a growth trajectory, but we’re also in a little bit of a wait and see and wait for customer to — compliance to improve and demand particularly on the West Coast to improve.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question is from Ken Hoexter with Bank of America. Please proceed.Ken Hoexter Hey. Great. I guess, John, Shelley, or I guess, Brad, just to continue on that. You noted we’re in a freight recession accelerating declines with down 8%.
I guess you’re saying that it gets even tougher as you move into April and 2Q. I guess are there any signs of — from an ICS point of view, seeing capacity come out? Is there anything you’re starting to see peaking out of inventory levels? Any signs on how we could see this peak out or is 2Q going to be — it sounds like from that last commentary maybe even worse than 1Q.Brad Hicks Yeah, Ken. This is Brad. I’ll start from an ICS perspective and anybody else is free to add in there. As we came into the year, Darren covered nicely what our kind of macro thoughts were and we’re seeing more pronounced in highway and in ICS in particular kind of the freight recession impact. We’re not really seeing a high volume of carriers exit at this point, although you can see in our reported data that we did reduce our active carriers.
That was in part to my comment on some of the [indiscernible] that that we saw occur in in the quarter. And so, we kind of called out and establish new parameters there. So that’s not an indication necessarily of carrier loss. It was our processes and protocols that we implemented to create better protection for us against that specific set of circumstances.And quite frankly, the market itself more pronounced in spot. We were a little bit over indexed through the height of the pandemic in fisting our customers and their disrupted need. And quite frankly, we were probably behind on the published side coming into this current environment. We work tirelessly to recover from that. And I think you can see we’re north of 60% on published freight at this point in time.
But obviously the heavy volume was in spot and what occurred to spot in the back half of last year in the first part of this year with a negative to our overall book and our overall performance.Shelley Simpson Hey, Ken. I might add just a couple things to that. You know, we do see a low point of what’s happening in spot. And from a capacity perspective, our evaluation of how cures can perform in this environment makes it very difficult for spot to go significantly lower. I’m not suggesting we’ve completely found the bottom, but we have seen a more leveling out, Brad, of what’s happening in the spot market. So just from a capacity perspective, we estimate that they are losing money to breaking even at this point. It have been for a period of time.
Typically, that can’t last for a long period of time. So it’d be one note that I would say. And from an inventory perspective, we did spend a lot of time with our customers. I think they are struggling to really forecast what consumers are going to do. It’s one of the reasons that we’re more cautious on our outlook. Certainly, what Darren talked about on bid compliance, that’s just an intermodal, JBT is similar. The brokerage side is even worse than that. So across all of our transactional businesses, I would say it’s been very difficult for our customer to forecast. I think that’s the reason we’re not giving any more color as to what we think for the back half of the year. We can go off of their optimism and them wanting to purchase our services, but I think it’s just a little more caution from us as to what the timing will be in total.Operator Thank you for your question.
Our next question is from Tom Wadewitz with UBS. Please proceed.Tom Wadewitz Yes, good afternoon. I wanted to see if you could give some comments on the revenue per load in Intermodal. We saw, I think, it’s about a 9% decline sequentially 1Q versus 4Q. Is that a function of lower contract rates or is that accessorial and other? And maybe just kind of how we think about the cadence of when new contract rates affect the business. Is that — did you see that in 1Q, or does that really not start until 2Q? Thank you.John Roberts Well, I think there’s a lot in that question. Mix of our business can play an enormous role and we highlighted that we were negative 9% transcon, plus 1% East. That’s going to influence our overall revenue per load. Certainly, all of the factors you highlighted are part of it.
In terms of the way we implement pricing, what we’ve highlighted multiple times is, we implement approximately 30% of our business in Q1, 30% in Q2, 30% in Q3 and 10% in Q4. Current cycle, so I don’t know that it’s any different than that. There’s — customers — our ability to predict what’s going on with that. I mean, Shelley just highlighted it. It’s never been more challenging to know just what’s going to happen with volumes. And I said earlier, I mean, the pricing market has largely behaved like we would have expected. And we expected some negative pressure on price. So I don’t know how to give you any kind of further info on what to expect with price. I just know that certainly the impact of shorter length of haul and growth in the East more than transcon, once our transcon gets back to normal, you can expect that that would be helpful to the revenue per loan.Operator Thank you for your question.
Our next question is from Ari Rosa with Credit Suisse. Please proceed.Ari Rosa Hi, good afternoon. So we’ve seen a lot of changing dynamics out West, obviously, with some of your IMC competitors switching between railroads. I’m a little surprised to see, I guess, the extent of the weakness in volumes. I was hoping you could just talk about the dynamics of what’s driving the weakness out West. Is it really just that kind of international intermodal business? Or is there an element that’s being driven by competition? And then in that context, how are you thinking about your ability longer term to take share, particularly in the West? Thanks.John Roberts Okay. Well, let me be very clear. I don’t believe we’re losing share in the West to a competitor.
I feel very confident that our customers want our business. We’ll have to prove it that we’re taking share, but I feel very confident in our competitive environment against IMCs on the Union Pacific. Largely, the weakness in the West is almost purely related to the import economics. International Intermodal that comes in and goes intact is down, but so is just imports in general that feed warehouses throughout California and then create full truckload shipments out of there and the transload model. So all of that business is down. But I do expect and anticipate that J.B. Hunt is growing share in all markets in Intermodal.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question is from Bascome Majors with Susquehanna. Please proceed.Bascome Majors You’re heading into the year, it didn’t feel like either Hunt or retailers are really broadly in the market.
There was a lot of expectation for import recovery either in the West Coast or nationally in the first quarter. And so, I wanted to drill into a little more of what really or what was the most impactful change that really caused you to discount your optimism over the 2.5 months or 3 months since we talked in January. And on the other side of that, what one or two shifts do you want to see either in data you track or your customer messaging to ratchet that optimism back up? Thank you.John Roberts Well, I mean, I don’t know that we anticipated strength or rebound in imports in Q1. When we talk about what might have gradually changed over the course of the quarter, again, it was that compliance and just continued uncertainty from our customers about what the consumer was going to do and what order would be like.
I think we felt that a lot in the first quarter as we met with customers and you could see as time went on their ability to forecast and even know what to expect, we had questions and that’s what has created our change to some degree. What do we need to happen? We need imports to improve. We need a West Coast labor agreement to finalize and give customers confidence in the West Coast to import programs more than anything we need in the economy and the goods economy to improve. That will drive the fastest response and inventories to bleed off.Shelley Simpson Bascome, I would add to that. I think we’re using our experience through the cycles to create more cautiousness in what we think on the timing for 2023. We have a lot of customers asking us those questions.
