Support activities for transportation
This subsector comprises establishments primarily engaged in providing services to other transportation establishments. These services may be specific to a mode of transportation, or they may be multi-modal. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 9,925
- Under 10 employeesA
- 72%
- Establishments · USA
- 50,045
- Employment · USA
- 831,997
- Payroll · USA
- $54.5B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 9,925 Canadian establishments with employees, 72% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 488, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
A varied set of intermediaries. Brokerage is asset-light and contested by software; towing, marine services and airport handling are local and licence-bound.
- Who sets the price
- Carriers and shippers; brokers earn a spread.
- The software it runs on
- Freight brokerage and visibility platforms, port and airport systems, towing dispatch.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Track and right-of-way maintenance, railcar and locomotive servicing, terminal and yard operation — real work with real barriers to casual competition, since it takes certified people and heavy equipment on live track. The group is substantial: 249 Canadian establishments, 42 of them with fifty or more employees, and in the US an average of about 26 employees per establishment. The pre-screen's note was 'contract work for two customers', and the filings bear it out. CN, one of the two, spent $2,306M on purchased services and material in 2025 against $2,313M in 2024 — flat on $17,304M of revenue — and attributed the flatness to 'lower contracted services' offset by other items [A]. That line is the contractor's whole market at one customer, and it also contains freight forwarding, track materials, crew lodging and utilities. The buyer employs its own engineering forces, decides each season how much to contract out, qualifies who may set foot on its property, and can take the work back in-house whenever headcount allows. Price, volume and access all sit on the customer's side of the table. The incumbents hold multi-year approved-contractor standing and the safety record that renews it, which an entrant cannot present on day one. The reachable variant is work where the customer is a shipper rather than a railway — industrial switching inside a plant, transloading, private-siding maintenance — since there the buyers number in the hundreds. That variant was not screened here and is the part worth a second look. The freight and terminal software on this branch is screened separately.
A marina is waterfront real estate with a service counter attached, and the real estate is now institutionally priced. Sun Communities sold Safe Harbor — the largest marina and superyacht servicing business in the United States — to Blackstone Infrastructure for $5.65B, closing 123 of the 138 properties in April 2025 for $5.25B of cash consideration [A]. Across roughly 48,790 wet slips and dry storage spaces that is about $115,800 per slip, which is the number a would-be owner is bidding against. Infrastructure capital has repriced the asset, and it is not competing on service quality. The reachable version of this code is therefore not the marina but the services around it — rigging, haul-out, winter storage, brokerage and mobile repair — which need a yard lease rather than a harbour, and which the record at 441220 already touches from the retail side. That version was not screened here and is the one worth a second look.
Volume comes from rotation lists, motor clubs and insurer contracts rather than from customers, and those lists are held by operators with the equipment and the municipal relationships to stay on them. Heavy recovery is where the margin is and it requires the most expensive iron. Rate regulation and consent-tow rules vary by municipality, which caps the price of the routine work.
Asset-light and therefore crowded. The broker's product is a shipper relationship and a carrier list, and both sit with incumbents who have been building them for decades while double-brokering fraud has made shippers less willing to try an unknown name. Working capital is the quiet killer: carriers expect quick pay and shippers pay in 45 days, so growth consumes cash. The visibility and TMS software above this market is screened separately. Update, 2026-09-16 — the capital barrier is genuinely low, and that is not the problem. Federal authority plus $75,000 of financial security is the whole regulatory entry [B], which makes this one of the few markets in this research a person can legally enter with five figures. But active broker authorities stood at about 25,271 in a January 2025 update, down 9.9% year over year [C] — an industry shedding intermediaries — and in 2025 the listed brokers' shares fell on the argument that AI removes the matching work a brokerage sells. The margin here is an information asymmetry, and entering a business whose product is an asymmetry while that asymmetry is being automated is a timing bet rather than a market.
A residual, and the pre-screen was right that freight brokerage and forwarding do not live here — they are at 4885. What Statistics Canada does list under this code is an odd set: driving services for auto and truck delivery, packing and crating of goods for transport, livestock feeding stations for animals in transit, and independently operated pipeline terminals [A]. These share nothing but a filing category, so the screen looks at the two a person could actually start. Packing and crating — building export crates and preparing machinery or artwork for shipment — needs a shop, lumber and a few skilled hands, and sells to manufacturers and movers by the job. Driving services sell a licensed driver's time to a carrier or a dealer who owns the vehicle. Both are reachable within weeks, which is the problem: nothing is sunk, nothing is licensed beyond the individual's own credentials, and the customer can replace the supplier with an employee. The business counts carry a signal of their own. Canada has 1,208 establishments, 874 of them with one to four employees and 608 in Ontario, against only 2,290 in the whole United States, where the average establishment has about twelve staff [A]. A Canadian count more than half the American one, made almost entirely of micro-firms and concentrated in one province, looks less like an industry than like drivers incorporating themselves — a reading this screen could not confirm. Either way the entrant would be selling labour by the hour with no asset to defend it. The livestock, pipeline-terminal and remaining activities were not examined.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Airports buy through multi-year public tenders written around SITA and Amadeus, and the certification path runs through IATA standards and the airlines that must interoperate. The airline record at 4811 cut on the same procurement wall from the other side of the apron.
This market has three layers. Two have already been bought, and the third has a history of companies running out of money. (1) Fleet operations and reality capture. This is the software a construction, energy or public-safety drone team plans flights in, logs pilots and aircraft in, and processes imagery with. The pure-play leader is now part of a construction suite: Procore agreed on 27 July 2026 to buy DroneDeploy for about $845.0M in cash and completed the merger on 9 September 2026 [A]. DroneDeploy had said in September 2025 that it had reached break-even and was used on more than 1.7 million sites. At the deal it claimed over 3 million jobsites in more than 180 countries [C]. In public safety, Versaterm (Ottawa, Banneker-backed) bought DroneSense in July 2025 and then Aloft in early 2026 [B]. That puts fleet management, FAA authorisation and dispatch in one police and fire suite. DJI's own FlightHub 2 is bundled with the hardware most operators fly. (2) Autonomy OS. This is the flight-software layer drone makers license. It is now a defence market. Auterion (Arlington, Virginia and Munich) raised a $130M Series B in September 2025, led by Bessemer, with $25M of it non-dilutive capital backed by the Office of Strategic Capital [B]. In February 2026 Resilience Media reported, from unnamed sources, that Auterion was profitable and on track for about $200M of revenue from signed contracts [C]. The free floor beneath it is open source: PX4 and ArduPilot are both open-source autopilots, and Auterion's own homepage says the US Defense Innovation Unit standardises on PX4 and MAVLink. (3) Airspace authorisation and UTM. This is where the casualties are. In the US, LAANC is free to the pilot, and one supplier processes most of it: Aloft says it handles 85% of all monthly LAANC authorisations [C]. Verizon closed Skyward on 30 June 2022 [B]. AirMap shut its app and left LAANC on 22 June 2023, after DroneUp had bought it in 2021 [B]. The UK's Altitude Angel went into administration on 7 October 2025, and Indra agreed to buy its GuardianUTM assets in January 2026 [A for the notice and the release]. National UTM contracts go to air-navigation suppliers and ANSP-backed firms: Indra, Unifly (DFS is a major shareholder; NAV CANADA, ENAIRE and Malaysia's ClearPath) and ANRA (Dubai, 2025) [B]. The open door is the US rule that has not arrived. The Part 108 BVLOS rule, proposed in August 2025, has been in White House review since July 2026 by secondary accounts. It would create paid roles for automated data service providers, but the companies best placed for them (Aloft/Versaterm, ANRA, Airspace Link) are already approved suppliers. A further turn: the FCC added foreign-made drones and components to its Covered List on 22 December 2025, which blocks new DJI models in the US [B]. That helps US fleet software only if non-DJI hardware supply grows. How it differs from its neighbours: 4881-airport-operations-and-ground-handling-systems covers crewed-aviation airport and apron systems sold through SITA and Amadeus tenders. 336410-aerospace-defence-and-space-systems covers the airframe and defence primes. Counter-drone detection is not covered here. Willingness to pay decides it: the authorisation layer is free by regulation, and the layers people do pay for have been bought by Procore, Versaterm and the defence primes' investees.
The software that keeps an aircraft airworthy, and the planning tools that decide how many spares an air force buys, are bought once a decade and are already owned by the companies that do the maintenance. This record covers maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) systems of record — maintenance tracking, work orders, parts and engineering records for airlines, MRO shops and military fleets — and the defence sustainment layer above them: spares optimisation, life-cycle cost and readiness analysis. IFS is the broadest incumbent: Aerospace & Defence is one of its named focus industries, it reported more than EUR 1.2B of total revenue for 2024 and was valued at over EUR 15B in an April 2025 minority sale in which Hg became co-control owner alongside EQT [A]. The commercial MRO specialists have already been taken in by their customers' own industry. AMOS, which Swiss-AS says runs 10,000+ aircraft for 270+ customers, became a 100% subsidiary of Lufthansa Technik — one of the largest MRO providers — in 2023 [C]. AAR, an MRO and parts group with FY2026 sales of $3,308.0M, bought Trax for $120.0M in cash plus up to a $20.0M earn-out in March 2023 (about 5,000 aircraft supported) and Aerostrat's long-range maintenance planning for $19.0M in August 2025 [A]. Veryon (formerly Aircraft Technical Publishers, founded 1973) has rolled up Flightdocs, CaseBank, Rusada (ENVISION), RCMBT, EBIS and, in September 2026, Polaris Aero, and says it serves 5,500+ customers [C]. Ramco Aviation is the one listed specialist, but inside a company with only $71.09M of FY2025 income and a net loss of $4.08M [A]. On the defence side the money moves through sole-source renewals and ERP programmes, not open competition. The US Air Force has used PTC's Servigistics since 2017 to plan what PTC called a $76B service-parts supply chain; a 2022 contract was worth up to $95M over five years, and it was renewed again on 15 October 2026 under the ESCAPE programme, terms undisclosed [B]. Systecon's Opus Suite (OPUS10, SIMLOX, CATLOC) lists the US Navy and Air Force, French and Brazilian air forces, Australia's and Singapore's defence ministries and primes from BAE Systems to Saab among its users, and was bought by Swedish private-equity firm Monterro in April 2025 [B/C]. The Army is consolidating five logistics and finance systems, GCSS-Army among them, onto a single SAP platform under an eight-year Other Transaction award to Accenture Federal Services (initial $69.4M) [B] — while the Air Force's Oracle-based ECSS was cancelled in 2012 after about $1B was spent [B]. That failure is why defence buyers stick with what works. How this differs from its neighbours: 4811 airline operations covers passenger service and the airline IT estate (Amadeus, Sabre); 481214 covers business-aviation flight operations and maintenance tracking (CAMP, Veryon's Part 91/135 side); 336-PLM covers design data; 333 covers industrial predictive maintenance. This record is the MRO shop's and the military fleet's system of record and the sustainment planning tools on top of it. Distribution decides it: a few hundred airlines and MRO shops plus a short list of ministries, each changing systems about once a decade, with airworthiness approval, export-controlled technical data (ITAR/EAR), defence cloud accreditation (ATO, FedRAMP) and CMMC in front of any new entrant — and the independent specialists are already inside MRO groups, a PE roll-up or a large ERP vendor.
Both ends of the tow job have consolidated, and a new entrant would sit in the middle of them. The work a tow company does comes in from three places: motor clubs and roadside networks, police rotation lists, and private-property impounds. Each source is now held by a funded or entrenched owner. Demand side: Agero now owns the motor-club pipe. Agero is privately held and part of the Wolk family's Cross Country Group. It bought Swoop, a web-based dispatch platform for roadside providers, in January 2018 [B, company release]. It then agreed in March 2026 to buy Urgently (NASDAQ: ULY) for $5.50 a share in cash, and the deal closed by late April 2026 [B]. Urgently's FY2025 10-K shows $129.2M of revenue, down from $142.9M. Substantially all of it came from roadside-assistance services. It completed about 0.8M dispatches through about 13,500 service providers, and its top three customers made up 58% of revenue [A]. The combined company claims 150M+ vehicles and 14M service events a year [C, vendor]. That puts the largest independent roadside job feed and the second-largest digital network under one owner, and that owner also runs a dispatch tool for the tow operators who take the jobs. HONK (Santa Monica) is the remaining venture-backed network: $31.8M raised, led by Altpoint Ventures, with the last round in 2018 [B]. Supply side: the operator software has been rolled up. In 2022 Traxero, backed by Radian Capital and Wynsum Partners, combined Tracker Management, TOPS Dispatch, Dispatch Anywhere, Omadi, InTow, TowSpec and Beacon Software. It added the lien tools TowLien, TowMail and Auction Simplified [B, trade press]. In October 2024 Traxero merged with Autura, the government and police-towing platform backed by Nexa Equity. The combined company claims 3,000+ customers and 50,000+ tows a day [C, vendor], and topsdispatch.com and towlien.com now redirect to autura.com. Towbook (Michigan, founded 2007) is the other incumbent. It has no disclosed funding and sells a low-priced cloud tool with motor-club invoicing and QuickBooks built in [C]. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. Towbook is cheap and well liked, Autura owns the police-rotation and impound-lien workflow, and Agero controls both the job feed and a dispatch product. Integration with the motor clubs is where an entrant would get locked in or locked out, and the largest motor-club network now competes in software. The one opening is Canadian and regulatory. Since January 1, 2024, Ontario has required provincial certificates for tow operators, drivers and storage operators, with maximum rates and consumer-protection rules [A, municipal summary of the TSSEA]. That gives a compliance-invoicing angle, but it is a feature for Towbook or Autura, not a company.
Two heavily funded visibility platforms plus a public Canadian consolidator (Descartes) already own the carrier-integration graph, which is the actual asset — thousands of carrier connections that take years to build and cannot be copied quickly. The fleet-side record at 4841 is cut for the same underlying reason. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
And what every business buys · 33 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 62
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| C. H. RobinsonNASDAQ:CHRW | Freight transportation arrangement4885 | $16.2B | 1/13 |
| RXOPrivate | Freight transportation arrangement4885 | $5.7B | 2/13 |
| LandStar SystemNASDAQ:LSTR | Freight transportation arrangement4885 | $4.7B | 3/13 |
| MarineMaxNYSE:HZO | Support activities for water transportation4883 | $2.3B | 1/3 |
| UrgentlyPrivate | Motor vehicle towing488410 | $129M | 1/7 |
| IFSPrivate | Other support activities for air transportation488190 | — | 1/8 |
| AgeroPrivate | Motor vehicle towing488410 | — | 2/7 |
| Cando Rail & TerminalsPrivate | Support activities for rail transportation4882 | — | 1/6 |
| E2openPrivate | Freight transportation arrangement4885 | — | 4/13 |
| IndraPrivate | Support activities for air transportation4881 | — | 1/22 |
| INFORMPrivate | Support activities for air transportation4881 | — | 2/22 |
| Ramco AviationPrivate | Other support activities for air transportation488190 | — | 2/8 |
| TraxPrivate | Other support activities for air transportation488190 | — | 3/8 |
| VeryonPrivate | Other support activities for air transportation488190 | — | 4/8 |
| ADB SafegatePrivate | Support activities for air transportation4881 | — | 3/22 |
And 47 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Transportation and warehousing, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. But note the shape of this industry: 72% of establishments have fewer than ten employees, and at that size most of these roles are one person wearing several hats, or bought in from outside.
Inside this industry
6 rows sit directly beneath 488, and 32 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.