Editorial standards

This site makes claims about permits, deadlines, road restrictions and federal rules, and a reader has no way to tell a researched page from a confident one. This page explains how ours are produced, what we refuse to publish, and what happens when we get something wrong.

Who publishes this site

Cross Country Movers Group, a licensed interstate household goods carrier based in Culver City, California. We hold our own operating authority — USDOT 2138595 and MC-744411 — and our own crews and trucks perform the moves we sell. We are not a broker and we do not hand your shipment to a carrier you did not choose.

Both numbers are searchable in the FMCSA SAFER database without asking us for anything, and that is the point of printing them: you can verify who we are from a federal source rather than from this page.

How a page about a place or a rule gets written

Every operational claim on this site — a permit fee, a notice period, a length restriction, a chain law, a registration deadline — is taken from the authority that issues it. Not from an aggregator, not from another mover’s blog, and not from a plausible number that appears in enough places to look settled.

In practice that means the city or state department’s own page: SFMTA’s published fee table, DDOT’s public space permit rules, phila.gov’s Temporary No Parking service page, chicago.gov’s parking restrictions, Caltrans and CDOT closure records, the FMCSA regulations for anything about your rights on an interstate move. Where a figure has an effective date, we record the date we checked it, because a published municipal fee is a good source and still goes out of date.

What we will not publish

• A number without a source. Pages here are built so that a missing figure renders as absence rather than as an estimate. A state page with no sourced number simply carries one fewer fact than a state page that has one.
• Star ratings we were not given. Not one of the reviews on this site displays a star count, because the platforms’ own records that reached us did not carry one. The previous version of this site drew five stars beside every quote with nothing behind them. We would rather show none than invent them.
• An aggregate rating. For the same reason: we cannot compute an average from ratings we do not have, so the site claims no overall score anywhere.
• Words a customer did not write. Every pull quote is checked against the review it cites and must be a verbatim substring of it. If it is not, no name is printed. Reviews are shown in full, unedited, including the parts that are critical of us.
• Our own prices as a table. An interstate move is priced on weight, mileage and access, so a table of our rates would be either a range so wide it tells you nothing or a number we cannot hold to. We quote after a survey. Where a page shows dollar figures, they are third-party market data, named and dated, and marked on the page as a market rate rather than our quote. What we publish as our own are the weight ranges by home size and the transit spreads our dispatch works to.
• An invented author. Every byline on this site names the writer responsible for the guide and for keeping it current, and no byline carries credentials its writer does not hold. Accountability for every page sits with the licensed entity named above.
• Rankings of other movers. We are a moving company. A “best movers” list on our own domain is us ranking ourselves, whatever it says.

What that process rejected

Rules are cheap. These are four claims that were drafted for this site, checked against the issuing authority, and thrown out or corrected before the pages went anywhere. Each names a source you can check.

Chicago: a sixteen-foot rule that does not exist

Widely repeated mover and ward guidance says Chicago requires a permit for any vehicle over sixteen feet occupying a street for more than an hour. We could not confirm it anywhere at source — CDOT’s own moving-van right-of-way document states no length, no duration and no notice period at all. What chicago.gov does publish is a restriction on parking any truck, van or trailer more than 22 feet in length on a residential street at any time, with an exception for expeditious loading and unloading. The invented rule was withdrawn; the real one is better, and it is what our Illinois and Chicago pages are now built on.

Chicago: the right number attached to the wrong sign

A forty-eight-hour sign-posting requirement appears everywhere alongside Chicago moving permits, and we had it too. It is real — but it is what a ward office asks a resident to do with the free courtesy sign, which the ward offices’ own pages describe as non-enforceable. It is not a condition of the paid CDOT permit, which is enforceable because CDOT issued it. We had attached it to the wrong sign, which is why looking for it in CDOT’s documents found nothing.

San Francisco: our own figures had gone stale

Our San Francisco pages carried an SFMTA permit at about $280 and a metered surcharge of $18 per meter per day, sourced from SFMTA when they were written. SFMTA’s published fee table now gives $355 for one to four signs and $21 per meter per day. Both were corrected, along with two rules we had simply omitted: signs must go up 72 hours before enforcement at an unmetered curb and 24 at a metered one, and the zone is billed in five-day increments on metered spaces. A cited source is not the same as a current one.

Washington DC: a rule stated more precisely than the rule

Our own research file recorded DDOT’s sign rule as “exactly 72 hours, not at least”, and reasoned from that to a rule of its own: that posting early was as wrong as posting late. DDOT’s guidance says something different. The signs must be posted 72 hours before the truck arrives at an unmetered location to be enforceable, or 24 hours ahead at a metered one, and a permit may be issued weeks in advance of its start date. So it is a threshold rather than a specified period, it turns on whether the curb is metered — and we had dropped the metered case altogether. There is no penalty for being early. Being more specific than your source is a way of being wrong.

How we handle corrections

When we find an error in a factual claim, we change it and we say what changed rather than editing quietly. Where a correction affects something you might act on — a notice period, a fee, a deadline — the page carries the current figure and the date it was checked.

This version of the site is a rebuild and replaces an earlier one, so there is no list of published corrections yet. Three of the four above were caught before the pages were built. The Washington DC one was not: the correction was written down and then failed to travel, so the lane page was fixed while the Washington city page carried the invented version through every draft — and that page had built its whole permit section on it. It was found by checking our own pages against each other, noticing that this page and that one disagreed about the same rule, and going back to DDOT. We are naming it here because a page about how we check things is worth nothing if it only lists the errors that were convenient to catch. They are not the only things the process caught. The earlier site displayed five stars beside every quote with no ratings behind them, claimed an overall score that could not be derived from the reviews it held, and attributed wording to six named customers that those customers had not written. None of that survives here. As corrections are made from now on they will be recorded on this page, dated, with what was wrong and what replaced it.

How to check us, and how to tell us we are wrong

• Our authority: search USDOT 2138595 or MC-744411 in FMCSA SAFER.
• Our reviews: every one links to the original on Google, Yelp or Trustpilot. Read them there rather than here if you would rather.
• Our facts: each names the department that issues the rule. Go to that department’s page.

If something on this site is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That includes a fee that has changed since we checked it, a rule we have stated too broadly, and a page that reads as though it were written by somebody who has never been to the city it is about. A correction is cheaper than the reputation of a page nobody trusts.