Editorial

Isn’t it always this way? The good news is, there’s plenty of freight for the trucking industry to haul, and strong signs that growth will continue.

This Editorial appears in the Jan. 23 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

The nation’s roads and bridges are still ailing, as Congress and the White House continue to fiddle while we await some concrete action on infrastructure funding.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s new hours-of-service rule is a serious and major disappointment for the trucking industry.

There is reasonable cause for people in trucking to be optimistic in 2012. It looks like the economy’s recovery from the long and deep recession is gaining strength, so trucking can look forward to increasing demand.

Patrick Quinn was a lot of different things to different people. To trucking, he was a leader.

We were all disappointed to see the rise in fatalities in truck-related crashes on our nation’s roads during 2010, as reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Yes, there has been some new movement on Capitol Hill in the drive to get a highway funding bill through and into law. But don’t pop the champagne just yet: the “movement” is simply Congress kicking the can down the road once again.

There is every reason to believe that 2012 will be a good year for the trucking industry, based on what’s happened so far this year and on reasonably strong U.S. economic growth projections.

Usually, when you work for a federal regulatory agency and you’ve got good news to report, the rule is to shout it out as loudly as possible and as many times as possible from as many places as possible.