Perspective

It was not that long ago that the land border between Canada and the United States was viewed as a serious impediment to the secure and efficient movement of goods and people between the world’s largest bilateral trading partners.

On Oct. 1, an estimated 150,000 motor carriers currently engaging in unlicensed brokerage will find themselves subject to what amounts to an enormous new tax, courtesy of the latest transportation funding law — Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, or MAP-21.

Interestingly, regardless of company size or type of operation, trucking companies share common failure points — activities or programs they lack that have a negative effect on profitability.

What happens when you have state budgets that are straining to come in balance and union representation that continues its long-trending downward slope as measured by percentage of workers covered? Unfortunately, the answer is an attempt to radically transform the trucking industry and an assault on the American dream.

A top box-office movie this winter was “Identity Thief,” a lightweight comedy about a guy chasing a woman across the country after she stole his identity. The movie’s message was simple: Getting your identity stolen can be funny.

There’s no real mystery as to why otherwise intelligent fleet operators so often negotiate full-service leases using only big, round numbers. Reason No. 1 is that they simply don’t know their actual, detailed maintenance costs.

As transportation and logistics businesses expand their services and customer bases in the rapidly evolving third-party logistics environment, many firms unknowingly expose themselves to legal risks by using a single, standard form of terms and conditions for all customer arrangements.

Lawsuits, class-action suits and civil penalties” are not the words carriers want to read at the beginning of an op-ed in this newspaper.

The case for going paperless is compelling, but how to get there is not evident. If you’re ready to eliminate the mounds of overwhelming paperwork in your office, you need to select a document-management solution.

As we close the book on 2012, I think most economists and trucking executives would agree that while growth is preferable to the alternative, the relatively anemic growth we saw last year is certainly nothing to get excited about.