Editorial: Endings and New Beginnings
This Editorial appears in the July 9 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
This week’s issue of Transport Topics is the last one that will be produced at 2200 Mill Road in Alexandria, Va., the headquarters of American Trucking Associations, our owner, for almost 24 years.
The next copy of TT that you receive will have been written and edited by our staff at ATA’s new home, a shiny 12-story office building in Ballston, a booming section of Arlington, Va.
If all goes as planned, this change of location will be virtually invisible to you, our readers. The only new thing you will see is the address for contacting us by surface mail; everything else — telephone numbers and e-mail addresses — remains the same.
This will be ATA’s, and TT’s, fifth home since ATA was incorporated in 1933 in Washington, D.C.
TT began as a member newsletter (with a different name) soon after ATA was started, as a way for the fledgling association to communicate with its sparse, far-flung membership about the key issues involving the motor transport industry.
While TT’s charge today remains being the authoritative voice covering trucking and freight transportation in North America, it is a far different publication than it was early in ATA’s history.
TT has followed the motor carrier industry as it has evolved into a complex freight-distribution business. Trucks, per se, have gone from being the industry to being only one of the components of a modern freight-moving company. Like our readers, we have adjusted our focus to keep up with changes in the big picture, whose elements include government regulation, infrastructure development, intermodal shipments, international trade, maritime and aviation, macroeconomics, technology improvements, taxation, the environmental movement and many other topics. Yet we can never forget our basic charge, which is to report the activities of trucking and of the largest trade group in that industry, ATA, to a far-flung readership.
Every one of us at Transport Topics is proud of the role we play in helping ensure the nation’s trucking and freight industry remains the best and most efficient in the world. And we promise to serve you at least as well in the future as we have over the past 74 years, no matter where we hang our hats.
