Editorial: Good News, Bad News

This Editorial appears in the Aug. 3 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today. Following the congressional and presidential wrangling over a multiyear surface transportation plan is enough to make your head explode, so try not to dwell on that alone.

Do read our story about how senators and representatives demand long-term action on infrastructure improvement for the sake of the nation, yet prove incapable of producing anything more than short-term patch No. 34 over a six-year span.

On the business side, it is clear again there are still Americans beyond Capitol Hill who accomplish things.

So many, in fact, that truck operators are almost falling over themselves to order new trailers. The trailer market has been good for a while now, but June’s figure shot up 29% over the same month in 2014 to a very high tally of 27,900.

Paccar Inc. joined Daimler Trucks and Volvo Group in celebrating North America’s truck market that drove second-quarter profits higher. Cummins Inc. is selling more engines, and UPS Inc. is delivering more parcels. Truckload and less-than-truckload carriers are generally reporting higher profits.

For some companies, quarterly revenue declined from a year ago, but that’s often because diesel prices have dropped, taking down fuel surcharge revenue as well.

Diesel is now the cheapest it’s been in almost six years. The last time it cost less was October 2009, when the economy was in horrible shape. Now we’re seeing low fuel prices and prosperity — a combination some thought was impossible.

Adding to the world’s oil supplies, Iran’s resumption of oil sales helps push crude prices down.

People can criticize all this as a shortsighted focus on the immediate, but there’s also a report from American Trucking Associations projecting that U.S. freight volumes will grow by 28.6% through 2026, an average of 2.3% a year.

Business cycles have not evaporated. Something terrible will happen at some point. We remember how the prosperity of 2006 and 2007 turned into recession in 2008 and 2009.

For now, though, it is pleasing to see the nation’s economy working reasonably well, with no obvious catastrophe approaching quickly.

This makes it an excellent time to invest in the nation’s future by taxing diesel fuel and gasoline more to finance investment in better roads and bridges. We would like to see members of Congress get an infectious boost in optimism and productivity from their constituents and accomplish something important.

Regrettably, though, we won’t place a large bet on that happening anytime soon.