Business

WASHINGTON — CSX Corp. CEO Hunter Harrison apologized to railroad shippers at a U.S. Surface Transportation Board meeting Oct. 11, blaming layoffs prior to his arrival, the proxy battle to replace the prior leadership and employee resistance for lengthy service disruption during the summer.

Port Manatee set records for container volume and cargo tons moved during its recently completed fiscal year, besting marks set in 2010 for both categories.

Greenwich, Conn.-based transportation and delivery services company XPO Logistics was the top performing U.S. company on Forbes’ list of Growth Champions, released Oct. 10.

Photos from the 2017 Management Conference and Exhibition at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., Oct. 21-25, 2017.

California took another step Oct. 11 toward permitting testing of self-driving vehicles without a human driver, continuing a shift away from previous policies that companies criticized as being overly restrictive.

If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. That old business adage may not apply in all cases, but it does capture the essense of a growing movement toward data-driven decision-­making in trucking.

Truck platooning — also known by the more precise but less compelling term “cooperative adaptive cruise control” — will soon become available to trucking fleets interested in testing the latest in fuel-saving technology.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Trucking technology supplier PeopleNet envisions a future when truck drivers might wear virtual-reality goggles to perform data-enhanced vehicle inspections while dispatchers monitor their fleets in a 3D context rather than simply viewing dots on a computer screen.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced that it is granting the Truck Renting and Leasing Association a five-year exemption from a federal requirement that all trucks be equipped with electronic logging devices to record drivers’ hours of service.

Third-party logistics firms capitalized on stronger demand to transport freight this summer but spent more to purchase trucks, resulting in what Wall Street analysts predict will be a mixed-earnings season.