Business

Beginning Jan. 1, officials at the Southern California sister ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will face yet another challenge as they begin the second phase of their clean trucks plans: fewer trucks.

A proposed toll increase for the seven state-owned bridges that crisscross the San Francisco Bay could double the cost for trucks.

Commercial vehicle Group said it will close its Norwalk, Ohio, truck cab plant due to Navistar Inc.'s decision to assemble cabs for its own trucks.

Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) will introduce a long-awaited rail bill on Dec. 15 that expands the Surface Transportation Board and adds several provisions that could give shippers more choices of rail carriers, committee officials said.

Today’s new diesel-power trucks are, by law, equipped with particulate filters, and in many models the DPF will soon will be joined by another aftertreatment device — selective catalytic reduction, or SCR, in a canister.

In a local newspaper, I recently read an editorial titled: “Truckers Should Not Be Texting While Driving.” The writer improperly quoted statistics and singled out the trucking industry as the problem.

This has been a year when so-called “good news” actually has come in the form of less-bad news, as in “freight levels fell less last month than they did the month before” or “fewer jobs were lost last week than the week before.”

President Obama last week proposed directing about $50 billion in unspent money from the federal government’s bank bailout program to build roads and bridges, as a way to counter high unemployment.

Early in 2008, when forecasts called for a continued, long-term rise in ocean shipping activity, many maritime companies accelerated the building of new vessels and leased as many containers as they could obtain.