Editorial

While new technology is driving trucking forward, the industry still needs the expertise of service professionals to keep tomorrow’s equipment running smoothly.

The $2 trillion infrastructure agreement President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats reached last week has been a long time coming, and we’re thrilled to see it. Voices on both sides of the aisle have maintained that infrastructure is a bipartisan issue. Seeing the top leaders from both parties agree on such a massive legislative effort indicated that those statements were more than just talk.

With quarterly earnings underway, we’re getting a look at how the industry fared during the first three months of 2019, a year which some have predicted could mark the beginning of a cooldown from last year’s red-hot freight market. Turns out the start of this year for freight haulers wasn’t marked so much by a cooldown as it was cold and snowy weather.

The launch of the Nikola Two tractor just days ahead of Earth Day — April 22 — was a fitting and, perhaps, deliberate gesture by the company to spotlight the trucking industry’s progress in improving its level of environmental responsibility.

The notion of being a “hands-on” worker still carries weight in professional circles. Increasingly, though, some of the things that once were decidedly “hands-on” are becoming much more “hands-off” thanks to the march of technological innovation.

The Department of Transportation has taken an important first step in potential reform of the hours-of-service rules that regulate how much time truck drivers can spend behind the wheel, and we’re glad to see it.

Journalists love it when big news breaks. As last week drew to a close, two significant deals involving major players in the commercial truck industry made headlines and landed on the front page of the April 1 issue of Transport Topics.

The importance of mining repair data for information that can help improve the performance of motor carriers’ equipment was a continuous message during presentations at the annual meeting of the Technology & Maintenance Council of American Trucking Associations recently from companies across the spectrum of industry suppliers. They either introduced or updated products designed to wring more efficiencies out of freight operations.

All of a sudden, it looks like lawmakers might be making good on the long-standing promise to get moving on what most agree is an issue with bipartisan support — yes, infrastructure funding.