Editorial

A number of things are conspiring to push driver turnover rates up for smaller carriers, even as larger fleets have been more successful in keeping a lid on employee churn.

There’s been a lot of energy expended recently as the trucking industry pushes to get the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to adopt a reasonable crash accountability standard.

There’s no denying that finding the best, most accurate way to determine whether a motor carrier should be deemed accountable for a crash is a difficult and complicated task.

At ATA’s leadership conference last week, we issued a statement pointing out what we see as the increasingly inflexible stance taken by FMCSA in regard to a number of outstanding issues and by some counterproductive steps the agency has taken as it fleshes out the CSA program.

After carefully weighing the pros and cons in the sometimes overheated debate over whether the federal government should mandate electronic logging devices in heavy-duty trucks, we unequivocally support a requirement for electronic logging to monitor hours-of-service compliance.

There was some interesting advice offered by two of our industry’s best-known economists last week to fleet executives who were attending the National Tank Truck Carriers annual conference in San Francisco.

The latest quarterly study of trucking fleet failures paints a more positive picture than we would have expected in years past, considering the high level of fuel prices.

Last week, the Federal Reserve, which has been keeping interest rates at rock bottom, agreed to continue holding short-term rates near zero for the next couple of years.

Tolls. To paraphrase the late Ronald Reagan, “There they go again.” The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls all the access from New Jersey to the nation’s largest city, has slapped trucks with higher tolls that will skyrocket 163% by 2015 to $105.

Truck sales remained strong during March, as fleets bought 17,308 heavy-duty vehicles, 33% more than they bought in March 2011. That’s the good news.