Letters to the Editor

I read with interest your Sept. 15 article — “Michigan DOT Relies on Smart Phones for Alerts About Parking on I-94” — in particular, the part about the $4.5 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration.

When will we in the trucking industry stand up and defend our safe-driving records based on the miles we drive every day?

The last paragraph of the story “ELD Comments Pour Into FMCSA; Support Splits Along Carrier Size” incorrectly referenced comments I filed on behalf of five companies located in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, and engaged in truck-transport operations via saddle-mounted vehicle transporter combinations.

It seems that lately every issue of Transport Topics contains an article about yet another trucking company raising driver pay and/or sign-on bonuses. For truck drivers, the grass is greener on the other side.

Greg Fulton’s “Detention Time Is Too Important to Ignore” provided a solid perspective with a number of good suggestions on how to avoid detention and the loss in truck productivity. Moving the industry in this direction is certainly a worthy effort that should benefit all shippers, carriers and receivers long term.

President Obama’s desire to abolish the ability for a trucking company to self-insure is a hindrance to the industry and an ineffective way to save a lousy $9,000 per company that chooses to use this option, which amounts to about $500,000 a year.

I don’t know what Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association leadership was smoking when it called for the dismissal of FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro, but I hope they were in the states of Washington or Colorado.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement began, rules were set in place to make sure the carriers coming out of Mexico were compliant with U.S. laws.

The writer of the letter headlined “Carriers’ Dilemma” in the April 21 Letters to the Editor section (p. 8) risked appearing naïve, but I would echo his sentiments about who unloads a truck and who pays for it, and raise a related concern: Why does the truck delivering a sealed load have to wait while the pallets are broken down and the individual items that constitute the load are checked in?

When I received my March 24 copy of Transport Topics and saw the front-page article with the words “Level the Playing Field” in the headline, I was immediately angered. What do all the big fleets want? It appears to me that they want to upset the field completely in their favor.