Construction has begun on an intermodal terminal at the Global Container Terminals in Bayonne, New Jersey, to connect on-site to CSX and Norfolk Southern railroads and to offer an alternative that could result in fewer containers being placed on trucks.

Maersk, the world's largest container shipping line, has teamed up with Alibaba to allow customers to reserve space on its vessels through the Chinese company, illustrating growing cooperation between e-commerce and logistics firms.

XPO shareholders overwhelmingly approved a plan Dec. 20 to increase the maximum number of shares the company can issue to executives as compensation, to 2.5 million shares from 500,000, easily overcoming opposition from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

With less than three weeks left in the Obama administration, Martin Klepper was named the first executive director of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Build America Bureau on Dec. 30.

U.S. trailer orders in November were more than 36,000 and, while the strongest month of the year, they fell just short of the year-earlier volume, analysts said.

Uncertainty dominates the outlook for trucking and freight transportation in 2017.

Truckload and intermodal carrier Schneider National Inc., No. 7 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers, filed financial documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Dec. 22 as a prelude to the company going public, possibly later this year.

Household confidence in the United States is closing in on its best year since before the latest recession, according to figures in the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index released Dec. 29.