General

After four days of competition culminated on Saturday, Roland Bolduc was named the Bendix Grand Champion of the 2017 National Truck Driving Championships Bolduc, who also took home the Sleeper Berth class title, has more than 1.9 million safe driving miles in his career and has worked in the trucking industry for more than 36 years, spending the last 23 years with FedEx Express.

ATA also recognized Bryce Neilson as the 2017 Rookie of the Year and the team of drivers from Kentucky as the top state delegation, having received the best collective score. Many more awards were handed out on Saturday night; See the full results and honors.

For more information, contact Drew Mitrisin atamitrisin@trucking.org.

ATA American Trucking Trends 2017, the annual compendium of data about the trucking industry, was released on Monday. Among the findings in this year’s Trends is that trucking industry revenues in 2016 were $676.2 billion – confirming that trucking is the leading freight mode.

“The information in Trends highlights exactly what I tell elected officials, regulators and key decision-makers every day: trucking is literally the driving force behind our great economy,” said ATA President and CEO Chris Spear. “Safe, reliable and efficient motor carriers enable businesses throughout the supply chain to maintain lean inventories, thereby saving the economy billions of dollars each year.”

Among the findings: Trucks moved 10.42 billion tons of freight – 70.6% of all domestic freight tonnage; and the nation’s commercial trucks paid $41.3 billion in state and federal highway user fees and taxes.

For more information and to and purchase the report, see the press release.

ATRI, the trucking industry’s not-for-profit research organization, today launched the 2017 Top Industry Issues Survey. The annual survey, commissioned by the American Trucking Associations, asks trucking industry stakeholders to rank the top issues of concern for the industry along with appropriate strategies for addressing each issue. The survey is in its 13th year and participation by trucking stakeholders has grown each year.

Industry stakeholders are encouraged to complete the survey available on ATRI’s website. For more information, contact Rebecca Brewster atrbrewster@trucking.org.

The California Air Resources Board is holding two workshops to discuss concepts for limiting the operating time of refrigerated trucks and trailers (TRUs) while at certain facilities, including grocery stores, distribution centers and cold storage warehouses. The current concept calls for the registration of all TRUs operating in California beginning in 2020, an initial 6-hour stationary operating limit beginning in 2023 that reduces to 15 minutes in 2029, and, ultimately, a mandatory phase-in of zero-emission TRUs between 2025 and 2050. The use of electronic tracking and reporting is proposed to enforce the operational limits.

The initial workshop, which will be webcast, is on August 16 in Sacramento, followed by an in-person only workshop in Riverside on August 18. More details on these workshops and a presentation can be found on CARB’s Zero-Emission TRU webpage. ATA will attend the Sacramento workshop and encourages the participation of fleets with refrigerated operations in California.

For more information, contact Mike Tunnell atmtunnell@trucking.org.

Last month NHTSA released their latest technical report on Automatic Emergency Braking—an assessment on which types of frontal crashes could benefit from the technology, and an estimate of how many such crashes occur annually.

The report develops a target population for AEB systems in vehicles over 10,000 lbs. GVWR. The target population was developed over a multi-step process with an end result of 11,499 crashes annually involving 7,703 injured persons, 173 of which were fatal. NHTSA also provided detailed breakouts of the population that could be used to estimate the benefits of the technology. The chief value of this report lies not in its estimated target population size, but rather in the detailed descriptions of affected crashes and subpopulation breakouts that have traditionally fed into benefits through estimation.

For more information, contact Ross Froat atrfroat@trucking.org.