Latest in Trucking and Fleets

About Trucking and Fleets

Almost everything on a store shelf spent part of its life on a truck. Trucking is the circulatory system of the modern economy, and in the United States it moves the large majority of freight by weight, carried by a workforce that ranges from one-truck owner-operators to fleets running tens of thousands of tractors. When trucking sneezes, retailers, manufacturers and farmers catch a cold. Freight volumes are often read as an early signal of where the wider economy is heading.

The industry lives by the freight cycle, swinging from boom years when rates soar and every truck is busy to brutal downturns when capacity floods the market and small carriers go under. Its perennial arguments are familiar: driver pay and turnover, the safety of long hours and the rules that limit them, the cost of insurance and so-called nuclear verdicts, parking shortages at night, and cargo theft and freight fraud that have become organized businesses of their own.

Regulators such as the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in the U.S. shape the work through hours-of-service rules, electronic logging, drug testing, licensing and English-proficiency enforcement. Meanwhile fleets are adopting telematics, cameras, automated transmissions and route-optimization software, and testing electric and autonomous trucks where the economics allow. The stories here cover carriers and fleets, freight markets, driver issues, safety and regulation, fleet-management technology, truck orders, crashes that make the news and the people who keep the goods moving.