Past Chatter

Though it's unclear how exactly this is a safety-improvement motivator, Randy Cornell, safety VP with Joplin, Mo.-based Con-way Truckload, sky-dived from 10,000 feet after the fleet's drivers met a safety challenge to get its "accident rate down by a creditable 34 percent in just five years," as reported at HandyShippingGuide.com and elsewhere. "The figure equates to less than 8 accidents per million miles driven according to ...

The Missouri-based Daily Dunklin Democrat newspaper once again featured a driver I had the pleasure of meeting in Nashville late last year. Campbell, Mo.-based Double G Trucking hauler Larry Morris's "Cotton Fields to Nashville" song was selected as the title track for a Johnny Cash tribute record, a coproduction of TRS Music Group and Plush Records. The companies' heads, A.J. ...

Though the writer played it as an example of distracted driving, could it be an argument for more flexibility in the hours of service? Whatever the case, given today's news that a nationwide texting-while-driving ban is in the offing, I guess it couldn't be helped that Joseph Rose of the Oregonian newspaper wrote on the Hard Drive blog of 45-year-old Los Angeles-based trucker ...

As someone who talks to proud and professional owner-operators and company drivers on a daily basis, I'm no stranger to a particularly common sentiment: the notion that the actions of a very few within the trucking industry strike huge blows to the collective image of the many. Whether it's a criminal broker-fraud scheme, a big mistake that leads to a ...

At American Idol auditions in Orlando, Fla., 25-year-old Matt Lawrence breezed past the judges with a soulful rendition of Ray LaMontagne's "Trouble." What most viewers might not have noticed was Lawrence's occupation -- he's a manager with his father's trucking company in Starke, Fla. Less sanguine, perhaps, is the fact that he's also done time for bank robbery (at age ...

Tools like Transcore’s Rate Index Pro and Internet Truckstop’s Fuel Desk Plus have in recent years offered for users of the load board services and other subscriber owner-operators access to real-time load market data along individual lanes and in specific regions, leading to a broker-carrier negotiation situation where, for the first time in history, individual owner-operators and larger carriers can ...

National media, at the behest of the candidate/soon-to-be-senator himself, are putting a GMC Canyon pickup at the center of his (some say) upset victory over the Democrat running against him for Senator Edward Kennedy's former Senate seat in Massachusetts. If eTrucker.com polls we conducted in August and December are any indication, it's appropriate that a truck (if, admittedly, only a ...

Over-the-road drivers deal with all manner of annoyances, some rising to the level of outright injustice -- I think immediately of the numerous times I've watched a fellow auto-driver cut across three lanes of traffic at 70-plus mph within mere feet of a rig's front bumper, to name just one -- but writing in the Montana newspaper Billings Gazette, reporter ...

The folks at CommercialTruckTrader.com have introduced the latest in iPhone apps from the heavy duty trucking industry, and with it comes the following slick, simple, well-soundtracked video, detailing the app's truck-searching and social functionality. And thinking about on the past year or so, which saw at least three trucking-related iPhone apps detailed in these pages -- the most interesting being the ...

Nacogdoches, Texas-based Schneider National driver Robin Reese recently told me a story that ranks among the absolute most positive I've heard to come out of the bankruptcy of Arrow Trucking, which before officially filing as bankrupt late last week abruptly ceased operations a few days before Christmas, leaving drivers the nation over in the lurch and wondering just how to proceed. ...

In Gary Richards' Monday "Roadshow" column in the Silicon Valley Mercury News paper, Richards called on Aptos, Calif.-based UPS trucker Dan Casas to help answer the question of a writer about the safety of closely following a big rig in fog to get through a dangerous drive. Casas was gracious and knowledgable in his reply.

More pictures from South African Antarctic research expedition -- now that's extreme intermodal.

“Singin’ Sam” Little has dedicated one of the Kenworths in his Little Country small fleet to pull parade floats and other materials during his own 2010 campaign for the governorship of Alaska. The sometime country singer Little has also issued a new record, "Truck Driver for Governor," that features a tune updated from his original penned during the national independent ...

With unfortunate toll hikes in New York, haulers got another late Christmas gift with the new year in the implementation of an Illinois state law that raised maximum interstate speed limits, formerly split between 55 and 65 mph for trucks and cars, respectively, to an even 65 for both.

South African Times-Live correspondent Tiara Walters is the first female writer-in-residence with that country's team of research scientists probing the barren landscape of the South Pole, and her Pole Dancing blog recently chronicled the team's trek across what many Americans will be familiar with from the History Channel's Ice Road Truckers series. " Challenger drivers from the defence force ...

The Knoxville News-Sentinel newspaper reports that Pilot Travel Centers is launching several new marketing campaigns in our new year, including not only a new Facebook fan page but an extension of the one suggested by the image included here. As News-Sentinel reporters put it, "The company’s fleet of 325 tanker trucks now display the message 'Best Coffee on the Interstate' ...