Improvements at the Detroit-Windsor Truck Ferry will reroute haz-mat and oversize loads on a 150-mile detour to cross the northern border.
The Ontario Ministry of Transport and Transport Canada recently granted $8.8 million to improve infrastructure at the Windsor terminal and dock. The changes are expected to increase the ferry’s number of trips to more than the current ten trips daily.
The ferry transports about 40 to 50 haz-mat and oversize trucks across the American-Canadian border daily, since such loads are not permitted to use the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel or the Ambassador Bridge. For the duration of the renovations, trucks will need to use the Blue Water Bridge crossing from Port Huron, Mich., to Sarnia, Ontario.
Source: TruckingInfo.com: Detroit-Windsor Truck Ferry to Close for Improvement Project
Long Beach Port has been blasted by an environmental group and labor organizations, such as the Teamsters, for its willingness to treat independent truckers fairly under the Clean Trucks Program. According to The Journal of Commerce, the Natural Resources Defense Council wants Long Beach City Council to review the settlement between the port and the American Trucking Associations (ATA) last month.
NRDC wrote a letter to the council opposing the registration agreement, which would allow compliant owner-operators and independent truckers to load at the port. The group said the settlement “erodes the environmental benefits of the clean truck program,” and wants the concession agreement reinstated, like at the Los Angeles Port. A convoy to protest L.A. Port’s harsh stance recently rolled up I-710 and past the L.A. City Hall, trying to bring attention to the unfair requirement.
The Oct. 19 settlement dropped the [click to continue…]
A Minnesota congressman has revived pressure to remove flammable wet lines, pipes underneath cargo tankers, saying they pose a high risk to motorists who may be involved in crashes with the haz-mat trucks.
But members of the tanker industry say the odds of fatal wet lines accidents is around 1-in- 30 million. Barbara Windsor, president of the tanker company Hahn Transportation, said the industry’s record of safety shows there’s no justification for requiring equipment to purge wet lines.
Able to carry up to 50 gallons of cargo, often petroleum fuels, wet lines can rupture during accidents and [click to continue…]
Claiming four Louisville-area trucking companies are competing unfairly with companies that pay higher union wages, Teamsters Local 89 picketed the carriers Tuesday, reported the Courier-Journal. The union named Pegasus Transportation, Hammond Transportation, Summitt Trucking and TDXRESS as the four targeted.
The union tries to maintain a standard of wages and benefits for their members, but those companies don’t use union employees pay “well below the standard,” said union president Fred Zuckerman.
The picketing didn’t affect Summitt Trucking, said company president Dave Summitt. This wasn’t the first Teamster pressure against the Clarksville, Ind., dry van and reefer company.
Summitt said the wages and benefits the company pays its approximately 350 employees are “fair” for the current business climate, otherwise the carrier wouldn’t have any employees.
Source: Courier-journal.com: Teamsters to picket 4 trucking, transportation companies Tuesday. (updated)
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) meeting in Sacramento this week will include presentations on diesel emissions and air quality legislation, reports Land Line Magazine. At least one alliance of motor carriers plans to be in attendance.
The Nov. 19-20 meeting will include updates on California’s Bill 32 implementation. The legislation, from 2006, gave the board much of its clout responsible for recent stringent trucking regulations.
The carrier coalition West State Alliance (WSA) plans to attend the meeting. WSA has criticized the board for the postponement of a workshop in October that was to discuss the aggressive emissions enforcement’s economic impact. A WSA board member, Bill Abudi, said the tough new regulations haven’t been matched with grants for smaller carriers.
Truckers want to reduce diesel pollution, Abudi pointed out, and are the first people affected by it. But clean air and workable business options must be balanced.
Source: OOIDA’s Land Line Magazine: This Week’s CARB meeting to hit on trucking-related topics. Chalire Morasch.
Trucking conditions continued to improve for a third month in a row, according to FTR Associates, a firm that analyses the trucking industry. The firm’s Trucking Conditions Index (TCI) for October, which combines statistics for the trucking industry into one measurement, reached the highest number since November 2008, the group reported Monday.
But at minus 16.4, that number was still well below neutral zero, indicating a continued struggle from the “steep downturn seen late last year and into 2009,” said FTR president, Eric Starks.
“Real acceleration in the trucking fundamentals that we track for this index will likely wait for a substantial recovery in volumes and capacity utilization which we don’t expect to occur for at least another year,” Starks said.
The Nashville, Ind. firm uses five trucking industry statistics to analyze the overall health of the trucking industry, reported monthly on its The Trucker’s Dashboard.
Source: FTR Associates: TCI Index Improves But Remains Well Below Neutral. (press release, Nov. 16, 2009)
