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Click here to write a Letter to the Editor. ith all the bad news we’re subject to each day, it was wonderful to learn from TTNews.com recently that the figures on fatalities involving big trucks were down again in 2002.

Truck industry representatives at a California meeting last week said that the state’s proposal for onboard diagnostics of heavy-duty truck engine emissions systems should be delayed.

Sales of Class 8 trucks in September were off just 4.4% from the soaring levels of a year earlier, when buyers were loading up on new rigs ahead of a tightening of federal diesel engine emissions requirements that were about to go into effect..

Three stories on the front page of this issue illustrate what an important role the federal government continues to play in the trucking industry decades after deregulation.

Mullen Reports Better 3Q in 2003 • U.S. Initial Jobless Claims Fall to 386,000 • Volvo Says Net Income Doubled on Trucks and Lending • AAA Seeks Help From Trucking in Curbing Splash and Spray • And more ...

SAN ANTONIO – U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said Wednesday the Bush administration remained "very strongly opposed to any gas-tax hike."

The government has significantly softened earlier proposals for anti-terrorism rules covering cross-border food shipments, heading off what could have caused chaos for haulers of food and agricultural commodities, industry officials said last week.

The American Trucking Associations has provided a glimpse of the goings-on in San Antonio for this year's Management Conference and Exhibition.

With the deadline for implementing a federal rule closing in, the trucking industry last week still had gotten no official word on whether the Transportation Security Administration would extend its deadline for states to conduct fingerprint background checks of drivers certified to haul hazardous materials.