���ϳԹ���

Qualified diesel technicians are getting harder to find, a situation the transportation trade press has lamented for the past decade with headlines such as “Who Will Fix Your Trucks?”

U.S. diesel prices slipped 3.7 cents to $3.894 a gallon last week, the third straight weekly drop, the Department of Energy reported.

U.S. diesel prices declined for a second straight week, while gasoline declined for a third consecutive week, according to the Department of Energy.

U.S. retail diesel prices slipped back below $4 a gallon last week, but the 4.6-cent decline in the national average price provided little comfort to truckers who are still paying 80 cents more a gallon than they were at this time last year.

WASHINGTON — Natural gas holds a great deal of promise for the trucking industry as an alternative to diesel, but with the hurdles of infrastructure and costs, it’s rarely a viable option currently, trucking stakeholders said.

The average price of a gallon of diesel climbed above $4 last week, approaching levels not seen since spring, when trucking’s main fuel stayed over that benchmark for six weeks.