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Consumer confidence increased in August, the New York-based Conference Board said.

Truckload fleet executives said not even the certainty of truck prices rising up to 10% next year will cause them to alter their current purchasing plans.

The Transportation Intermediaries Association has released its second-quarter 3PL Market Report, which showed that total dollars billed by all study participants for all activities increased about 7% from the first quarter.

Truckload carriers C.R. England and Knight Transportation each recently announced they were investing in new software aimed at making its routing and fuel purchasing more efficient.

This is in response to the letter in the July 27 issue with the headline “Brokers Revisited”: Your complaint is not justified with me.

All nine publicly traded less-than-truckload carriers reported classic signs of overcapacity — tonnage and pricing falling simultaneously — during the second quarter of this year, leaving the industry unable to capitalize on the 47% decline in diesel prices from the corresponding time in 2008.

The number of Class 8 vehicles operating in the United States totaled 3.641 million units in the second quarter, an increase of less than 1% over the same quarter in 2008, transportation research firm R.L. Polk & Co. said.

With total U.S. container import traffic down more than 20% in the first half of 2009 compared with a year ago, all pieces of the supply chain are feeling the pain of the recession.

Truck component maker Eaton Corp. said that it would provide the electric power systems for 378 Class 5 electric hybrid plug-in vehicles under a federal grant, which it called the “largest commercial hybrid deployment” ever.

U.S. biodiesel production has been rocketing upward in each of the past 10 years and reached 690 million gallons last year, but industry officials and analysts said it would drop this year by half to 350 million gallons or as low as 250 million gallons.