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We all got half a loaf when President Obama signed the new highway bill into law on July 6.

Highway safety is one of the trucking industry’s top priorities, and we have long supported the industry’s efforts to employ technology in enhancing the safety of our employees’ workplace and the safety of everyone who shares our nation’s highways.

Congress finally has managed to come to grips with a bill that extends funding for highway and other transportation programs beyond the next few months.

As noted on other pages of this week’s edition of Transport Topics, American Trucking Associations will be conducting the first comprehensive summit on the use of natural gas in trucking.

A number of things are conspiring to push driver turnover rates up for smaller carriers, even as larger fleets have been more successful in keeping a lid on employee churn.

There’s been a lot of energy expended recently as the trucking industry pushes to get the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to adopt a reasonable crash accountability standard.

At ATA’s leadership conference last week, we issued a statement pointing out what we see as the increasingly inflexible stance taken by FMCSA in regard to a number of outstanding issues and by some counterproductive steps the agency has taken as it fleshes out the CSA program.

After carefully weighing the pros and cons in the sometimes overheated debate over whether the federal government should mandate electronic logging devices in heavy-duty trucks, we unequivocally support a requirement for electronic logging to monitor hours-of-service compliance.

There was some interesting advice offered by two of our industry’s best-known economists last week to fleet executives who were attending the National Tank Truck Carriers annual conference in San Francisco.

Last week, the Federal Reserve, which has been keeping interest rates at rock bottom, agreed to continue holding short-term rates near zero for the next couple of years.