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Yes, it’s still impossible to pay your bills with “cautious optimism.” But that state of mind is a lot better than what we were hearing just a few months ago when we asked any gathering of truckers about the outlook for their businesses.

For the past three years under federal hours-of-service regulations, fatal crashes involving heavy trucks have declined, last year reaching the lowest level since the U.S. Department of Transportation began keeping the records.

The settlement that American Trucking Associations negotiated with the Port of Long Beach last week is the kind of compromise that is so difficult to accomplish: Both sides got most of what they wanted.

There was further evidence last week of the growing link between fuel prices and Wall Street, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 10,000 for the first time in a year, and the price of crude oil exceeded $75 a barrel for the first time since September 2008.

Twice in recent days, the New York Times has uncharacteristically turned its attention to the trucking industry, and twice it has tried to give trucking a black eye, strongly implying that the industry is unsafe and has little interest in getting safer.

The Department of Transportation will host a two-day summit this week on problems surrounding distracted driving and solutions to combat what has become a national epidemic.

If you’re in the trucking business, you need to be at American Trucking Associations’ annual Management Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas on Oct. 4.

At the very least, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration needs to provide the freight transportation industry sufficient time to respond to its proposal to fix the clearly broken Unified Carrier Registration agreement.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has proposed “fixing” the underperforming revenue aspects of its Unified Carrier Registration agreement by shifting more of the financial burden to the nation’s law-abiding trucking fleets.