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The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has begun enforcing its New Entrant Safety Assurance Process rule, requiring stricter safety standards for newly registered truck and bus companies.

WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the department was working to complete its work on a regulation to ban texting by commercial drivers, and that it would be finished “sooner rather than later.”

Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) will introduce a long-awaited rail bill on Dec. 15 that expands the Surface Transportation Board and adds several provisions that could give shippers more choices of rail carriers, committee officials said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week declared that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities are a danger to human health, a first step the agency must take along the path to regulations limiting the levels of combustion by-products from tailpipes.

Charles “Shorty” Whittington, immediate past chairman of American Trucking Associations, was among the officials who stressed to the Obama administration the importance of investing in the nation’s roads and bridges during the president’s recent Washington jobs summit.

The California Air Resources Board last week began to look into changing the state’s diesel emissions rule, which could give truckers hit by the recession more “flexibility” or even partial delays of one or two years in complying.

President Obama has nominated David Strickland to be the next administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the White House announced.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is preparing to propose requiring “a much larger population of carriers” to use electronic onboard recorders to monitor driver hours-of-service than it earlier envisioned, an agency official said.