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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.

President Obama last week proposed directing about $50 billion in unspent money from the federal government’s bank bailout program to build roads and bridges, as a way to counter high unemployment.

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.

Former American Trucking Associations chairman Patrick Quinn, an executive of U.S. Xpress Enterprises, has returned to a leadership role with the federation, succeeding Robert Davidson as the organization’s treasurer on Dec. 7 for a 10-month term.

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

FedEx Corp. said it will raise Ground and ���ϳԹ��� Delivery rates by an average of 4.9% in 2010 and also reported that its fiscal second-quarter earnings will be higher than Wall Street expectations, mostly because of volume growth.

Early in 2008, when forecasts called for a continued, long-term rise in ocean shipping activity, many maritime companies accelerated the building of new vessels and leased as many containers as they could obtain.

The U.S. diesel average inched down another 0.3 cent to $2.772 a gallon last week, the fifth straight decline, the Department of Energy reported.

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.