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More and more, electronics are replacing the telephone at truck stops as the main communication service for many companies and drivers.

Last week’s off-year elections saw voters return key trucking lawmakers to Capitol Hill, with no major changes in the makeup of congressional committees dealing with transportation issues precipitated by the American electorate.

TruckPac, American Trucking Associations’ political action committee, raised and spent more in the 1998 elections than it did in the previous two election cycles, according to Federal Election Commission records and interviews with ATA officials.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ slow-motion national election began Nov. 2 when the federal government dropped some 1.4 million ballots into the mail.

The fatal crash rate for large trucks fell to 2.39 per 100 million miles in 1997 from 2.41 the year before, according to newly released statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

Michael A. Meredith, the long-time president of the Oregon Trucking Assns., has joined American Trucking Associations to help guide and strengthen ATA’s relationship with the state associations in the next century.

Consolidated Freightways is the first trucking company to outsource a large segment of its information technology operations to IBM Global Services, a unit of International Business Machines Corp.

The federal government wants to retain financial reporting requirements for nearly 3,000 of the nation’s largest trucking companies, but it also may give carriers a way to keep the information private.

The Federal Highway Administration is proposing changes to driver medical examination forms that trucking interests say would let physicians perform additional tests at their discretion.