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A petition to the U.S. DOT asking for a reprieve from ELD compliance for small carries with clean safety records has been denied, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association announced Tuesday.

OOIDA filed the exemption request last November, less than a month before the deadline by which drivers were required to begin using an electronic logging device. The association requested that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration allow small businesses, defined as those with less than $27.5 million in annual revenue, to continue using paper logs for to record duty status if they had no at-fault crashes and did not have a safety rating of Unsatisfactory.

Market conditions for trucking companies, as measured by FTR’s monthly Trucking Conditions Index, remained heavily tilted toward carriers in April. What’s more, says FTR, carriers can expect the conditions to continue to improve and hold strongly in carriers’ favor into 2019.

Truck tonnage climbed 5.7% on a year-over-year basis in May and also increased from April, helped by stronger consumer demand and a long-awaited drop in inventories, American Trucking Associations reported. The federation’s advanced seasonally adjusted index increased to 139, a rise of 2.7% above the April result. The latest report reversed two consecutive months of tonnage declines and lifted the index out of the doldrums seen late in 2015 and earlier this year. Until the latest report, tonnage had barely budged from the level seen in both November and December 2015. “Following two consecutive decreases totaling 6%, May was a nice increase in truck tonnage,” said Bob Costello, ATA’s chief economist. “Better consumer spending in April and May certainly

In Boston, Massachusetts, a truck driver was fired by his employer when he refused to violate HOS regulations during his delivery.

The incident occurred in August of 2012. According to the lawsuit, NFI Interactive Logistics Inc. of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, assigned the driver to deliver a load of Poland Spring bottled water. The trucker was instructed to haul the water from Northboro to Jersey City, New Jersey.

According to MassLive, at that time, a severe thunderstorm, flooded roads, crashes on the route and heavy traffic made his trip much longer than expected. The truck driver believed that he lacked enough time to deliver his haul without violating HOS restrictions.

New information released by the Department of Transportation (DOT) shows that U.S. driving reached 746 billion miles in the first three months of 2016 — surpassing the previous record of 720.1 billion miles set last year.

For a sense of scale, 746 billion miles is roughly 286.9 times as far as the International Space Station has traveled since it began orbiting in 1998. In fact, Americans drive twice as far on any given day before noon than the space station has ever flown.

The new data, published in the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) latest Traffic Volume Trends report – a monthly estimate of U.S. road travel — show that more than 273.4 billion miles were driven in March 2016 alone, highlighting the growing demands facing the nation’s roads.

The report reaffirms the value of the recently enacted “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation” (FAST) Act, which is investing $305 billion in America’s surface transportation infrastructure – including $226 billion for roads and bridges – over the next five years.

The March 2016 report also includes seasonally-adjusted data, which is conducted by USDOT’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics as a way to even out seasonal variation in travel and enable vehicle miles traveled (VMT) comparisons with any other month in any year.

The seasonally-adjusted vehicle miles traveled for March 2016 were 268.2 billion miles, a new monthly record for seasonally-adjusted VMT. March VMT increased by 5 percent compared to the previous March and by 0.7 percent compared with seasonally-adjusted February 2016 figures. The estimates include passenger vehicle, bus and truck travel.

In March, U.S. drivers increased total mileage among all five regions of the United States. At 6.4 percent, traffic in the Northeast – a nine-state region stretching from Maine to Pennsylvania – led the nation with largest percentage increase in unadjusted VMT, and continued a streak of consecutive monthly increases that began in Nov. 2014. At 4 percent, the West – a 13-state area stretching from including Alaska and Hawaii – had the smallest percentage increase in unadjusted VMT for the month.

At 8.1 percent, Maryland led the nation with the largest unadjusted single-state traffic percent increase compared to the same month a year earlier, followed by Connecticut at 7.8 percent, and Delaware and Pennsylvania with 7.6 percent each. At 3.5 percent, Wyoming had the largest unadjusted traffic single-month decrease due, in part, to heavy snows that caused road closures in February and March.

The new figures confirm the trends identified in Beyond Traffic, a USDOT report issued last year, which projects a 43 percent increase in commercial truck shipments and population growth of 70 million by 2045. The nation’s current infrastructure has ever increasing demands on it, and investments are needed in both the short and long term. Increased gridlock nationwide can be expected unless these investments are made.

To review the VMT data in FHWA’s Traffic Volume Trends reports, which are based on information collected from more than 5,000 continuous count stations nationwide, visit fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/tvt.cfm.

May 31, 2016By: Trucking News Staff