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In a local newspaper, I recently read an editorial titled: “Truckers Should Not Be Texting While Driving.” The writer improperly quoted statistics and singled out the trucking industry as the problem.

This has been a year when so-called “good news” actually has come in the form of less-bad news, as in “freight levels fell less last month than they did the month before” or “fewer jobs were lost last week than the week before.”

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.

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.

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.

FedEx Corp. said it will raise Ground and ������ý 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.

Donaldson Co., a manufacturer of filtration systems, said Monday it is spending $5 million to enable one of its plants to manufacture parts that comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 diesel emission standards.

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.

Trucking company failures during the third quarter markedly trailed the record pace for last year, as freight demand stabilized and showed early signs of a coming improvement in rates, according to a new report from Avondale Partners.

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.