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The heavy-duty truck sales drought continued into February, with year-over-year results declining for the 14th consecutive month, and some analysts are now predicting that any recovery won’t occur until late in the year.

Port of Los Angeles officials last week approved the final piece of the port’s sweeping plan to dramatically reduce diesel emissions by replacing and retrofitting dirty trucks through a controversial employee-only business model that will phase out independent drayage operators.

An effort by rail carriers to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals they haul is creating new business for some trucking companies.

Retail diesel and gasoline prices again set U.S. records last week as the diesel average flirted with $4 a gallon, according to the Department of Energy.

Michelin & Cie., the world’s second-biggest tire maker, said it will link the prices of car tires to the cost of oil, Bloomberg reported Friday.

Manufacturing levels in the Philadelphia region showed contraction for a fourth consecutive month in March, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said.

Widespread flooding primarily in the Midwest threatened to worsen Friday, with many rivers rising past their banks for more than a day, the Associated Press reported.

State officials closed a bridge over the Mississippi River northwest of the Twin Cities area in Minnesota because of problems found in the same kind of steel plates that may have played a key role in last summer’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the Associated Press reported Friday.

American Trucking Associations asked President Bush in a letter this week to help “burst the bubble in the crude oil market” by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.