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Truck tonnage dropped 2.8% in February year-over-year, reversing January’s positive momentum, but American Trucking Associations’ chief economist maintains that freight activity remained strong considering February 2016 was a record-setting month.

Last week, we cheered the apparent demise of a federal regulatory provision regarding hours of service. Now we’d like to salute a positive development: a recent discussion on truck safety before a Senate subcommittee.

The electronic logging device mandate for tracking hours of service has brought a lot of attention to truck telematics, and many experts are providing advice on how to prepare for that transition. But one aspect of telematics that few are addressing is how underutilized most existing systems are. In my estimate, only three in 10 fleets are utilizing their telematics system to the max.

In 2008, I wrote an article where I described a future scenario in which a driver in a truck is leading a convoy of several driverless trucks. In 2011, I began predicting that we would have autonomous cars on the market and on the roadways by 2020. These predictions seem to be turning out better than my 2007 prediction that Apple would not get much market share in the cellphone business.

Conference halls from coast to coast were teeming with talk of transportation last week, with no shortage of prognostications from industry leaders about what the future holds.

As reported in Transport Topics in early December 2016, (12-12, pp. 4, 43) American Trucking Associations President Chris Spear told a roundtable of lawmakers at a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., that the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, or TWIC, represents the future of secure transportation.

Each night, thousands of truck drivers across the country find themselves in a horrible game of “musical chairs” — searching for parking spaces to take their mandated 10-hour rest period. This occurs because of a major shortage for truck parking, which has not kept up with the volume and growth of trucks traveling across our country each day.

For the record, Don Robinson knows exactly when and where his personal and professional milestone happened: 9 p.m. on Oct. 8 in the northbound lane of Interstate 71 in Ohio.

I read the chairman’s profile of Kevin Burch (10-10, p. 1), and quite frankly, he is a man after my own industry heart — and others should feel the same way.