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This Editorial appears in the Jan. 23 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

The nation’s roads and bridges are still ailing, as Congress and the White House continue to fiddle while we await some concrete action on infrastructure funding.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s new hours-of-service rule is a serious and major disappointment for the trucking industry.

There is reasonable cause for people in trucking to be optimistic in 2012. It looks like the economy’s recovery from the long and deep recession is gaining strength, so trucking can look forward to increasing demand.

Patrick Quinn was a lot of different things to different people. To trucking, he was a leader.

Yes, there has been some new movement on Capitol Hill in the drive to get a highway funding bill through and into law. But don’t pop the champagne just yet: the “movement” is simply Congress kicking the can down the road once again.

There is every reason to believe that 2012 will be a good year for the trucking industry, based on what’s happened so far this year and on reasonably strong U.S. economic growth projections.

At last, we’ve had some movement on Capitol Hill toward enactment of a new federal transportation funding act.

The good news is that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration missed the court-imposed deadline for submitting its latest iteration of the hours-of-service rule to govern commercial drivers.

The most recent bits of news about business conditions and the economy suggest that, while we can’t be sure we’re out of the woods yet, the most dire predictions of a double-dip recession a couple of months ago apparently were too pessimistic.