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While new technology is driving trucking forward, the industry still needs the expertise of service professionals to keep tomorrow’s equipment running smoothly.

With quarterly earnings underway, we’re getting a look at how the industry fared during the first three months of 2019, a year which some have predicted could mark the beginning of a cooldown from last year’s red-hot freight market. Turns out the start of this year for freight haulers wasn’t marked so much by a cooldown as it was cold and snowy weather.

The launch of the Nikola Two tractor just days ahead of Earth Day — April 22 — was a fitting and, perhaps, deliberate gesture by the company to spotlight the trucking industry’s progress in improving its level of environmental responsibility.

The notion of being a “hands-on” worker still carries weight in professional circles. Increasingly, though, some of the things that once were decidedly “hands-on” are becoming much more “hands-off” thanks to the march of technological innovation.

The Department of Transportation has taken an important first step in potential reform of the hours-of-service rules that regulate how much time truck drivers can spend behind the wheel, and we’re glad to see it.

All of a sudden, it looks like lawmakers might be making good on the long-standing promise to get moving on what most agree is an issue with bipartisan support — yes, infrastructure funding.

Across three industry events in the span of just a few days last week, the evolution of automated driving was front and center, with everyone from government leaders to technology innovators looking ahead to how — and at what pace — automation might someday reshape the trucking industry.

In the nine years that the American Transportation Research Institute has been producing a list of the worst bottlenecks in the United States, three spots have had the inauspicious honor of landing at the top of the list. These same three are consistently awful, even if from year to year one is worse than the others.

We were surprised that President Donald Trump did not focus more on infrastructure during last week’s State of the Union address, particularly since he chose to include some pointed language to describe the North American Free Trade Agreement.