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You don’t have to be a diesel mechanic to know that extended idling is bad for business. Frequent or prolonged idling increases emissions, wastes fuel and puts unnecessary wear on your engine. That’s why, due in large part to increasingly strict emissions standards, the trucking industry has seen a dramatic increase in idle-reduction technologies.

There has been a great amount of media attention with the first delivery by autonomous truck by Otto Transportation, which recently took place on Interstate 25 from Fort Collins to Denver in Colorado. While this trip was made with a convoy of State Patrol and Colorado DOT vehicles around it, this event still represented quite an achievement.

Idaho’s Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle program, or GARVEE, recently wrapped up, after a decade of investment in the state’s roads and bridges. Along the way, the GARVEE program transformed the state’s infrastructure in a way we haven’t seen since the interstate system was built through Idaho in the 1960s.

Workforce equipment, technology, regulations and demographics continue to change, but truck driving has and will always be more than a job — it’s a lifestyle. Perhaps nothing illustrates this more today than watching drivers use smart phones and tablets.

This Opinion piece appears in the Jan. 13 print edition of Transport Topics.

Our industry must adjust to major changes in government regulations. We know that changes are coming, but it’s still not clear precisely when they will go into effect, nor do we know exactly what the changes will be.

Lighting is already responsible for 19% of the world’s electricity consumption, and its technological advancements are changing the world in fascinating ways, including some that are becoming increasingly more evident in the trucking industry.

Those in our industry can make whatever excuses they want for not using EOBRs. The bottom line is they haven’t wrapped their minds around how to make money legally. I mean, they might as well be bootlegging whiskey. It’s the same damn thing.

We live in an age of electronic information. Computers, the Internet, iPhones, iPads, GPS . . . all these technological wonders work to make our lives easier, reduce paperwork and give us all more time to do other things.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration continues to be dead set on forcing every commercial vehicle in the United States to carry an electronic onboard recorder — better known as an EOBR — despite the device’s hefty price tag and general uselessness as a safety tool.