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For 25 years or longer, operating ratio (the ratio of operating expenses to operating revenue) has been a common measure of profitability and efficiency in the truckload transportation industry.

Excessive roadside service calls are a major symptom of a dysfunctional fleet operation, the sort whose pickup-and-delivery times are less than dependable and whose truck downtime is costing the head office big bucks for lost business and expensive repairs. And the No. 1 cause of roadside service calls is tires.

Every year at the Management Conference & Exhibition, American Trucking Associations selects a new chairman. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to serve you all this year.

As our industry adds more and more safety technology, an increasing number of your trucks have equipment installed that alerts drivers and dispatchers when the vehicle changes lanes.

There’s no denying that technology is rapidly changing the shipping and logistics industry. These changes are making warehousing more efficient, dispatching faster, planning easier and communications smoother — and that’s just the tip of the technological iceberg.

It was about this time last year that I had the privilege of addressing you in these pages as I started my year as chairman of American Trucking Associations.

The word “green” today means far more than the color of money. It refers to a set of practices and positions that embrace efforts to reduce mankind’s impact on the earth’s environment.

We often fail to notice things until there’s a problem. When you go to the light switch, you expect when you hit it that the lights will come on.

The adoption of natural gas as a transportation fuel continues to pick up speed. It is no surprise to me: I spent more than 30 years in the waste business and was the CEO of Republic Services, which is now the nation’s second-largest waste services provider, when the industry began to consider transitioning from diesel, a fuel we had used for decades. I understand the challenges in making the decision to switch to natural gas.