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The Obama administration’s $8.5 billion plan to advance U.S. high-speed rail programs is being questioned by trucking interests and the freight railroads whose tracks would host most of the new services, officials in both industries said.

SAN DIEGO — CSA 2010, the new federal safety monitoring and rating system for motor carriers, is likely to be the most important and potentially disruptive federal policy development for trucking to come out of Washington this year, fleet executives and industry watchers said last week.

When passive radio frequency identification began its rise almost a decade ago, hopes ran high that the new technology, which offers hands-free operation and doesn’t require a direct line of sight, would help to free the shipping industry from labor-intensive bar-code tracking, which often requires handheld devices to read labels and is consequently much prone to human error.

Automated vehicle tracking is now accessible to more fleets than ever before, as providers pack the technology into small — but powerful — hardware. However, economic and regulatory concerns are keeping older systems firmly entrenched in the trucking industry.

A recent study by one of the world’s largest makers of Global Positioning System navigation devices has concluded that Seattle is the most traffic-clogged city in the United States.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it was delaying some intermodal chassis safety requirements for six months to give operators of that equipment more time to create a database to track the condition of each chassis.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it was delaying some intermodal chassis safety requirements for six months to give operators of that equipment more time to create a database to track the condition of each chassis.

Driver turnover at large truckload carriers fell in the third quarter to 43% a year, the lowest level since American Trucking Associations began tracking the data in 1995.

If people won’t voluntarily avoid using handsets while operating a motor vehicle, there are ways to render cellular connections inoperable, or at least report the driver’s activities to management.