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Trucking companies are bracing themselves for potentially large increases in insurance costs next year.

Diesel fuel prices continued their march upward last week, with the national average retail cost rising 1.5 cents a gallon to $1.304, the highest in about three years.

Trucking companies use all sorts of tactics to reduce driver turnover, from higher pay and more home time to free vacations. Yet C. Gerald Carter believes that looking inside the driver’s head may provide the biggest turnover-buster of them all.

Instead of singing Auld Lang Syne at midnight, teams of federal government staffers will be poised to pounce on any significant computer problems that arrive with the millennium.

A settlement between a produce wholesaler and a group representing owner-operators could dramatically change how trailers get loaded and unloaded in this country – and who pays for it.

A spokeswoman for Landstar System said last week the Jacksonville, Fla.-based company is working “feverishly” to resolve problems that led the Department of Transportation to propose an unsatisfactory safety fitness rating for one of its subsidiaries, Landstar Ligon.

Illinois lawmakers provided relief to intermodal truckers who are often stuck with faulty equipment by passing a law that makes the owners of chassis, trailers and containers responsible for their condition.

An Overnite Transportation Co. driver was shot and wounded Dec. 1 in Memphis, Tenn., leading to charges by Overnite officials that Teamsters were responsible for the shooting.

The Teamsters union, after decades of on-and-off campaigns to organize owner-operators in the nation’s seaports, is preparing for another shot at the brass ring.

Word that U.S. authorities are pulling over Canadian truck drivers and deporting them — minus their equipment in some cases — has angered truckers north of the border.