Stories You May Have Missed This Week

Move over, CB radio: Trucker apps are helping to haul the load

If you’re old enough to remember 1970s trucker films like “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Convoy” and “White Line Fever,” you may think of truck drivers as free-spirited individuals tethered to the world by nothing more than citizens band airwaves. That depiction was a stretch even then, but today’s truckers are often as Web-connected as the technophiles occupying the local Starbucks. Even on the loneliest stretches of the Interstates, smartphones and tablet apps provide diversions and lend a helping hand.

Read more in the New York Times.

Texas: Plan to convert roads to gravel begins

The sharp increase in heavy traffic from a historic oil boom has damaged many farm-to-market roads in South and East Texas. The damage related to energy development has become so extensive that state and local authorities lack the funding to make all the repairs. Last month, the Texas Department of Transportation announced plans to convert more than 80 miles of paved roads to gravel. ... But the plan has been met with criticism from lawmakers and some of the farmers and ranchers who live near those roads.

Read more in the Texas Tribune

"How ironic it is that just as the Legislature comes to the rescue of county roads, TxDOT is turning its back on some of the paved highways that also lead to the oil patch — the very place that harbors so much of Texas' future prosperity," write State Sen. Carlos Uresti (D-San Antonio), who portions of Converse, Kirby, Universal City and unincorporated Bexar County, in an opinion piece on My San Antonio website.

Read Uresti's commentary.

Financial services expert turns to trucking

Gary Shade was driving north along Interstate 5 to Grants Pass early one morning, dreading his workday ahead as a stockbroker at Smith Barney, when he glanced at a man in a white 18-wheeler alongside him.

At that moment, a light came on for Shade. He later discovered expediting was just the escape he and his wife needed.

Read more in the Medford, Ore., Mail Tribune.