It takes special people to be flatbedders. Tarping, however, is usually not on their list of favorite activities. A single tarpaulin can weigh 65 to 100 pounds or more. It must be half thrown and half dragged over the load, spread evenly with corners properly folded and tucked in, and the whole piece of slippery fabric secured with straps and bungies.
Shippers must work smarter and cooperate closely with their carrier partners to offset expected losses in truck capacity caused by government regulation, according to presentations at the 11th Annual Transplace Shipper Symposium held earlier this month in Dallas.
Want to get a handle on alternative fuels? Talk with someone who uses them. One person is Melvin Rose, fleet manager for Monroe County in western New York, which surrounds Rochester. The county has 700 vehicles, from compact cars to Class 8 trucks. All run on ethanol-gasoline blends, biodiesel, compressed natural gas or propane, and Rose loves to talk about them.
Only a couple of days after announcing its new T880 at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky., in March, Kenworth had a couple of trucks for us press people to drive. Equipment Editor Jim Park and I were pleased to be among the scribes who got their hands on the just-minted vocational and regional-haul vehicles.
Equipment Editor Jim Park still recalls his first meeting with a T800. It was in the fall of'86, the year the truck was introduced and a little more than a year after the T600 had made its game-changing debut.
New hours of service rules go into effect July 1. Are you ready? The American Trucking Associations has published an easy-to-use, free tipsheet to help you help your drivers understand the new HOS rules.
Retreading tires provides the absolute lowest cost per mile of any tire management strategy. When coupled with other enhanced preventive maintenance measures, a retreaded tire can easily go half a million miles or more, all things being equal.
It is an old trucking industry adage that while the sales department sells the first truck, the service department sells the second, third and fourth trucks. According to David Gerrard, senior vice president of distribution at Navistar, “Without an effective relationship on the service side of the house, it is very difficult to maintain the customer relationship.”
The day after its introduction in Dusseldorf, in northern Germany, we reporters had a chance to drive Mercedes-Benz’s new Sprinter van for a few hours on various surfaces, from a test track to a dirt road and on a nearby Autobahn.
In the past two years, 34 states have adopted laws that allow motor vehicle departments to waive the CDL skills test for qualified military veterans, the Obama administration says in a new report. Nine more states plus the District of Columbia are considering legislation to do the same thing.
It's still an oddball spec in road tractors, but some believe the 6x2 — a single drive axle with two powered wheels among six total wheel positions — will someday become more common as truck operators look for ways to save fuel and cut tare weight.
Everything you need to know about switching from dual wheels to wide-base singles you can learn at a playground. Picture a teeter-totter with a big kid on one end and a little kid on the other. The big kid is on the ground, while the little guy's legs are dangling in the air. The load is unevenly distributed. If you moved the fulcrum closer to the big kid, the beam would eventually balance.
Truck driver pay is often summed up in just two words: Not enough. But one analyst sums up the situation lately with the words “productivity bonuses” and “sign-on bonuses.” Gordon Klemp, publisher of the National Survey of Driver Wages, talks about whether those are good or bad in this story from the May issue of HDT.
Whenever there's a panel discussion about driver turnover and the coming driver shortage, low pay is always pointed to as a culprit. Yet when it comes to making drivers happy, pay often takes a backseat to the bigger picture.
Greening a fleet can be a daunting prospect, but as fuel prices continue to rise, the opportunity to save money has increased. Significant and easily accessible funding is now available in California through the Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP)
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