Stiff wind to pay the toll: The 2011 Channel 19 year in review

What better way to start the new year than with a look back on the previous? I did it last year, after all, so let’s make it a tradition, how bout?

The Chinese Year of the Rabbit saw all manner of issues hopping in and out of the national on-highway spotlight, bookended by a proposed hours-of-service rule and its ultimate issuance, slightly reducing potential weekly work hours. Bound up in the discussion was, as any regular reader will remember, the notion of a “driver shortage,” as carriers competed hard for the best drivers and owner-operators with sign-on bonuses, pay hikes and other perks as the economy slowly chugged back to life and CSA made carriers ever more wary of drivers with marks on their records.

But lots happened along the way, of course. Indulge me — and yourselves — in this trip down memory lane…

January
The year started with an inauspicious boom.

Oil and, hence, diesel prices were headed up quickly again, and of course commodity futures markets continued to be open for business to what some were calling the investment banks’ “long con.” In other quarters, a wireless roadside inspection technology pilot program was wrapping up on the very day that the FMCSA proposed to mandate EOBR technology for virtually all interstate truckers — which would be necessary for the inspection technology to work, it just so turns out. Convenient? Conveniently, we were at the scale house the day it came down.

After the FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program went live in December, its potential effects on driver pay were being debated by a large swath of the industry. A driver-led effort to benefit wounded soldiers at Fort Sam Houston in Texas got off the ground as a Chinese ag hauler was sentenced to life in prison for hopping quite rabbit-like $560,000 U.S. worth in tolls by running two trucks with fake military license plates, load services were poking fun at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (and themselves), and Overdrive 2010 Trucker of the Year Mike “Mustang” Crawford got his own authority.

A spilled load of pigs was heard squealing for miles around a Missouri off-ramp.