Playbook: News

Rob Carpenter Thursday, May 21, 2026

Another CA truck crash and two dead kids on Highway 99

A Freightliner Cascadia operated by Amritsar Trans Inc., a five-truck carrier out of Manteca, California, rear-ended three vehicles on Highway 99 near Lodi on May 19, 2026, killing two young men. The driver fled on foot. The carrier sits inside a web of 267 carriers clustered across residential addresses in the same ZIP code, and 10 involuntary revocation actions.

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Rob Carpenter Wednesday, May 6, 2026

The Columbus corridor of Medicaid millionaires and chameleon carriers

An investigation found 195 active motor carriers clustered along a few miles of East Dublin Granville Road in northeast Columbus; the same corridor was just exposed for a billion dollars in Medicaid fraud. Federal inspection data shows those carriers have been involved in 275 crashes, including 4 fatal and 74 injury crashes. The world’s largest retailer appears in 175 inspections across 44 of those carriers with a 20.6% out-of-service rate.

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Rob Carpenter Friday, May 1, 2026

How an Executive Order reshaped highway safety

We have never seen a twelve-month period in which the White House, the Department of Transportation, and FMCSA moved as aggressively, as comprehensively, and as effectively on the specific safety failures that haunt our highways and our industry. Before we sit down with Derek Barrs on Monday, here is the year that got us here.

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Rob Carpenter Thursday, April 9, 2026

How the worst of trucking failed Athena Strand

On Nov. 30, 2022, a delivery driver put Athena Strand in the back of a branded van and strangled her. The company that hired him was seven months old. Its owner had never worked a day in the trucking industry. The box was checked. The FBI has linked more than 850 murders to commercial truck drivers since 2004 and is tracking 450 active suspects right now. This is a hiring problem. It has always been a hiring problem.

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Rob Carpenter Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Secretary Duffy prioritizes barriers to entry in trucking

America’s highways became a testing ground for unqualified drivers long before anyone in Washington was paying attention. Now, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy shuttering thousands of sham CDL schools and placing unqualified truckers out of service, he emphasized to the frontline at the Mid-America Trucking Show that drivers’ day has finally come.

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