The Playbook

After a fourth quarter of mostly declines, the benchmark diesel price is climbing fast.

The ATA wants FMCSA to extend a failed pilot program that produced 42 graduates out of a planned 3,000. Meanwhile, we’re handing CDLs to drivers who can’t pass basic safety screenings, and carriers who kill people on our highways are walking away with slaps on the wrist. Lowering the age requirement doesn’t solve a labor problem; it creates a safety catastrophe.

A viral dashcam video and a puzzling lawsuit showcase what the trucking industry has known for decades: Distraction kills, and for CDL holders, it kills careers too.

When Harjinder Singh made an illegal U-turn on Florida’s Turnpike on Aug. 12, 2025, killing three people, he exposed what many in the industry have known for years: the American commercial driver licensing system is fundamentally broken. Singh failed his CDL written exam 10 times. He held licenses from two states simultaneously. He couldn’t read road signs or communicate with law enforcement. And yet, he was legally permitted to operate a 40-ton truck on our nation’s highways. This isn’t just an immigration story. This is a licensing standards story.

Secretary Duffy has moved beyond funding threats. He’s now openly discussing pulling California’s ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses to anyone, a move that would effectively ground 700,000 CDL holders and create supply chain chaos that would make the 2021 port backups look like a minor inconvenience.

Power-only trucking sometimes is one of the most misunderstood pieces of the freight industry. Scroll social media long enough and you’ll see it framed as everything from a liability dodge to a race-to-the-bottom strategy that hurts drivers, safety, and rates. Others defend it as one of the few flexible tools left in a market that […]

The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges rose for the first time in eight weeks.

If you got an email from FMCSA this week telling you to prepare for Motus, you might have rolled your eyes. Another promise to modernize. We’ve heard this song before. This one actually matters.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is seeking public comment on renewing its commercial motor vehicle marking requirements. While the FMCSA documents over 153,000 marking violations in 2024 alone, an underground economy of swapped placards helps chameleon carriers and Carrier Identity thieves stay one step ahead of investigators.

A credit card and fifteen minutes can now put an unvetted operator behind the wheel of 80,000 pounds, with full legal authority to share the road with your family. The underwriting standards that once kept dangerous carriers off the highway have collapsed, and everyone from crash victims to taxpayers is footing the bill.

In December 2025, Waymo recalled 3,067 robotaxis after its vehicles ran red lights and blew through school bus stop signs at least 20 times in Austin alone, including one incident that occurred moments after a child crossed in front of a vehicle. Meanwhile, Aurora’s autonomous trucks have completed over 100,000 driverless miles in Texas without a single school bus incident. The difference is methodology, and understanding that difference might just save your life.

The freight industry moved $14 trillion in goods last year. It cannot function without trust, trust that the carrier picking up your load is who they claim to be, trust that the broker paying you will actually pay, and trust that the load you accepted exists. That trust has been systematically exploited for decades. At its root, every form of freight fraud, chameleon carriers, double brokering, cargo theft, identity spoofing, comes down to one question: Are you who you say you are?

Dartanyan Gasanov, co-owner of Westfield Transport, is scheduled to stand trial on March 2, 2026, in Springfield, Massachusetts, on federal charges related to the June 2019 crash that killed seven Jarheads Motorcycle Club members. He reportedly rejected a no-time plea agreement and chose to fight the charges at trial. Meanwhile, the driver who killed seven people was acquitted, remains free under an immigration supervision order, and becomes eligible to petition for his license back in June 2026.

That ELD mounted in your cab? It needs cellular. Your AI dashcam uploading safety footage to the cloud? Cellular. Real-time GPS tracking? Cellular. Wednesday’s Verizon outage was a reminder that modern trucking’s entire technology stack rides on infrastructure we don’t control, and can’t fix when it fails.

The conversation around Right to Repair has been floating around trucking for years, but it’s usually talked about in vague terms. More access. More fairness. More competition. What Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) is pushing for right now is much more specific — and much more urgent. At its core, this is about who controls […]

The Trump administration’s decision to drop its appeal that tied billions in transportation funding to immigration enforcement represents a significant legal setback, but don’t mistake this tactical retreat for surrender. For motor carriers employing non-domiciled CDL holders, the regulatory battlefield has only shifted, not cleared.

The consecutive week streak of declines in the benchmark retail diesel price is now eight, but market conditions are suggesting it might be a challenge to reach nine. The Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration average weekly retail diesel price declined 1.8 cents/gallon in the price published Tuesday, effective Monday. The latest price is $3.459/g.  It’s […]

A stolen 39,000-pound front loader became a weapon against Nevada police this week, and the incident underscores an industry losing up to $1 billion annually to equipment theft with only a 20% recovery rate.

CVSA’s five-day Human Trafficking Awareness Initiative kicks off today across the United States, with law enforcement and carriers conducting coordinated outreach at truck stops and weigh stations through Jan. 16. Since Truckers Against Trafficking launched in 2009, the organization has trained over 1.8 million transportation professionals, generating thousands of hotline calls and identifying more than 1,200 potential victims.

A five-year-old Maine boy was dragged nearly 300 feet and run over by his own school bus after his arm became trapped in the closing doors. The NTSB investigation comes as national data shows approximately 16 children die annually in school bus loading zones, a number that has persisted for decades despite available technology to prevent such tragedies.