The pedestrian bridge that collapsed in Florida was designed to make students safer

A bridge at Florida International University's campus collapsed on Thursday, resulting in multiple injuries and casualties to those who were trapped beneath it. The 950-ton bridge, which was set to be completed in 2019, was designed to make it safer for students to travel between FIU's campus and Streetwater, a city where around 4,000 students live. The bridge was installed in a single day on Saturday through a method that was supposed to increase safety for workers, pedestrians, and drivers.

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‘Multiple’ fatalities when bridge collapses onto vehicles

A pedestrian bridge being built across an eight-lane highway collapsed at a Miami-area college Thursday, crushing eight vehicles under massive slabs and killing multiple people, authorities said. Search ...

Trump Org. responds to New York Times report on Mueller s…

CNBC's Robert Frank reports on comments from the Trump Organization about its subpoena from Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Where Did the Hours of Service Rules Come From, Anyway?

HOS rules were created in 1930 and would remain fundamentally unchanged until 1995, when Congress directed the DOT to establish a new set rules incorporating the latest scientific understanding of human fatigue and alertness. 

How the hours of service rules for truck drivers ever became a safety regulation is a question that has vexed many in the industry.

The rules came into being in the 1930s as a combination of labor and economic regulation intended to bring some stability to the nascent trucking industry, and to protect workers from overly demanding employers. There were few rules to speak of at the time, and little was known scientifically about fatigue, sleep, driver performance, or crash causation.

The earliest regulations requiring rest for truck drivers, circa 1935, allowed drivers to work 12 hours within a 15-hour period while requiring nine hours of rest and three hours of breaks within a 24-hour day. That rule also established a weekly maximum of 60 hours on-duty over seven consecutive days. Sound familiar?

A few years later, organized labor petitioned trucking's regulator, the Interstate Commerce Commission, for a reduction in the hours drivers were required to work, proposing an eight-hour daily limit and 48-hour weekly limit. The ICC, lacking any specific knowledge on the matter, asked the U.S. Public Health Service in 1938 to investigate truck driver hours of work. The resulting report was not very conclusive, but it did note, “... a reasonable limitation of the HOS would ... act in the interest of highway safety.”

The rules would not change substantially until 1962, when the ICC eliminated the 24-hour framework and replaced it with a rotation that allowed the driver to drive up to 10 hours within a 15-hour period before being required to take eight hours off. The net effect allowed the work/sleep rotation to slip to as ...Read the rest of this story

Commentary: What Do Dealer-Vendor Partnerships Mean for Fleets?

Although they aren't the first dealership to do it, Steve Dupuis, COO of Summit Truck Group, believes dealers partnering with suppliers is likely to gain traction going forward.

Denise Rondini

Late last year, Summit announced a strategic partnership with Fontaine Fifth Wheel. Under the terms of the partnership, Fontaine will be the exclusive supplier of fifth wheels for all stock trucks ordered by Summit, and will also be the standard fifth wheel on retail sales, “unless the customer specified another brand,” Dupuis says.

The dealership's management decided to “take a look at how we go to market and how we could leverage scale with Tier 1 vendors that share the same customer service philosophy and approach to business we do.”

He says the dealership decided to “strike a relationship that was a little more formal than the typical dealer Tier 1 vendor relationship.” Typically, Tier 1 suppliers have relationships with the truck OEMs, but not with the dealers themselves.

Dupuis says the dealership looked at how it could work with Fontaine to leverage economies of scale “to get better pricing, better warranty and some type of service agreement.”

Summit customers benefit from discounted prices with better service. “We have parts stocked at all our locations and have a preferred service agreement with Fontaine whereas if a fleet has a unit down, Fontaine will overnight parts, components and even a whole fifth wheel to us or the customer to get them up and running again.” Summit operates 27 full-service locations and five parts and service locations in eight states.

Basically the customers get “a better product, at a better price with better service,” Dupuis says. “Once we tell them the story, I think the vast majority of customers are going to see the benefit of these kinds of relationships.”

The benefit to Fontaine is more sales and ...Read the rest of this story

3 Ways Vocational Truck Specs are Changing

A wide range of engine options that allow fleets to spec for tough applications is one of the top trends in vocational trucking today. Photo: International

The advent of new technologies such as autonomous and connected vehicles has put over-the-road fleets squarely in the national spotlight. But vocational fleets face many of the same operational issues, and they, too, increasingly are turning to new technologies and options to work more efficiently and profitability.

Some industry observers believe it will be in vocational fleets where we'll see the first real-world tests of vehicle-to-vehicle communication, self-driving trucks, self-diagnosing powertrains and other new technologies. Volvo, in fact, recently predicted that refuse trucks working at a walking pace in residential neighborhoods may well be the general public's first exposure to self-driving trucks.

For now, many cutting-edge medium- and heavy-duty vocational fleets are looking to more established, and often less flashy new technologies, to help them work smart and profitably. And three of those trends are gaining momentum.

<img src="http://www.automotive-fleet.com/fc_images/articles/m-freightliner-m2-vocational-1.jpg" border="0" alt="

Freightliner recently added to its medium-duty vocational power offerings with the launch of the new DD8 diesel engine. Photo: Freightliner

1. Increased emphasis on safety

Advanced vehicle safety systems have become a common spec for over-the-road fleets. Yet vocational trucks may need them even more, says Ralph LoPriore, director of fleet assets and processes for Stoneway Concrete/Gary Merlino Construction in Seattle. His mixers and dumps spend far more time in tight city areas surrounded by passenger cars than the majority of OTR trucks. And given the increased congestion in and around Seattle, along with his younger, less experienced team of drivers, spec'ing advanced safety systems for his fleet was a no-brainer.

“I'm really working hard today to try to get as many of the same safety features on my trucks the over-the-road guys are already getting,” LoPriore says. “I'd like to ...Read the rest of this story