Moving Forward

After a decade of uncertainty, some stability would be a nice change

As 2010 comes to a close, it’s good time to reflect on the official end of the first decade of this new millennium.

Randy Grider is editor of Truckers News. He is the son of a career trucker and holds a CDL. He blogs regularly at www.truckersnews.com/truckwriters-blog. Write him at rgrider@rrpub.com.

Riding a wave of careless enthusiasm through the late 1990s, we were indeed partying like it was 1999, but the foundation of that economic boom was already showing cracks. The dot-com bubble burst, starting the tumble down. In the trucking industry, easy access to financing put practically anyone who wanted a truck into his or her own driver’s seat. But as the economy headed south and the bankruptcies grew, the market was flooded with used trucks — a glut that slowed the trucking recovery.

All this also coincided with the first round of regulations in 2002 requiring heavy-duty engine makers to reduce emissions output. The decade saw subsequent lower-emission engine hurdles, most recently in 2007 and 2010.

Of course, the other major factor of the early-decade recession was the crippling effects of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which eventually led the country into two wars abroad. While we saluted the trucking industry’s response to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the attacks’ impact on trucking was far-reaching and continues to ripple through the industry today as the possibility of other terrorist attacks involving the transportation sector remains high.

As the economy began to recover, the Bush administration handed down a controversial rewrite of the hours-of-service rule — its first revision in six decades. The rule has been tweaked and challenged numerous times during the past several years, and at press time, we were awaiting the Obama administration’s promise of yet another revision of the regulation.