News

From Yankee Institute. Lawmakers short-changed Connecticut’s Special Transportation Fund by $650 million between 2011 and 2017, according to a transportation funding document released by Senate Republicans — more than enough to pay Connecticut’s portion of the new commuter rail line from New Haven to Springfield, Massachusetts. The vast majority of the funds were “diverted” away…

Registration is now open for the 98th Motor Transport Association of Connecticut (MTAC) Annual Meeting! This year’s conference will be at the Four Points Sheraton in Meriden, Conn. on Thursday, Oct. 25. This year’s conference will feature great educational seminars, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) Division Administrator Chris Henry will speak about the Electronic…

From Transport Topics. The Interstate 84 widening project in Waterbury, Conn., which has been going on since 2015, is on track to open one year ahead of schedule. The $300 million project involves the addition of a third travel lane and full-width shoulders in each direction to a 2.7-mile segment of the route, one of…

From Transport Topics. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials have issued a proposal that seeks comment on several possible changes to the agency’s hours-of-service rule, ranging from how to increase driver or workday time in adverse driving conditions to revising the current mandatory 30-minute driver break after eight hours of continuous driving. In a telephone…

From ATRI. The American Transportation Research Institute, the trucking industry’s not-for-profit research organization, today launched the 2018 Top Industry Issues Survey. The annual survey asks trucking industry stakeholders to rank the top issues of concern for the industry along with appropriate strategies for addressing each issue. The survey is in its 14th year and participation…

From The Hour via Business Insider. Truck driver salaries have been on the up and up for some truckers in 2018. Nearly 50% of all truckers in the National Transportation Institute’s quarterly survey on trucker pay received salary bumps in 2018, according to Gordon Klemp, principal of the National Transportation Institute. Last year, only 11%…

From FreightWaves. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has agreed to implement a series of actions as it works toward the possible implementation of an Item Response Theory (IRT) approach to identifying at-risk carriers for intervention. IRT is a data-driven approach that has been used in other settings, such as ranking hospitals, says Science…

From New Haven Register. “Why don’t we just ban all trucks from our interstate highways in rush hour?” A mayor of a small Fairfield County town recently asked me this question. He’s a smart guy who obviously had given a lot of thought to resolving our traffic woes and believed he had the answer to…

Late last week, MTAC President Joseph Sculley visited member company Environmental Services Inc (ESI). ESI’s staff of over 70 employees includes project managers, supervisors, compliance and regulatory personnel, equipment operators, skilled craftsmen, and field technicians with multiple years of experience in emergency response, site remediation, hazardous waste management; as well as backgrounds in the petroleum…

From WTNH. A Connecticut state senator is working to stop bonded funds from being used for a $10 million toll study. On Tuesday, State Senator Joe Markley (R-Southington) filed the injunction in Connecticut’s Superior Court to stop the funding for a study on possible electronic highway tolls in the state. “It’s up to the General…