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The U.S. Coast Guard is beginning to review how biometric devices should be added to federal transport security cards that are becoming mandatory for truckers and everyone else who wants access to secure port areas.

Four more trucking companies, including Chicago-area less-than-truckload carrier Mid-States Express Inc., have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, becoming the latest casualties of the continuing economic downturn and credit crunch.

FedEx Corp. last week won a Washington state class action case that affirmed the company’s position on driver classification.

PHOENIX — As an Arizona highway patrol officer for 14 years in the 1970s and ’80s, Dick Landis chased illegal immigrants, drunken college students, speeding motorists and even hardened drug dealers up and down just about every strip of concrete slicing through the state’s scalding, lonely desert.

An accounting rules shift could trigger fundamental changes in a truck leasing market worth as much as $70 billion by reducing the attractiveness of renting equipment and reducing fleets’ access to debt.

U.S. retail diesel prices jumped sharply last week, a second straight bump that raised the national average a two-week total of 20.4 cents a gallon, or about 10%, as gasoline also rose, topping the $2 a gallon mark for the first time since November, according to the Department of Energy.

Two senior House Democratic leaders last week introduced a sweeping greenhouse gas bill that includes a cap-and-trade program and would expand motor carriers’ use of SmartWay technologies.

Budget committees in Congress have approved draft versions of spending-revenue plans for next year that reject an Obama administration proposal to remove the firewalls that have traditionally protected the Highway Trust Fund and other transportation-related funds.

The Department of Transportation will develop a proposal to reopen the United States to trucks from Mexico before President Obama visits President Felipe Calderon there later this month, a spokeswoman told Transport Topics.

Two regional less-than-truckload carriers announced across-the-board pay cuts because of deteriorating freight volumes and prices, Saia Inc. by 5% for salaried employees and drivers, and Ward Trucking Corp. by 8.9%. Both companies said executives’ pay was cut even more.