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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

U.S. factory orders rose in February for the first time in seven months, the Commerce Department said Thursday.

Less-than-truckload carrier Con-way Freight will take over the final leg of express shipments from Europe under a new partnership with Dutch transportation and logistics firm TNT.

Construction spending fell 0.9% in February, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.