Issue: Efficiency
Heavy duty trucks burned more than 38 billion gallons of diesel fuel in 2006. Depending on the price of diesel, fuel is the industry’s largest or second-largest cost, before or after labor costs. Becoming more efficient in fuel use is a goal that will help the industry and the nation.
But reducing fuel usage is more than a matter of getting better mileage out of each truck. The overall efficiency of a fleet’s performance – moving more goods for each gallon of diesel consumed – is the more important measure, and a key goal of the new American Trucking Associations program.
For example, more productive truck combinations can deliver more goods with fewer vehicles, using less fuel. New management techniques for deploying truck fleets more efficiently are being developed. Working with the government’s SmartWaySM Transport Partnership program, great advances in the overall efficiency, or productivity, of trucking can be achieved.
