September 12, 2007 Vol. 3, No. 19

You’ll see in the collection of new products below a pair of pretty exciting announcements from two enterprising outfits in the communications game, Shaw Tracking and PeopleNet.

The level of sophistication on this front continues to amaze me, especially as I remember going to a press conference – at Frederick Transport — back in the mid-1980s in which
satellite tracking was first introduced to the unsuspecting masses. Fears of Big Brother were in the air, but that never became an issue.

And now? Well, we’ve come a very long way from that crude tool presented way back when. All manner of data can now be shuffled back and forth in milliseconds, creating
efficiencies that nobody could even dream about 20 years ago.

Around the same time, more or less, I visited Glengarry Transport in Montreal, where Ken Weisberg of Carrier Logistics (both still around and thriving, I’m happy to say, unlike Glengarry) was installing what I believe was the first automated – read, computerized – dispatch and routing system in a Canadian fleet. It didn’t help Glengarry quite enough, it seems, but it was the launch of another side of the fascinating digital revolution that propels us still. We take dispatch software for granted nowadays.

But I’m old enough to remember the first little handheld calculator, and before that the first transistor radio, both of which were revolutionary in my life. And I think it takes someone of my vintage to understand how far trucking has come in just two decades and a bit. If I might be spared a moment of cynicism, I’ll suggest that shippers sometimes seem to have been the main beneficiaries of all this. Or let me put it another way and say that these amazing advances in technology have allowed freight haulers to serve their customers better and better. Yes, that’s nicer.

STICKING WITH MY CYNICAL SELF, I’ve gotta write a little bit here about biofuel. Seems I’ve raised the ire of some western folk with an editorial I wrote for the mother ship
magazine, Today’s Trucking, in the September issue. It was quite benign, really, but I registered doubt – as I’ve done in this space on several occasions – about the wisdom of
a blind leap into a biofuel future without a solid view of its implications for the world’s food supply.