The Iowa Department of Transportation would like to inform Iowa carriers of a construction project in the Dubuque area, on shared route US 52/61/151 between Twin Valley Road and Grandview Ave. involving the reconstruction of bridges over Catfish Creek.

The highway will remain open to traffic. However, during the construction season, that section of highway will be limited to two-lane traffic (one lane in each direction head-to-head) on one side of the road and speeds will be reduced. Congestion in the peak hours is likely, and travelers in the area should expect delays. 

The road is anticipated to be open to four lanes again for the winter. Work will begin on the opposite bridge in the spring of 2014, and similar constraints to traffic operations will be present for 2014.

Up-to-date traffic information can be found at www.511ia.org.

New orders for Class 8 trucks climbed 10.4% in March when compared to a year ago and surpassed 20,000 for a sixth straight month, according to ACT Research.

The 22,100 net orders placed last month marked the second consecutive year-over-year gain and were the fourth-strongest in the past 13 months. However, the total was 4% below February's order intake of 23,027.

Last month's tally shows "stability" but "doesn't exude confidence," said ACT Vice President Steve Tam. Companies generally aren't expanding their fleets, he said. Instead, they are only replacing older equipment after delaying replacement cycles.

Through March, manufacturers have received 67,439 Class 8 orders in 2013, 0.3% below the same period last year, ACT said.

John Walsh, vice president of marketing at Mack Trucks, said the orders this year largely reflect replacement demand rather than expansion.

Jack Allen, president of North American trucks and parts at Navistar International Corp., said his company's forecast still points to growth in the second half of 2013.

Another research firm, FTR Associates, put Class 8 orders in March at 21,817, up 11% year-over-year but down 4% from February.

ACT's Tam also said order backlogs stood at 83,700 at the end of February, and likely grew slightly in March. He doesn't expect the current string of 20,000-plus order months to continue much longer.

The year-over-year gains in the past two months were "more about timing last year than strength this year," he said. 

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will miss an October deadline set by Congress to mandate electronic logging devices in all trucks, according to Administrator Anne Ferro. Instead, the agency will publish a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking for the mandate in September, and the mandate itself will likely be finalized a year late. The requirement will probably be implemented in 2016.

That timeframe is later than what Congress asked for in MAP-21, last year's transportation funding law, which called for the regulation to be finalized by Oct. 1 and to take effect two years later.

After President Barack Obama signed MAP-21 in July, the FMCSA said it expected it could meet the October deadline.Once the new proposal is re­leased, the agency will allow the public to comment on it for at least 90 days.

In 2010, the FMCSA first issued a rule requiring trucking companies with a history of hours-of-service violations to use electronic logging devices. That would have taken effect in June 2012. The next year, the agency proposed requiring ELDs, which it called electronic onboard recorders at the time, for all companies that were using paper logbooks. But months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit overturned the 2010 rule, saying the agency did not meet a statutory obligation to ensure that the devices could not be used to harass drivers.

The universal mandate used the same technical specifications as the one overturned in court, so in 2012, FMCSA rescinded its proposal and vowed to reissue a rule that complied with the court ruling. Later that year, Congress mandated the regulation in MAP-21.

The driver harassment issue is just one of the major aspects the FMCSA must consider in its new proposal, American Truck Associations Rob Abbott said. It also must settle some issues that ELD manufacturers identified with certifications of the devices and their communication and security.