Trucks

It sounded like a good deal: The Port of Los Angeles offered to pay $20,000 incentives as part of its Clean Trucks Program, launched Oct. 1 in conjunction with the neighboring Long Beach port to reduce pollution from trucking fleets serving the harbor. That sent Vic La Rosa into overdrive. The owner of Total Transportation Services Inc.

In a victory for independent truckers, a federal judge on Wednesday blocked part of a program to cut diesel emissions by phasing out 17,000 old big rigs at the nation's busiest port complex. U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder's preliminary injunction halted some new rules, including one that prohibits drivers at the Port of Los Angeles from being independent contractors. That was a provision sought by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

The standing joke about the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach used to be that they were like the diesel version of elephant graveyards: the place where old trucks went to die. But lately, they have become a proving ground for technology that produces little or no pollution. On Tuesday, the first of 25 heavy-duty all-electric trucks rolled off a new Los Angeles assembly line. All are slated to work at the Port of Los Angeles or to make short hauls to and from the harbor.

Miguel had more reason than usual to be anxious as he drove his aging big rig out of the Port of Los Angeles' bustling China Shipping Terminal. By his own admission, his 24-year-old truck was dangerously overloaded. The suspension was shot, the tires nearly bald. Over his CB radio, other drivers barked warnings that the California Highway Patrol had set up several checkpoints nearby.

For months, officials in Los Angeles and Long Beach have touted plans to jointly combat air pollution generated by their adjacent ports, but a much-vaunted program to replace thousands of polluting trucks has hit a significant snag. The problem reveals that officials at the cities' ports have sharply differing views on how to treat the 16,500 truckers serving the nation's busiest port complex.

The Los Angeles City Council backed the first phase of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's clean-truck program Wednesday, imposing a cargo fee that will raise roughly $800 million to buy new and alternative-fuel trucks for haulers operating at the Port of Los Angeles. The council unanimously endorsed a Board of Harbor Commissioners ban on all diesel trucks built before 1989 from the port starting Oct. 1.

The Los Angeles Harbor Commission on Thursday unanimously approved a clean air plan requiring shipping companies to buy and maintain a modernized fleet of big rigs and employ thousands of independent truckers who currently operate under contract. A spokesman for the American Trucking Assn. derided the plan as a "scheme to unionize port drivers" and vowed that his group would sue the port.

If you think gas is expensive, be thankful you're not a trucker. Filling up their 18-wheel, 80,000-pound leviathans can cost more than $1,300 these days. Because of short supply, the price of diesel has gone up more than twice as much as gasoline in the last year, reaching a U.S. all-time high this week of an average of $4.33 a gallon. With little hope of a near-term decline -- oil futures rose $2.17 to settle at a record $126.

A month of gasoline prices near $4 a gallon was enough to sour Americans' long love affair with trucks and sport utility vehicles, pushing them back into sedans -- and driving Detroit's automakers into deeper trouble. U.S. sales results released Tuesday showed cars outselling gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs by almost 200,000 in May -- the biggest margin since 1996. That was bad news for U.S.

Henry Ford II was famous for saying "Big cars, big profits. Small cars, small profits." Now a better mantra for the country's second-largest carmaker might be "Big cars, no profits." Faced with crashing sales of big sport utility vehicles and pickups and an increasingly dim financial outlook as a result, Ford Motor Co.