IT’S HAPPENED AGAIN. FOR THE 33RD TIME IN THE PAST SIX
years, Congress missed a deadline for passing a new transport funding
reauthorization bill and resorted to extending the current law. On
May 31, the clock ran out on the previous extension to the legislation
that funds highway and mass transit projects, including critical infrastructure repairs. Despite the pressing need for a long-term solution,
Congress simply postponed the inevitable and took the easy way out.
And so, we have another temporary patchwork solution to a serious
problem.
It’s not entirely for lack of trying. During the past year, there have
been a number of politically motivated but inadequate suggestions,
America,” and “Build America,” but on the infrastructure front, America is sitting still.
But that doesn’t mean Congress is sitting still.
On April 28, the House Appropriations Committee
released the 2016 Transportation, Housing, and
Urban Development funding bill. The committee’s press release is
fairly straightforward, and the recital of the bill’s highlights doesn’t
raise any red flags. But dig a little deeper and you’ll uncover some
provisions that would seem to have no place in an appropriations
bill, unless someone wanted to slip them into law with a minimum
of attention. It has been suggested that these provisions were an early
Christmas present for the trucking industry, which spent $9.85 million
for lobbying and $7.96 million in political contributions last year, no
correlation intended.
One provision of the bill would curtail efforts by the Department of
Transportation to take another look at the carrier liability insurance
minimum. It now stands at $750,000 but has not been changed since
1980, in spite of inflation.
Another would make it more difficult for the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration to try to reinstate the “34-hour restart” requirement established in 2013. That’s the provision in the truck driver
hours-of-service (HOS) rule that required drivers to get two consecutive rest periods between the hours of 1 and 5 a.m.
Most interesting and most concerning to many is a provision that
BY CLIFFORD F. LYNCH fastlane
Another congressional end run
would allow two trailers of up to 33 feet in
length to be hauled in tandem—up from the
28-foot restriction now in place. What this has
to do with appropriations is unclear, but the
provision has the backing of FedEx, Con-way,
and others. Proponents argue that this would
cut down on the number of trucks on the highways, save fuel, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They also maintain that the new 84-foot-
long rigs would pose no threat to highway
safety. These arguments are similar to those put
forward by supporters of raising truck weight
limits a few years ago, albeit for different reasons. This
time, the push is a response
to the increased volume of
lightweight packages resulting from the surge in e-commerce—a trend that is only
expected to gather force. The
Coalition for Efficient and
Responsible Trucking, whose
members include FedEx and
UPS, predicts that this segment of traffic will grow 40
percent over the next 10 years.
Critics include Secretary of Transportation
Anthony Foxx, who says that legislation of this
type should not be included in appropriations
bills, but rather, fully heard and debated in
Congress, a logical objection in my view. The
Truck Safety Coalition cites the potential for
increases in truck-related deaths and injuries,
and contends that provisions that cater to “
special trucking interests” will raise risks to drivers
and the general public.
The end result of all this remains to be seen,
but so it goes in the hallowed halls of Congress.
Clifford F. Lynch is principal of C.F. Lynch & Associates, a provider
of logistics management advisory services, and author of Logistics
Outsourcing – A Management Guide and co-author of The Role of
Transportation in the Supply Chain. He can be reached at cliff@
cflynch.com.
