Highway Legislation Generates Dozens of Research Studies

Members of Congress have been boasting that the new highway bill they passed will create as many as 3 million jobs, including construction workers, highway engineers, manufacturing and truck drivers.

And, it seems, there will be plenty of jobs for transportation researchers.

The bill, expected to be signed by President Obama on July 6, mandates that federal regulators initiate as many as two-dozen studies on a wide range of topics: There is an hours-of-service study, a truck size-and-weight limit study, a wetlines protection study, a truck-rental study, a crash-data collection study, a distracted-

driver study and a hazardous materials safety permit program study — to name just a few.

While the studies might help transportation policymakers understand complex issues, they also can be a tactic used by Congress to stall final decisions on politically controversial projects or regulations — or as a way to compromise on hot-button issues that otherwise would spell doom for a piece of legislation.

Case in point: Earlier this year, House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) threw his support behind a provision in the House’s version of the highway bill that would have allowed bigger and heavier trucks on interstate highways.

However, during the committee’s markup, some members balked at moving forward with the provision, saying they were uncertain about the safety of heavier, longer trucks.

So, they asked for a study.

This was a classic case of using a study to kick the can down the road, said David Osiecki, senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs for American Trucking Associations.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of truck size-and-weight studies that have been done,” Osiecki said. “The last thing that needs to be done is yet another study. It was clearly an effort to stop progress on truck productivity.”

Indeed, there literally have been hundreds of research projects that have been devoted to the weight and size issue, said Rebecca Brewster, president and chief operating officer of the American Transportation Research Institute.

“There’s even a study on all of those studies,” Brewster said, referring to a sweeping survey of the research last fall by the Transportation Research Board. “Now we’ll have yet one more to add to them.”

However, Henry Jasny, general counsel of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an opponent of bigger trucks, said he believes there is a need for a “more pointed study.”

While Jasny does agree that studies can be a delaying tactic, he said they also can be a way of compromising on a controversial issue.

Jasny said there are times when members of Congress, under tremendous pressure to produce a highway bill, will allow a study that delays an action to be substituted for another provision or conceded just to get the bill passed.

“It’s the Solomonic thing to do,” Jasny said. “If they had more time, they might have been able to negotiate or work out provisions that do something more substantively. There were loggerheads on a lot of issues, so studies seemed to be the easiest compromise.”

Congressional observer Paul Carver, who spent 28 years as a senior adviser to former House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.), said studies can be a delaying tactic used by both political parties.

Representatives tried to “divert, dilute and distract by proposing studies when action was needed,” said Carver.

Annette Sandberg, a former administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, said this year’s highway bill included a large number of “hot-button topics” that would have made a bill difficult to pass.

But Sandberg agreed that the truck-weight study is clearly a delaying tactic. Including it in the legislation could have poisoned the prospects for passage of the highway bill, she said.

“I don’t really know what more they’re going to study,” Sandberg said. “They have a fair amount of data already. I just think that the other side didn’t want to see the heavier trucks.”

Another former FMCSA administrator, John Hill, agreed.

“Traditionally, highway bills have not been that partisan. They’ve been fairly beneficial for all members of Congress and, in some ways, for their constituents,” said Hill, now a transportation consultant. “I think they were trying to avoid some of the lightning-rod issues, but it’s tough in this environment. It doesn’t take much to keep something from moving ahead.”

Sometimes a study can be a way to evaluate contradictory studies on tough issues, said John Conley, president of the National Tank Truck Carriers.

“And it sometimes takes really controversial stuff out of a bill,” Conley said. “If they had put in a provision for 97,000-pound trucks, that bill would have been so dead.”

One of NTTC’s biggest battles over the past two years has been against a wetlines protection bill.

Conley said he is pleased that a study in the highway bill will put off a pending final wetlines rule at least another two years.

Jasny, whose group supports a wetlines projection requirement, agreed, however, that a wetlines study makes sense because, despite a large amount of crash data and some anecdotal evidence of a problem, the topic is largely devoid of scientific analysis.