Opinion: Success Through Cooperation
The panel, gathered to talk about “The Politics of Transportation: Representing the Public Interest,” discussed several topics guaranteed to raise the temperature of trucking executives, such as workplace injuries, funding for mass-transit programs and tax reform.
In sponsoring this group, the ATA Foundation lived up to its goal of inspiring debate and presenting alternative opinions, including some unpopular ones that run contrary to the thinking in some portions of the industry.
The participants — two current and two former federal officials — urged the gathered industry leaders to work more closely with the agencies they represent or represented. They appealed not to the patriotism or political loyalty of the audience, but to practicality and self-preservation.
“We will continue to work with industry,” Wykle said, even as officials at the agency’s Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety distance themselves from truckers.
“We need to get the right balance between enforcement and working with industry on education and training,” he said.
Wykle said it would be wrong for trucking to interpret the policy change as a desire to break relations with the industry. Rather, he said, it represented a shift in emphasis to restore enforcement to its rightful place among the agency’s priorities.
Marthe B. Kent, director of general safety standards for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, tried to hold out an olive branch to the trucking community, urging executives to fully participate in the agency’s pending ergonomics rulemaking. She said trucking has more than twice as many muscular-skeletal disorders as the national average, and that despite the industry’s unhappiness with OSHA’s activities, new rules will be instituted.
She said truckers need to inform agency officials about the impact of general proposals that might not be appropriate for them and to help devise rules that would protect workers while not unfairly affecting business.
Kent received the least cordial reception from the audience, some of whom complained that they thought the agency had ignored their efforts in the past and who warned that the proposed ergonomics rules could be disastrous to the industry.
Fred Hansen, a former deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, urged trucking to get behind expanded mass transit programs. While truckers have often viewed public transit projects as competitors for federal highway dollars, he warned that traffic on the nation’s highways will only get slower — and freight deliveries take more time — unless commuters are encouraged to leave their cars and take buses, trains and subways.
Hansen, who now runs the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District in Oregon, also warned the audience that the old system “of trying to pave our way out of highway congestion is a policy of the past.”
Trucking must “build partnerships” with other groups, such as mass transit, in order to remove drivers who don’t need to use the highways from the road. Otherwise, he said, truckers can count on longer travel times and additional expenses in making deliveries.
Ken Krupsky, a former Treasury Department assistant secretary for tax policy, urged truckers to pay attention to developing tax policies and to voice their opinions on proposed changes.
