FMCSA Plans August Restart for Mexico Trucks Program

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration hopes to relaunch its controversial Mexican trucks pilot project by mid-August, according to an agency official.

A formal agreement between the United States and Mexico could be signed in the next few weeks, William Quade, FMCSA’s associate administrator for enforcement, told Transport Topics last week.

In a briefing last week to the agency’s Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee, Quade said the agency received nearly 2,000 public comments on its proposal

to allow trucks from Mexico to deliver to destinations in the United States (5-23, p. 5) as mandated under the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

The agreement to let Mexican trucks into the U.S. interior was completed in part to end $2.4 billion in retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products imposed by Mexico after Congress shut down a pilot cross-border program in 2009.

The United States and Mexico reached an agreement in principal in March, and in recent months have been negotiating details of a new pilot program.

The agreement would end a more than 16-year dispute over whether the United States was violating NAFTA by not allowing Mexican trucks deliver freight here.

FMCSA plans to include a discussion addressing the comments when it publishes its final rule on the pilot program, expected shortly after the agreement is signed, he said.

Quade declined to comment on whether the final rule will include any significant changes to the proposed rule, first announced in April.

The advisory panel last week appointed a subcommittee to monitor the three-year-long pilot project and report back to the agency on how well it went and assess the safety performance of Mexican carriers who participated.

The MCSAC is a 20-member committee that studies and makes recommendations on far-reaching, thorny and sometimes controversial regulations and issues. Its members range from trucking and bus industry executives to safety advocates and law-enforcement officials.

The committee does not have an operating budget, but borrows staff and expertise from FMCSA for its projects, said its chairman, David Parker, who is also senior legal counsel for Great West Casualty Co. Parker said the committee’s recommendations go straight to FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro’s desk. 

In an interview, Quade said he expects the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General’s office to complete its audit in late July assessing FMCSA’s readiness to grant operating authority to Mexico-domiciled motor carriers under the pilot.

The IG is required to submit the audit to Congress before the agency begins the pilot project. However, Quade said congressional approval of the pilot is not required.

During the briefing and in a question-and-answer session afterward, Quade told MCSAC members that 29 Mexican carriers registered for a 2007 Mexican trucks pilot project that was shut down in 2009 when Congress yanked its funding. However, only about 8% of the carriers’ trips during that test were beyond the 25-mile border commercial zone.

A total of 10 U.S. carriers participated in the 2007 program, but only four are still operating in Mexico, Quade said.

Quade said that Mexican carriers who participated in the 2007 pilot and who sign up for the new program will be able to receive credit for “time served” toward the 18-month requirement for permanent operating authority in the United States. “One carrier could get permanent operating authority if it passes another safety audit,” he said.

Quade said that, if granted permanent operating authority, Mexican carriers that operate safely for 18 months will be allowed to travel to the U.S. interior for the entire three years, or until the agency makes a decision on whether to make the program permanent.

But Quade told the committee he has concerns that the sudden shutdown of the earlier pilot program in 2009 left carriers with a “bad taste in their mouth.”

“We did pull the rug out from under them very quickly,” he added.

“Mexican carrier participation is going to be, in my opinion, the biggest challenge to the program becoming a success,” he said.

Not only is it costly for a Mexican carrier to start up a U.S. long-haul operation, it will also require trucks to wait in line for hours at the U.S. border, Quade said.

For the agency to properly evaluate the success of the pilot there must be a collective total of 4,100 vehicle inspections or “safety snapshots” of Mexican carriers. The proposal estimated that to reach the inspections goal, on average, 46 carriers must make one border crossing a week.

Although there wasn’t enough data to properly evaluate the 2007 pilot, the data that were collected showed that on average, Mexican carriers performed more safely than U.S. truckers, Quade told the committee.

Quade said a Mexican carrier’s inspections done at the border for the first three months during the initial phase of the pilot will not be counted toward the inspections total.

The rule, proposed April 13, calls for Mexican carriers to pass an initial 11-step safety check, including acceptable hours-of-service compliance and drug and alcohol testing plans.

Fleets that pass the initial check will be granted provisional authority and be inspected each time one of their trucks enters the United States.