Opinion: An Industry at the Crossroads

President and CEO

American Trucking Associations

This Opinion piece appears in the Oct. 8 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

As an industry as connected to the highways as trucking, we know an awful lot about roads. We know about smooth roads — those that are easy to traverse, the ones where you can feel the wind at your back and the sun on your face. We know too about congested roads — arteries that are frustratingly clogged, preventing us from moving very far or very fast.

However, we also know about crossroads — those points on the map where you can travel in a new direction to chase new opportunities. Well, after several challenging years, this industry is now at a crossroads.

When we last gathered, in Grapevine, I spoke to you of the Texas-sized challenges facing our industry. We were waiting for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to release its ill-conceived revision of the hours-of-service rule, for Congress to pass a long-overdue highway reauthorization and, for many of us, for the effects of the economic recovery to become more real.

Since then? FMCSA issued a rule that — while not as bad as it could have been — still will have a negative effect on our industry, but more importantly, on the safety of our highways. These rules, should they be allowed to go into effect, will put more trucks on the road, increasing congestion and raising the risk of a crash on top of reducing drivers’ flexibility to rest and get home more often.

American Trucking Associations, as you know, currently is suing FMCSA to keep these rules from ever being enforced — a case we feel we have a strong chance of winning.

Hours-of-service is not the only FMCSA-related bump in the road we’ve had to endure this year. With each passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that the agency’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program is not living up to its mission and is need of a serious midcourse correction. ATA has supported — and continues to support — the initial goal of targeting unsafe carriers in order to reduce crashes. However, ATA is disappointed with the agency’s lack of progress in rectifying fairly obvious deficiencies in CSA.

While the regulatory road has been bumpy, 2012 was a good year for ATA on Capitol Hill. After more than two years of delays, the House and Senate finally came together on a highway bill. That bill, now the law of the land, significantly advances the cause not just of truck safety, but of highway safety.

By requiring electronic logging, closing the job-hopping loophole in the drug and alcohol testing rules with a national clearinghouse, establishing standards for systems to provide employers with timely notifications of drivers’ moving violations and mandatory testing of new carriers entering the industry to verify their knowledge of safety requirements as well as ordering a study of crashworthiness standards for large trucks, this new law is a giant step forward for our industry.

Despite this, the bill does have flaws — notably it continues to kick the can down the road on truck productivity and more importantly, on adequate funding to ensure our roads and bridges are in good repair and remain uncongested.

By continuing to underfund our transportation system, the federal government is all but forcing states to look at another type of road to solve their problems: toll roads. We all know what tolls can do, not just to the transportation system, but to our industry.

I have said repeatedly that tolls are not the so-called “free market” or “conservative” solution to transportation funding — they in fact are the opposite. Creating huge new government agencies to collect and administer tolls is far more damaging, not just to the idea of smaller, less intrusive governing, but to basic common sense.

From every $1 of toll collected, nearly 25 cents goes to overhead, but for every $1 of fuel tax collected, as much as 99 cents gets poured back into concrete, steel and asphalt. It seems like a no-brainer.

But, ATA still has to go out and deliver that message to policymakers — such as in North Carolina and Virginia — where with your support, we are fighting plans to toll Interstate 95 and, for the moment, we appear to be winning.

This year has been a long and winding road, but it has not been without its moments of high points. We were honored to celebrate FedEx Freight’s Don Logan, this year’s National Truck Driving Championships Grand Champion, and Ryder System’s Christopher Barnett, TMC’s SuperTech Grand Champion.

We were privileged to see our America’s Road Team Captains crisscross the country in celebration of the safety, essentiality and sustainability of our industry.

We are grateful to Dan England, our outgoing chairman, for his terrific service this year, just as we are pleased to welcome Mike Card as our new chairman at this critical moment.

Our industry is at a crossroads. With possible important regulatory changes afoot, with changes needed in how we fund and manage our highways and with possible changes in who makes those decisions coming this November, it is an important time for trucking.

We’re preparing for those changes — and more. We’re looking at how our need for drivers is going to affect our industry, and how the economy is going to affect us all.

In a little more than a month, we’re going to look down the road to the next big thing: natural gas at our Natural Gas in Trucking Summit. It is just another example of how ATA and our industry are looking to the horizon to ensure that the road ahead is clear and smooth.

The ballplayer-philosopher Yogi Berra is quoted as saying: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” So I encourage all of you at this Management Conference & Exhibition to continue taking the road with us as move forward together as an industry and a federation.

Bill Graves is a former two-term governor of Kansas. American Trucking Associations, Arlington, Va., is a national trade federation with affiliated associations in every state. ATA owns Transport Topics Publishing Group.