California Targets Oldest Trucks in New Emissions Proposal
By Andrea Fischer, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Sept. 10 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
A proposed California Air Resources Board regulation would force the owners of an estimated 80,000 trucks built before 1994 to remove them from the state’s roads by 2009, a trucking official said.
Under the regulation proposed by CARB on Aug. 17, all trucks operating in California and built before 2007 would require some form of retrofitting — to reduce nitrogen oxide and particulate matter emissions (8-27, p. 4).
Erik White, head of the CARB heavy-duty diesel in-use strategies branch, told Transport Topics: “Our expectation is that pre-1994 trucks would be replaced by 2009.”
The regulation would mean “an estimated 80,683 pre-1994 trucks” would have to be taken off California roads in the next year and a half, said Matthew Schrap, manager of environmental affairs for the California Trucking Association. The cost of complying with CARB’s regulation has the potential to “put small trucking companies out of business.”
This rule is separate from another plan that is expected to ban 7,600 pre-1994 trucks that currently serve the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. That is almost half of the total number of trucks currently operating at the ports, said Arley Baker, a Port of L.A. spokesman.
Trucking executives said CARB’s regulation would hit small carriers the hardest because they are the least able to pay for truck replacements or retrofits.
“This rule will cause fleets to scrap their oldest vehicles and spend money retrofitting their older vehicles, which will be a more-than-expensive proposition for many fleets,” said Mike Tunnell, director of environmental research for the American Trucking Associations. “Obviously, spending up to $20,000 on one truck is a heavy burden for most small businesses.”
Tunnell estimated retrofits to cost between $8,000 and $20,000 a truck.
Buster Anderson, vice president of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies, said the regulation could force small carriers to reevaluate whether they should do business in California.
“If carriers choose to operate in that arena, they’re going to have to pay that cost by adjusting their rates. . . . If they can’t do that, they’re going to have to do something else,” such as relocate their business, said Anderson.
For large companies, such as Coca-Cola, ending operations in the state is not an option.
“We cannot avoid California,” said Chuck Harbin, a regional fleet supervisor for Coca-Cola in Southern California, “but we are going to have to decide how we are going to structure our operations there if we are going to have to retrofit our trucks.”
Harbin and other trucking executives have urged CARB to give the trucking industry more information on how much the regulation will cost during a series of recent public meetings.
CARB is required by state law to carry out a study to assess the effects of any proposed regulation on the industries it would affect.
White would not comment on how quickly CARB would release an estimate on how much the regulation would cost the trucking industry, but he said that an economic-impact analysis would be completed before the regulation is finished.
