Foxx Comfortable With Decision to Open Border to Mexican Trucks

WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said his department had plenty of information under which to justify opening the U.S. border to Mexican trucks despite a report from the Inspector General that said there were too few participants in a pilot program to determine if all Mexican trucks were safe enough to run U.S. roads.

“There were also legacy carriers that provided us with data that was also used to supplement the data that we got from the pilot, and the combination of those two data sets gave us sufficient information to move forward,” Foxx told Transport Topics during an appearance Jan. 12 at the annual Transportation Research Board gathering here.

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As many as 1,000 trucks have been running in the United States under special permits that predate the three-year pilot program that ended in October and the 2002 truck regulations promulgated under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The IG’s report concentrated on the 15 participants in the pilot program, while the report FMCSA sent to Congress the same day the agency announced the opening included data on the other Mexican trucks, known as enterprise and certificate carriers.

Foxx said, “We’ll see,” when asked if the low level of participation in the pilot program indicated that few Mexican trucks are interested in running longhaul in the United States.