Lautenberg Sees Safety as Key Highway Bill Issue

This story appears in the March 9 print edition of Transport Topics.

While much of the debate on the upcoming highway bill will focus on funding issues, a senator charged with overseeing the safety portion of the legislation said recently that “the status quo is simply unacceptable.”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), head of the Senate Commerce Committee’s panel on surface transportation and longtime advocate for increased regulation, told Transport Topics in an e-mail interview that he supported increased use of technology as a way to reduce the number of truck-involved crashes, but such technological leaps should be financed by the industry, without the aid of government incentives.

In his February e-mail to TT, Lautenberg said the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s “first priority should be to increase and enhance enforcement and compliance programs through targeted inspections, creative partnerships, new technology and stronger regulations to ensure that only safe carriers serve the marketplace.”

As part of those efforts, Lautenberg said he believed “new safety technology requirements will certainly be part of the up-coming reauthorization of the federal truck safety programs.”

Existing technology “is underutilized,” he said, “even though it has become much more affordable in recent years.”

“While some may have concerns about financing safety technology upgrades, I do not believe that the federal government should bear that burden,” Lautenberg said. “Maintaining a safe trucking fleet should be a prerequisite to entering the business.”

While Lautenberg stopped short of calling for the mandated use of all safety technology, he did say that electronic onboard recorders to monitor hours of service “absolutely” should be mandated on trucks.

At the end of the Bush administration, FMCSA was close to publishing an EOBR rule that agency sources said would have expanded the minimal mandate the agency had proposed originally. The regulation was recalled after the change of administration.

“I expect that the Obama administration will revisit and reissue the EOBR rule and I hope that this administration will be aggressive on requiring the use of this technology,” Lautenberg said. “For the hours-of-service rules to be effective at minimizing fatigue-related accidents, we must have an effective enforcement regime, and EOBRs can help us achieve one.”

Lautenberg also said preliminary data from 2008 showing a decline in highway deaths demonstrated that slowing down to increase fuel economy had increased safety, data that “strongly argue in favor of requiring speed-governor technology.” But, again, he did not commit to such a requirement making its way into the highway legislation.

American Trucking Associations has a petition before FMCSA to require trucks to carry governors set at 68 mph. The petition is part of ATA’s overall plan to reduce carbon emissions from trucks, which also includes a proposal to increase the maximum weight of trucks to 97,000 pounds, something Lautenberg said he was strongly opposed to.

“I do not support an increase of truck size-and-weight limits because I do not believe that proponents have demonstrated that longer or heavier trucks are safe or appropriate for our mixed-use infrastructure,” he said.

“In addition, before we can even consider increasing the size and weights of trucks, we must first improve the safety of our existing fleet by reducing collisions, injuries and deaths,” he said. “Until that happens, I do not support any efforts that would make trucks potentially more hazardous to the rest of the traveling public.”

Lautenberg said he believed before changes to the size-and-weight rules are considered, “there must be a way for these heavier trucks to fairly pay for the damage they do to our highway infrastructure, including costly bridges.”

At the same time, he acknowledged that truck-only lanes “are an intriguing idea.”

“If mechanisms existed to ensure that longer and heavier trucks would be solely confined to such lanes and their construction and operation were entirely self-financed by the industry,” he said, “it’s possible that they could be part of the freight capacity solution.”

Lautenberg also criticized FMCSA for inspecting only a “small percentage” of trucks on the road.

Of those, “23% are in such bad shape that they must be put out of service,” he said. “The roughly 5,000 annual deaths and 100,000 injuries caused by unsafe trucks and drivers require that the FMCSA embrace new strategies to appreciably improve truck safety right away.”

Last year, FMCSA and state partners conducted about 3.4 million roadside inspections, and placed about 23% of vehicles and 7% of drivers out-of-service, but an official of the enforcement community said those figures are artificially high.

“People need to understand [the inspections] are not random, they’re targeted,” said Steve Keppler, director of policy and programs for the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance. Inspectors are looking for trucks that appear to be in disrepair. “So, it is not necessarily a representative sample of the state of safety of the [truck] fleet in this country,” he said.

Keppler said a lot of state enforcement officers “don’t think they’re doing their jobs unless they have a 100% out-of-service rate.”