Letters: Broker Surety Bill, Pallets, Drivers
These Letters to the Editor appear in the May 16 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Broker Surety Bill
This is in regard to your April 18 issue, which includes an article about the Transportation Intermediaries Association, American Trucking Associations and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association all supporting a broker surety bill (p. 20).
I, too, support reforming the laws that govern licensed property brokers. However, the last reform bill, S. 3483, had a time bomb in it for 90% of America’s smallest motor carriers: In order for one motor carrier to hire another, which is brokering, that carrier would have to have a license as a property broker and post a $100,000 bond to do so.
Will the new legislation have that time bomb in it, too?
This is not currently the law. Any motor carrier can hire another without a license and bond. Motor carriers, since time immemorial, have been able to balance their dispatch by hiring another carrier or owner-operator without a license or bond.
The old bill and the new bill requirements may create an additional $100,000 tax on all motor carriers and hurt the smallest among them that are not currently licensed. Brokers’ license numbers will climb from the current 20,000 to more than 100,000 licenses.
Most small trucking businesses won’t survive this broker-reform legislation. Small motor carriers, those with fewer than 10 trucks — the majority of truckers — are placed at a distinct financial disadvantage should this “reform” pass.
Will the new legislation be like S. 3483? If that is the case, America’s food supply costs, 70% of which is trucking, will increase by double digits as capacity disappears.
There isn’t enough “liquidity” in current insurance markets to write 100,000 new $100,000 surety bonds. Have the authors of this legislation checked to see if insurance companies would even stay in the broker surety bond market if the bond is raised to $100,000? I have spoken to five of the nation’s largest and received a negative reply, i.e., “too risky.”
This new legislation is biting off your nose to spite your face.
David Dwinell
Professor of Transportation
Brokering
Sun City, Ariz.
Pallets
Regarding your May 2 article about pallets: Has anyone looked into taking old tires and recycling them into pallets?
Wayne Gilbert
Controller
Triple D Supply LLC
Las Cruces, N.M.
Drivers
I’ve been driving for a long time, 34 years, and by no means am I a perfect driver, but I try to drive safely in my everyday habits.
I drive a flatbed between Wisconsin and the parts of the Northeast north of the Tennessee line over to northern Illinois to upper Michigan and Minnesota. I drive Interstate 95 in Connecticut a lot, and I drive U.S. Highway 41 in Wisconsin because I live there.
When driving I-95 in Connecticut, how fast is fast? The speed limit on I-95 between the New York line and above New Haven, Conn., is 55 mph. How fast should a truck be traveling?
Out of three lanes, we only have the two right lanes to use. Speeds I’ve seen are 65 mph, 70 mph, 75 mph and as fast as the truck can go — and we know a car can go much faster. What happens when a truck has to slow down, and there’s no way out? With daytime trucking, you’re lucky if you can do 55 mph. But at night there isn’t as much traffic, and the trucks travel fast, and the drivers weave in and out of the lanes like they’re on the Indy 110 race track.
I usually travel about 3 mph under or over the speed limit. I use both lanes just to keep out of peoples’ way, and the drivers really get bent out of hell because you’re in the way. You see them going past, and then they slam on the brakes ahead of you because some four-wheeler is in the way.
Now they’ve gotten nice, shiny push bumpers and big train horns to move them out of the way. Next, they get up just past the car and cut off the other guy — no turn signal — and then the truck driver slams on the brakes.
Unsafe driving techniques — speeding, following too closely, unsafe lane changes — waste fuel and cause stress.
But there goes the big truck, racing the four-wheeler to the end.
Dan Gerster
Owner
DAG Trucking of Wi LLC
Oshkosh, Wis.
