Obama Signs $105 Billion Bill to Fund Transportation Programs Through Sept. 2014

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

President Obama was scheduled to sign into law late last week a two-year, $105 billion transportation funding bill that will allow more tolling of interstate highways and create a national freight highway network.

Editor’s Note: President Obama signed the highway bill into law on Friday, July 6, after this issue went to press.

The bill also requires trucks to have electronic onboard recorders  and calls for a field study on the 34-hour restart provision in the new hours-of-service rule.

However, it does not include changing existing truck size-and-weight standards.

Overall, the legislation provides $52.2 billion in spending for fiscal 2013 and $52.95 billion for fiscal 2014. It replaces the 2005 transportation authorization law known as SAFETEA-LU, which expired in 2009 but was extended nine separate times before Congress agreed on a replacement.

The bill passed the House 373-52 and the Senate 74-19 on June 29. Obama was expected to sign it on July 6 at a White House ceremony.

“While there is much to like about this bill, ATA is extremely disappointed that Congress has once again kicked the can down the road with respect to truck productivity,” said Bill Graves, president of American Trucking Associations.

ATA had wanted Congress to allow trucks to run as heavy as 97,000 pounds with an additional axle. The trucking federation also wanted states to be mandated to allow rigs with two 33-foot-long trailers on highways. Currently, double trailers are limited to 28.5 feet each.

Instead, Congress mandated only  a federal study to determine the effects of heavier trucks on roads and bridges.

Under the EOBR provision, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will have a year to come up with a regulation. Then, carriers will have two years to put the electronic logging devices on their trucks.

Under the bill’s new tolling provisions, states no longer will have to receive approval before tolling new interstate highway lanes.

However, the ban against tolling existing interstate highway lanes remains intact. Thus, if a highway has three lanes and a state wants to add a fourth, only the fourth lane can be tolled.

In the past, states that wanted to add new interstate lanes and toll the lanes to pay for them had to be accepted into a federal pilot program.

“If they want to add a new lane or convert a [high occupancy vehicle] lane to a [high occupancy toll] lane, they no longer have to apply under the pilot,” said Darrin Roth, ATA’s director of highway operations.

The new law allows states to “just go ahead and do it,” Roth said.

Jack Basso, chief operating officer of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said the provision “opens up a whole new avenue for tolling.”

The provision does not affect a pilot program Congress created more than a decade ago under which three states would be allowed to toll existing interstate lanes.

Virginia and North Carolina are preparing applications under the pilot program to toll Interstate 95. Missouri was accepted into the pilot several years ago but never followed through with an application.

The new highway bill also mandates that the U.S. Department of Transportation create a new freight program under which the federal government will designate a national freight highway network and develop an inventory of the worst traffic bottlenecks.

The bill originally contained a $2 billion appropriation that would have helped states add capacity to or improve the freight highway network. But the funding did not survive the House-Senate conference committee process that eventually produced the final bill.

ATA is disappointed about the money, but the freight program is still valuable to the trucking industry, Roth said, because DOT must collect a large amount of data in connection with the freight network and the traffic bottlenecks that slow the movement of goods.

“Maybe not for this highway bill, but I think once that information is out there, it helps us to bolster our case that [highway] money should be invested in a more targeted way,” Roth said.

The data will allow transportation planners to quantify the economic effects of specific bottlenecks, he said.

Roy Kienitz, former undersecretary for policy, who worked on freight issues before leaving DOT last year to open a consulting firm, said the freight highway program failed to take an intermodal approach.

He said the bill makes the federal and state governments “take a good look” at the highway system and pinpoint inefficiencies in terms of freight movement.

“That’s a good thing,” Kienitz said. “We should absolutely do that, but don’t mistake that for a comprehensive national freight policy.”