Opinion: Trucking Can’t Rest After Productive Year

By Bill Graves

President & CEO

American Trucking Associations

It always takes a few weeks into the New Year to fully shake off the rust from the holidays and get down to business. But before we do, I just want to take a little time to look back at what I believe will be seen as a historic year for the trucking industry.

In many ways, 2015 was the culmination of years, even decades, of work by the industry and by ATA. The events of last year will shape our industry, not just this year but for many years to come.

What events? Take passage of the FAST Act, for instance. Shaping a long-term highway bill has been ATA’s top advocacy priority for as long as I’ve been president, so to see Congress pass the first truly long-term bill in a decade after years of extensions and inadequate shorter-term measures was really gratifying.

And what’s more, that bill contains a number of important items for our industry that will make moving freight by truck safer and more efficient. It provides a real focus on freight projects — with real money attached — that will increase capacity and improve roads and bridges where congestion chokes our industry and our economy’s productivity.

The FAST Act also starts the much-needed process of reforming the CSA safety monitoring system — a system ATA has long supported the goals of but one that has been increasingly exposed as needing serious improvements. And while those improvements are ongoing, the scores that CSA produces will be rightly held back from the public.

The bill lays the groundwork for fleets to use hair samples in drug testing, which, based on the feedback of our members, can be a powerful tool in keeping unsafe drivers out from behind the wheel of our trucks.

There was another significant announcement related to the DOT’s mandated drug testing near the end of last year. After three years of historic-low positive test results, FMCSA announced it was lowering the threshold for fleets’ random tests to 25% of drivers from 50%. Our industry has proved itself to be serious in our efforts to keep drug abusers out of our trucks, and those efforts resulted in this reduction. ATA looks forward to our industry keeping our test results at those low levels, and we look forward to later this year when FMCSA gives trucking another powerful tool — a clearinghouse of positive drug and alcohol test results — to keep our trucks drug-free.

Staying on the regulatory front, FMCSA cleared the way for electronic logging devices to be required on all trucks by publishing its final mandate in December. ELDs have been shown repeatedly to increase compliance with the hours-of-service rules, and compliance with the current rule has a strong correlation to reduced crashes and improved safety. At the time, I called this rule a historic day for trucking safety, and I still believe that.

I also still believe that Congress’ actions on the HOS restart rules in the end-of-year spending bill will be a step forward for safety. Congress again told FMCSA to show its work and to look at the effects on safety and driver health of its ill-conceived restart restrictions and said those parts of the rule should remain suspended until they can be supported by science and data.

These big-ticket items join a host of other achievements ATA helped bring about: legislation restricting the expansion of tolling on interstate highways; a pilot program to allow some young veterans with CDLs to drive across state lines; increased flexibility for veterans to transition more easily into jobs as commercial drivers; a requirement for trucks to have electronic stability control; and passage of a tax extenders package that allows for accelerated write-off of new equipment by small businesses and extends bonus depreciation and tax credits for the use of propane in forklifts.

So needless to say, it was a very, very productive year. ATA’s aggressive pursuit of a pro-trucking, pro-safety agenda paid off for our members and the industry and will pay off for the public with safer, more efficient transportation.

But even after such a productive year, and heading into the presumed gridlock of an election year, we can’t afford to rest. ATA is already hard at work to correct the issues raised by California’s meal-break rules, which run counter to federal HOS regulations. It is our hope that Congress will clarify that states cannot impose their own work and rest rules at the expense of federal ones because our industry cannot abide the potential patchwork of state rules that would create chaos and confusion for drivers.

In addition, with the next phase of greenhouse-gas emissions standards looming, our never-ending effort to improve highway safety and ongoing challenges to bring new drivers and technicians into our industry, 2016 is another critical year for trucking.

The best way to set our industry on the right course to see all of 2015’s achievements implemented and to guide trucking in facing 2016’s challenges and opportunities is to get involved in our industry. Join your state association; support the research of the American Transportation Research Institute; contribute to the Trucking Moves America Forward industrywide image movement and, by all means, join ATA.

Your voice and your involvement are critical to our industry so that next January, we can look back on a 2016 that is just as historic for trucking as 2015 was.

American Trucking Associations, the largest national trade federation for the trucking industry, has headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and affiliated associations in every state. ATA owns Transport Topics.