‘Regulatory Overload’ Stalls Trucking, ATA Official Tells Transportation Panel

This story appears in the March 21 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — Trucking is burdened with “regulatory overload,” an American Trucking Associations official told a panel of Department of Transportation officials.

“In just the past three months, there have been eight proposed rules — four from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, two from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and two from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” said David Osiecki, ATA’s senior vice president for policy and regulatory affairs.

“Those eight proposed rules amount to over 400 pages of text in the Federal Register, and more than a thousand pages of additional documents related to the cost effect of those proposals,” Osiecki said here at a March 14 public hearing.

He said the heavy regulatory climate has caused trucking to become “a bit frustrated, frankly, with this government” and “hesitant to make investment and job-related decisions.”

The DOT panel, which mostly consisted of top agency attorneys, conducted the hearing in response to an executive order from President Obama that requires all federal agencies to review existing “significant rules to determine if they are outmoded, ineffective, insufficient or excessively burdensome.”

DOT is accepting written public comments on the regulatory review until April 1. It then must submit to the Office of Management and Budget a plan for periodically reviewing existing regulations to determine whether they should be modified or repealed.

Osiecki told the panel that ATA believes the DOT’s current policy of reviewing agency regulations every 10 years should be shortened to every three to five years.

“It is not necessarily working as well as it should be, and it doesn’t produce in our view a meaningful list of regulations that must be examined for improvement,” Osiecki said.

Other speakers asked the agency to consider changing the lengthy environmental review process for highway construction projects.

John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said that he and Victor Mendez, head of the Federal Highway Administration, have met in recent weeks with state officials, soliciting ideas on how to shorten the time it takes to complete highway projects.

Horsley said Mendez has told state officials that major highway projects now take on average from 10 to 13 years to complete.

“There’s no question that there’s got to be a better way, and we think that reviewing your federal regulations will be a step in the right direction,” Horsley said. “Over the last 10 years, the time it takes to produce an environmental impact study and a record of decision on a major highway project averaged between five and seven years, just for the National Environmental Policy Act process. We’d like to see that timeline cut by two-thirds.”

Horsley said AASHTO also wants to see more project-by-project reviews shifted to states from the federal government.

“We don’t think value is added by the federal highway staff review, and we think time is consumed needlessly,” Horsley said.

L. Daniel Tanksley, speaking on behalf of the National Society of Professional Engineers, also complained about the environmental review, calling it “sequential, not a collaborative approach.”

Horsley also said that AASHTO wants to see more privatization of rest areas.

“States like Virginia, Georgia and Arizona — and just about all over the country — are frustrated that they have very tight budgets and are having to cut back on spending,” Horsley said. “There are private outfits ready to privatize and commercialize rest room services, security and safety at these needed rest facilities.”

Natso has long opposed commercialization of rest stops, claiming that with the advantageous location on the interstate right-of-way, they would siphon away customers who normally patronize exit-based businesses.

In a recent policy paper, Natso said the interstate highway system has flourished at highway exits — with more than 97,000 businesses located less than a quarter mile from interstates, employing nearly 2.2 million people.

Natso spokeswoman Tiffany Wlazlowski said Congress has prohibited interstate rest areas from offering commercial services such as food and fuel.

DOT doesn’t have the authority to overturn a federal law, she said.