Shippers Push Lawmakers for Higher Truck Weights

Allowing higher truck weights on interstate highways and helping captive shippers who use the railroads would promote freight mobility and make American companies more competitive globally, representatives of large shippers told a special U.S. House panel exploring freight issues.

“Our trucks typically weigh out before we cube out,” Tom Kadien, senior vice president of consumer packaging at International Paper Co., said at the Oct. 1 hearing on Capitol Hill.

“And with 300,000 trucks going over the road, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to us to [have] trucks with 10 feet of empty space when there are safe alternatives to increase truck weights here in the United States,” Kadien said.

Congress should pass legislation that would allow states to decide if they wanted trucks up to 97,000 pounds with six axles to travel on their interstate highways, he said.

Trucks on interstates are limited to 80,000 pounds except for in states such as Maine and Vermont and in some western states where Congress has allowed exceptions.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a member of the panel, took issue with the idea that states, rather than the federal government, should determine if heavier trucks should be allowed on interstate highways.

“We know that interstate bridges cannot withstand the stress that 97,000-pound trucks will cause even with the addition of the sixth axle,” Nadler said. “These trucks will accelerate the deterioration of and further worsen the condition of our nation’s bridges.”

Nadler and Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) said that federal money pays for construction of the bridges.

The call for increased truck weights on six axles was seconded by another witness, William Roberson, materials and logistics manager of Nucor, a steel manufacturer.

Roberson also said Congress should try to foster competition among railroads to prevent firms such as his from being captive shippers, meaning they pay higher rates to ship their products when they’re served by only one railroad that can set rates at will.

“We cannot pass these increased costs onto our customers,” Roberson said. “We have to absorb them because we compete in a steel market that is being flooded with illegally subsidized foreign products that are often already sold for low costs.”