Truck Size Issue a Challenge, FHWA Nominee Mendez Says

This story appears in the June 8 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — Victor Mendez, the Obama administration’s choice to head the Federal Highway Administration, said safety and productivity would be among the factors he would consider when examining possible changes to federal truck size-and-weight limits.

“You need to have commerce, heavy commerce . . . and there are challenges with that,” Mendez, the former director of the Arizona Department of Transportation, said during his June 2 confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

“Clearly, under the current situation, safety is one of the factors that needs to be balanced out along with productivity and . . . preserving our infrastructure,” he said.

Mendez also told the committee that addressing the impending bankruptcy of the Highway Trust Fund would be one of his “highest priorities,” and that a long-term goal for FHWA would be the identification of “sustainable funding mechanisms” for surface transportation.

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chairwoman and ranking minority member of the committee, said they had been told by the Obama administration the trust fund would be $5 billion to $7 billion in debt by August without an injection of new capital (click here for related story).

Mendez was a member of President Obama’s transition team and a former president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Although Mendez did not make any policy commitments for the upcoming highway bill, he did promise that the administration would present Congress with a “robust transportation reauthorization solution.”

In setting transportation policy, Mendez said, the country “must be equipped to meet the growing demands of freight movement if we are to compete in a global economy and stimulate economic growth in the nation.”

A new direction in transportation must “consider multimodal solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation,” he said.

Mendez also said the federal government needed to address both national and regional transportation needs.

While Boxer and Inhofe both indicated Mendez would be confirmed by the committee and the full Senate, truck size-and-weight remains a controversial issue.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), chairman of the committee’s panel on transportation safety, called expanding truck size limits “a recipe for disaster.”

Like many other western states, Mendez’s home state of Arizona allows longer combination vehicles on its highways to weigh as much as 129,000 pounds, besides standard 80,000-pound trucks.

According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, over a three-year period, longer combination vehicles of two or more trailers accounted for less than 5% of all large-truck crashes.

However, Lautenberg, a longtime opponent of increasing federal truck size-and-weight limits, earlier this year introduced legislation that would restrict trucks to 80,000 pounds in weight and 53 feet in length on all parts of the National Highway System, expanding the current limit imposed on the Interstate Highway System.

Groups including American Trucking Associations are pushing Congress to allow states to increase the weight limit on interstate highways to 97,000 pounds if an additional axle is added to the truck to balance the weight.

Last month, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the Obama administration has yet to make a decision on whether to support efforts to increase truck size-and-weight limits.