In The News

"Truck Weight Cap On Its Way Higher"
Kiplinger - July 26, 2002

Odds are that the next federal highway bill will, in just over a year from now, give the green light for states to increase the maximum weight of truck tractor-trailer rigs permitted on U.S. highways. Expect western, Mountain and southern states, where truck runs tend to be longer, to raise their maximum truck weight to around 97,000 pounds, the cap set by our North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) partners Canada and Mexico. That will greatly enhance shipping productivity for U.S. firms plying NAFTA trading lanes and will yield annual savings of up to $40 billion for all U.S. firms that ship or receive goods by truck.

Although Congress won't get around to crafting the next multiyear highway bill until early 2003, support is building for a provision to give the states discretion to raise the current 80,000-pound weight limit. Allowing trucks to carry larger loads would help lawmakers head off a thorny political problem: With over-the-road commerce growing 3% to 4% a year, keeping the current federal cap on truck weights would put about 8 million additional trucks on the road by 2013 - a trend that would be sure to draw howls of protest from highway motorists and suburban commuters.

Of course, railroads will raise a buzz saw of opposition to any effort to boost prospects for its rival, the trucking industry, as will the Teamsters union, which wants more truck drivers on the highways, not fewer. But not only can proponents of heavier trucks point to the drawbacks of retaining the current federal weight cap; they'll also be able to play up the benefits to commuters and highway motorists. American Trucking Associations (ATA), with support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, intends to do just that, stressing that fewer trucks on the road will mean fewer collisions involving trucks and automobiles. That argument already is causing the American Automobile Association (AAA) to have second thoughts about its unalterable opposition to higher truck weight maximums. A spokesman for AAA concedes that heavier rigs would help reduce the number of trucks on the road and contribute to highway safety. And a recent federal Transportation Research Board study reached the same conclusion...

The ATA, which largely stayed on the sidelines during efforts in the 1990s to raise the federal truck weight cap because it didn't see much hope of success, is poised to commit its lobbying muscle this time out. And the ATA can be expected to remind lawmakers often of the federal study's findings. "If maximum truck weights were increased to 97,000 pounds, the 11% reduction in truck miles traveled would prevent more than 25,000 accidents a year, including about 450 fatalities and 8700 injuries plus save 2 billion gallons of fuel and prevent 7 million tons of pollutants from being emitted," says Darrin Roth, the ATA's director of highway operations. The ATA and its allies also are prepared to meet opponents' arguments that heavier trucks will speed up deterioration of the nation's highways. They'll counter that heavier trucks will have six axles, rather than the current five, to distribute the additional weight load and reduce pounding off roadways and that they won't be substantially longer than trucks now on the road.

Expect that Congress in the end will dust off a 30-year-old strategy, initially giving the states the discretion to raise the weight cap on their own, as it did in 1974, and then coming back after a few years to preempt state limits by setting a higher federal weight cap. The omnibus federal highway bill that will take effect on Oct. 1, 2003, is also likely to approve pilot tests to pave the way for construction of truck-only toll roads next to existing interstate highways. The plan calls for reserved lanes to be built and operated with funding from private revenue bonds and tolls averaging 40¢ to 80¢ per mile traveled. Roth says that it would give fleet operators the option to divert their most productive trucks to less-congested toll lanes for faster, higher-margin freight runs that could more than cover the additional costs of the tolls. Moreover, "about 70% of highway accidents are caused by actions of car drivers, and so a separation [of trucks and cars] is attractive for safety reasons," he adds.

Although no reliable estimates exist of the percentage of trucks traveling U.S. roads that might be siphoned off onto such special toll lanes, construction of the lanes would increase overall shipping productivity and allow more goods to be shipped overnight by trucks at savings off the cost of overnight air delivery. The most likely interstate highway corridors for construction of truck-only toll roads: I-95 along the East Coast, I-81 traversing the Appalachian and Allegheny mountain ranges, I-35 between Texas and Canada and I-75 between Detroit and Florida.

As the debate over the next highway bill intensifies in the months ahead, expect that proposals to lift the federal truck weight cap and to test the acceptance of truck-only toll lanes will be linked to a bigger initiative: Virtually all U.S. transportation sector interests agree on the need to upgrade infrastructure and reduce truck traffic around seaports, airports and truck and rail terminals to stave off bottlenecks that could throttle business productivity.