(The Washington Post published the following article by Don Phillips on June 26.)
WASHINGTON — The trucking industry, reaching a mutual lobbying pact with the railroads, agreed yesterday not to seek federal permission to run longer and heavier trucks on the country’s highways for at least the next six years.
Rather than battle over the issue, the American Trucking Associations and the Association of American Railroads effectively called a truce in one of Washington’s longest-running and most expensive lobbying battles. They will instead spend their lobbying time and effort to promote mutually beneficial freight industry issues.
Washington, therefore, will be spared the perennial lobbying dance in which truckers try to expand the highway mileage open to big trucks and railroads orchestrate a counter-campaign to convince voters that bigger trucks are dangerous.
For motorists, the agreement means that double- and triple-trailer trucks will not be allowed on any highway where they are not allowed now, although there may be some minor expansions of longer-truck territory in a few states.
The industry groups announced at a news conference that they will work to persuade Congress to provide more money to solve problems facing all freight transport, such as increasing security, expediting border-crossing clearance and expanding “intermodal” truck-rail terminals. They will also work to mitigate costly environmental rules, such as diesel-fuel emission standards, that affect both industries. A final list of issues is still being worked out, they said.
“In order to better focus efforts on common legislative and policy positions, ATA and AAR have agreed that their two organizations will support continuation of the existing federal statutory provisions concerning truck sizes and weights,” said a joint statement from Bill Graves, ATA president, and Edward R. Hamberger, AAR president.
The statement makes it clear that the trucking industry will lobby against efforts by anyone else to ease federal restrictions on truck sizes and weights. “We are now opposed to truck size and weight increases,” Graves said at a news conference.
Graves and Hamberger said that the impetus for the truck-rail detente came from the chief executives of some of the country’s largest transportation companies, who told their associations that the bitter size-and-weight issue was getting in the way of other cooperative efforts to move freight more efficiently.
“In the real world outside the Beltway, our industries work together every day,” Hamberger said. “The only negative issue out there was truck sizes and weights. It was threatening to overwhelm our positive energy.”
One of the chief peacemakers was United Parcel Service of America Inc., one of the country’s biggest truck lines and the largest single customer of the railroads, providing $1.8 billion of revenue a year — about 5 percent of all railroad revenue. Yellow Transportation Inc., which previously had pushed for more widespread use of triple-truck combinations, also switched to push for the six-year freeze.
The agreement was also strongly affected by what might be called the “Kansas connection.” Graves, former governor of Kansas, is a close friend of Michael R. Haverty, chairman of the Kansas City Southern railway. Graves also noted that the chairmen of the two major western railroads, Richard K. Davidson of Union Pacific Corp. and Matthew K. Rose of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., are natives of Kansas and also personal friends. Union Pacific also owns a major truck line, Overnite.
The agreement reflects the real world. Truckers and railroaders are increasingly cooperating in “intermodal” freight transportation — the movement of trucks and containers over long distances by rail or ship, with pickup and delivery by road. In addition to UPS, mega-truckers such as J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. and Schneider National Inc. are major rail intermodal customers.
“Even though rail carriers and motor carriers are competitors in many transportation markets, they are also part of an integrated national freight network,” the ATA-AAR statement said. “Indeed, the two transportation modes are partners in the context of intermodal transportation which is vital to both domestic and international commerce.”
The issue came to a head this year because the previous highway-transit bill, the six-year Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), expires in September. A final bill is not expected to pass before next year, but most interests are working now to influence the legislation.