A fair playing field was all he wanted, said the owner-operator who ran three trucks from California. He was addressing a panel of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and California Highway Patrol officials during a California Trucking Association-sponsored town hall meeting held at a recent trucking show in Las Vegas.
The trucker assailed the federal hours-of-service proposal and other regulatory burdens and asked when the FMCSA would start making rules dealing with excessive waiting, loading and unloading, the high price of fuel and other issues hammering his company and the industry in general. “What can you do about bringing back regulations where we can afford to make higher profits and where we can afford to give our drivers more money?” the trucker asked.
Julie A. Cirillo, FMCSA’s chief safety officer, was sympathetic with the trucker’s situation, but reminded him her agency was responsible only for regulating safety. “We are responsible for all federal motor carrier safety regulations,” Cirillo noted. Those regulations deal with equipment, maintenance, operations, driver qualifications, drug testing, medical qualifications and company safety management practices. Most of the trucker’s complaints were free-market issues, she said, and outside her agency’s range of authority.
“In terms of the economics of the industry, we don’t deal directly with the economics of the industry other than to determine the impact on the economics if we promulgate a regulation,” she said. That impact can be significant as the costs associated with complying with federal and local safety and environmental regulations continue to mount. Meeting federal emissions standards in the future, for instance, will mean pricier engines and more expensive low-sulfur fuel.
But Cirillo stressed her agency doesn’t have authority to regulate in the economic area, and doubted Congress would decide to re-regulate the trucking industry anytime soon.
Before deregulation in the early 1980s, the industry worked with its regulators to set rates, assign traffic lanes and control entry. A former state trucking executive told us they worked with state regulators to set rates so “the dumbest guy out there” could make a profit. But those days are long gone.
“In terms of suggesting, ‘Gosh, deregulation didn’t work, we ought to re-regulate,’ I think most economists would argue that there is really no basis for that view,” Cirillo said. Instead, she said, “economists say that deregulation has kept the price of moving freight low. Whether that is conducive to safety, I have no idea.”
