The New Highway Bill
Take a look at this year’s highway bill, and how it affects trucking. Read the bill, and notify your congressional representative or trade organization to respond.
ATRI Seeks For-Hire Carriers To Participate In Study
Arlington, VA – The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) today launched a data collection initiative to update the 2013 Operational Costs of Trucking report. Through a brief online survey, ATRI seeks to capture basic cost information from for-hire carriers such as driver pay, fuel costs, insurance premiums and lease or purchase payments. Carriers are asked to provide full year 2013 cost per mile and cost per hour data.
The results of this data collection, combined with the previous Operational Costs of Trucking reports, will yield six full years (2008 – 2013) of trucking cost information derived directly from fleet operations. This research provides carriers with an important high-level benchmarking tool and government agencies with real world data for future infrastructure improvement analyses.
For-hire motor carriers are encouraged to provide confidential operational cost data through ATRI’s survey, available online at www.atri-online.org. The results of this study will be available later this year.
ATRI is the trucking industry’s 501(c)(3) not-for-profit research organization. It is engaged in critical research relating to freight transportation’s essential role in maintaining a safe, secure and efficient transportation system.
Proposed IFTA Amendments Posted
This year there are four proposals to amend the International Fuel Tax Agreement. Three of them are probably of limited interest to motor carriers, but the other, which has to do with IFTA’s rules for audit and record keeping, should be of great interest to the industry.
That amendment is the third (FTPBP #3-2014 in IFTA’s code for these things). It’s sponsored by IFTA’s Audit Committee, and represents several years of work by representatives of IFTA’s member jurisdictions and of the trucking industry, including this writer. This amendment also represents a more or less complete rewrite and rearrangement of IFTA’s provisions in these two areas.
One of the goals of the project was to make IFTA’s rules in this regard as close as possible to those of the International Registration Plan following that organization’s similar effort, which went into effect last year. Like IRP’s, then, IFTA’s new rules on record keeping are somewhat more flexible for carriers, allowing them to maintain their records in any format that allows an audit to be done, and specifically accommodating records created in part through the use of GPS or some similar vehicle-tracking technology.
Provided a carrier’s records are of the quantity and quality necessary for an audit to be done, the jurisdiction doing the audit may not impose a general penalty for bad records – although of course audit adjustments may still be made that may increase the carrier’s tax liability. In the main, the proposed IFTA rules for auditing distance are to be the same as those in effect on the IRP side. Few changes are proposed with respect to the rules for fuel records, however, as these were on the whole found to be satisfactory as they stand currently.
In addition to these changes, and incidental revisions of IFTA language to make it clearer, the project largely rewrote the IFTA Audit Manual, which provides the states and provinces guidance on audit programs and their auditors with procedures for auditing specific situations. These changes, it is hoped, will make IFTA audits on the whole somewhat more uniform, and prevent some questionable practices by a few states.
This is an amendment industry should strongly support.
The other three ballots are as follows:
FTPBP #1 would change the cycle for IFTA program compliance (peer) reviews of the states and provinces from five years to four. If anything, this is a positive change, since it may help to ensure that instances of noncompliance with IFTA’s rules on the part of a state or province will have less time to become significant.
FTPBP #2, like No. 1, is sponsored by IFTA’s Program Compliance Review Committee. No. 2 would make a state’s noncompliance with (a) IFTA requirements to provide information to carriers or (b) the requirement for IFTA base-state audits even-handed for all jurisdictions grounds to take the offending state to IFTA Dispute Resolution Committee for potential disciplinary measures. Since we believe that all issues of noncompliance ought to be subject to such measures, we’re for this one too.
FTPBP #4, sponsored by IFTA’s Audit Committee, would make a definitional change that affects slightly the scope of an IFTA audit. From industry’s point of view, this seems wholly a technical change.
All these ballots are posted on IFTA’s website, at www.iftach.org, under IFTA Ballot Proposals, and are open for public comment through June 12. After that, they’ll be discussed at IFTA’s annual business meeting in August, and, if they survive that, will go out for a second comment period before being voted on this fall by the IFTA membership. ATA expects to file comments on the ballots during the first and possibly also the second period.
Sandberg Appointed to Board
The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) today announced the appointment of Annette M. Sandberg to its Board of Directors. Ms. Sandberg, CEO of TransSafe Consulting, previously served as Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) following her nomination by President George W. Bush and confirmation by the Senate. In addition to serving as FMCSA Administrator, Ms. Sandberg also served as Deputy Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and as Chief of the Washington State Patrol, where she was the first woman to lead a state police agency.
In announcing her ATRI Board appointment, ATRI Chairman Steve Williams, CEO of Maverick Transportation, commented, “Annette’s extensive experience and leadership in advancing the trucking industry’s safety agenda is a perfect complement to ATRI’s mission of improved industry safety and productivity. We are fortunate to have her join our Board of industry CEOs and know that the trucking industry will benefit from her involvement in ATRI’s research.
A complete listing of the ATRI Board of Directors is available at www.atri-online.org.
ATRI is the trucking industry’s 501(c)(3) not-for-profit research organization. It is engaged in critical research relating to freight transportation’s essential role in maintaining a safe, secure and efficient transportation system.
FMCSA Proposes Rule on E-Documents
On April 28, 2014, FMCSA issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would allow the use of electronic records and signatures to satisfy the Agency’s regulatory requirements. The change would permit the use of electronic methods to sign, certify, generate, exchange or maintain records so long as the documents accurately reflect the information in the record and can be used for their intended purpose. The change would apply only to those documents that regulated entities or individuals are required to retain; it would not apply to forms or other documents that must be submitted directly to FMCSA. Comments are due June 27, 2014.
FMCSA to Publish AOBRD Guidance
On May 12, 2014, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) will publish guidance on two issues involving roadside inspection of commercial motor vehicles (CMVs) equipped with automatic on-board recording devices (AOBRDs). The guidance addresses display requirements and clarifies that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSRs) do not require AOBRDs to provide a hardcopy printout roadside. This guidance supersedes previous Agency interpretations and regulatory guidance on the issues addressed. The guidance will be effective upon publication.