Regulation of Weights, Lengths, and Widths of Commercial Motor Vehicles Special Report 267 (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-12
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The committee's recommendations involve both organizational arrangements designed to promote reform of the federal regulations and regulatory and management changes intended to improve the efficiency of freight transportation and reduce the public costs of truck traffic. Throughout its work, the committee found that a lack of information about the costs and benefits of truck transportation and the impacts of the size and weight regulations hindered its effort to provide useful policy advice.
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The regulations are poorly suited to the demands of international commerce; their effectiveness is being eroded by ever-expanding numbers and types of special exemptions, generally granted without evaluation of consequences; and freight traffic is bypassing Interstate highways, the safest and most efficient roads, to use secondary roads where limits are less restrictive, but the costs generated by that traffic are higher. The greatest deficiency of the present environment may be that it discourages private- and public-sector innovation aimed at improving highway efficiency and reducing the costs of truck traffic because vehicle regulations are inflexible and because highway users are not accountable for all the costs they generate.
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The best way to control the costs of accommodating existing and future truck traffic is by coordinating practices in all areas of highway management: design and maintenance of pavement and bridges; highway user regulations, including vehicle and driver regulations related to safety; and highway user fees. Imposition of cost-based user fees is a regulatory approach that could usefully supplement or partially replace size and weight regulation to produce more efficient control of the public and private costs of truck transportation.
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Research and monitoring needed to understand the relationship of truck characteristics and truck regulations to safety and other highway costs are not being conducted today. Understanding of these relationships is needed to design improved highways, vehicles, and safety management and pollution control programs, and to provide a solid basis for truck size and weight regulation.
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. Functions Legislation creating the Institute should define the organization's objective as reducing the public and private costs of truck freight and passenger coach transportation by developing proposals for changes in size and weight regulations, as well as changes in related highway system management and operating practices, including user fee policy.
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The Institute should be authorized to make recommendations for harmonizing areas of federal highway policy related to size and weight regulation and to truck costs, including safety regulation, enforcement, infrastructure design and management, and user fees. It would not be inconsistent with the functioning of other areas of federal regulation to empower an executive agency to change federal size and weight limits, within boundaries specified by Congress, in response to needs revealed by monitoring and evaluation.
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2. Evaluation of the Consequences of Changes in Truck Size and Weight Regulations Through Pilot Studies Congress should authorize the Secretary of Transportation to approve pilot studies involving temporary exemptions from federal motor vehicle size and weight regulations for vehicles operating within alternative limits, operated by motor carriers that agree to participate in evaluation of the safety and other impacts of the alternative limits.
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The permit program, implemented with federal oversight of safety, fees, and enforcement, would constitute a redefinition of the federal role in truck size and weight regulation. The federal government would have diminished involvement in defining numerical dimensional limits, but greater responsibility for ensuring that state regulations governing the use of vehicles on federal-aid highways were contributing to the attainment of national objectives.
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Size and Weight Provisions Recommended size and weight provisions of the permit program are as follows: · The states should be allowed to issue permits for operation, on any road where the use of such vehicles is now prevented by federal law, of - Six-axle tractor-semitrailers with maximum weight of 90,000 lb; and - Double-trailer configurations with each trailer up to 33 ft long; seven, eight, or nine axles; and a weight limit governed by the present federal bridge formula. · After a transition period, all trucks operating under grandfather exemptions or state-specific exemptions from federal rules (when operating on roads where they could not be legally operated without such exemptions)
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User Fees Legislation creating the permit program should specify a quantitative test for the revenue adequacy of the permit fees imposed by participating states. As far as possible, fees should be structured to avoid giving truck operators incentives to use truck configurations whose public costs exceed their private benefits.
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6. Research The preceding recommendations call for three kinds of activities involving data analysis and research: systematic monitoring of truck traffic and truck costs to evaluate regulatory effectiveness, basic research on the relationship of truck characteristics to highway costs, and pilot studies to test new vehicles.
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· Regulation of Weights, Lengths, and Widths of Commercial Motor Vehicles | an established responsibility of a DOT agency, the study should be conducted cooperatively by the Institute and that agency) : · Evaluation of the effectiveness of the enforcement of size and weight regulations, Air quality impacts of changes in truck characteristics, Relation of truck performance to crash involvement, Risk-based bridge costs, Freight transportation market research, Costs of mixed automobile and truck traffic arising from nuisance and stress, and .
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