ATA Asks Congress Nicely About Highway Bill Changes
It is hard to believe that we are almost five years out from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, meaning that a new surface transportation Bill is going to have to come down the pipeline in order to keep our nation’s wheels spinning. The American Trucking Associations, a key industry stakeholder comprising every state trucking association, has some suggestions.
Details
The two primary issues the ATA brings up are truck parking and the Federal Excise Tax (FET). Both are likely familiar to long-time readers, but here is a refresher.
Truck parking is consistently rated as one of the biggest issues plaguing drivers in the industry, when drivers are asked about it from various entities such as the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). While great strides have been made in the past handful of years, the ratio of available and legal spots to trucks on the road is still at least 9-to-1. This leads drivers spending at least an hour every night looking for parking, or worse, parking somewhere that is illegal and unsafe.
The FET is a 12% tax on the purchase of new trucks that was originally instated to help fund World War I but is now used to help fund road repair. While this is a good idea in practice, the extra 12% placed on the price tag of a new car causes them to become significantly less appealing compared to purchasing a gently-used truck, or continuing to drive an older one into the ground. ATRI has mentioned the many downsides of the average age of trucks slowly increasing: increased emissions, worse fuel efficiency, and fewer safety features.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, these ideas have been debated in the halls of Congress for a long time now (truck dealers were imploring a suspension of the FET during the COVID-19 pandemic in hopes of getting the economy out of the dog days of the pandemic and back into motion), but we remain cautiously optimistic that as long as industry advocates continue knocking on the door, eventually someone will answer. Truck drivers make up a major voting block of this nation, over 3 million in total, so if push comes to absolute shove some members of Congress may have constituents to answer to if they continue ignoring the biggest issues of their jobs.
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