inside cover - Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance

Guardian
The Legislative Rundown
By Richard Henderson, CVSA, Director Government Affairs
President Signs 2008
DOT Appropriations Bill
President Bush signed the FY 2008
Omnibus Appropriations bill on
December 27, 2008 that contained funding
for Department of Transportation
programs. Funds for the remainder of
the 2008 fiscal year for MCSAP grant
programs should be available to the
states in the near future.
Reauthorization
Process Begins
Surface Transportation Panel
Recommends Restructuring of
Major Programs Including
Highway and Motor Carrier Safety
The National Surface Transportation
Policy and Revenue Study Commission,
created by SAFETEA-LU, issued its final
recommendations on January 15 setting
the stage for what promises to be a reauthorization
process quite different from
those in the past. It may, in fact, be the
most significant reauthorization legislation
considered since the Interstate
Highway System was first created in 1956.
It should be stressed at this point that
these are only recommendations to
Congress. They will be considered at
length by the current Congress as well as
the new Congress to convene a year from
now in January 2009.
What has drawn the most headlines so
far is the recommendation which could
result in nearly tripling the federal fuel
taxes over the next eight years to meet the
growing needs of our surface transportation
system. But in reality, the other recommendations
of the Commission are
every bit as newsworthy.
It recommends that all existing programs
at the Federal Highway Administration,
the Federal Transit Administration,
the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, and the FMCSA, as well
as certain infrastructure programs of the
Federal Railroad Administration, be
repealed and replaced with ten new programs
that would, in many instances, cut
across modal and bureaucratic boundaries.
The ten programs would be a system
maintenance and “state of good repair”
program, a multi-modal national freight
program, a congestion relief program for
urban areas over one million in population,
a consolidated safety program, a
suburban and rural connectivity program,
a high-speed passenger rail corridor
development program, an environmental
stewardship program, and alternative
fuels development program, a federal
lands program, and a research and
development program.
The overarching consolidated safety
program would subsume current FHWA,
NHTSA and FMCSA efforts and would
focus on driver-related programs (seat
belts, helmets, DUI repeat offenders) as
well as safety infrastructure. The report
recommends a national goal of reducing
annual traffic fatalities by 50 percent by
2025. The federal share of projects would
be 90 percent. Strategies recommended
that should be considered in state and local
plans affecting motor carrier safety are:
• Stronger enforcement of safety laws
including speed limits, seat belt laws,
impaired driving and using technology
to do so;
• Enhanced adjudication of highway safety
laws to impose penalties commensurate
with the seriousness of the offenses;
• Enhanced motor carrier safety programs
to reduce crashes caused by
driver fatigue, unsafe operators, and
automobile drivers who do not know
how to share the road with large
trucks; and,
• Highly visible public education campaigns
to make everyone aware of the
severity of highway safety problems.
Buried in another section of the
The National Surface Transportation Policy and
Revenue Study Commission’s recommendations …
may be the most significant since the Interstate
Highway System was first created in 1956.
Report covering Congestion Pricing is a
recommendation that an adjustment be
made to hours-of-service regulations to
take into consideration the need for rest
breaks to accommodate congested metropolitan
areas.
The federal funding for these new
programs would be distributed in a very
different manner than under existing
programs. At present, the funding for
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