EPA rejects American, Canadian truckers’ request to back them on dead-head rule

The Trucker News Services

12/30/2009

The American Trucking Associations and the Canadian Trucking Alliance sought help, recently, from the Environmental Protection Agency over a trucking rule that the two organizations said is costing trucking “millions of dollars a year” and is contributing to greenhouse gas pollution but EPA declined to come to their aid.

ATA President and CEO Bill Graves and CTA CEO David Bradley had asked the agency to back their request to allow a low-risk foreign (i.e. Canadian) driver to drop a loaded foreign trailer, hook up an empty foreign trailer, transport it to a second location and then hook up a loaded foreign trailer for the trip back home. Currently, the two stated in a letter to EPA, DOT, the Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Commerce, drivers may only reposition an empty trailer if it is the same trailer with which the driver originally entered or departed the U.S. They said this “double movement.”

While a domestic driver repositions the trailer, the Canadian tractor with no trailer is moved by the Canadian driver to the same location, using twice the amount of diesel fuel needed to move one trailer, Graves and Bradley argued.

The EPA, however, in a letter back, said it was passing the buck to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security “with respect to restrictions on international goods movement and immigration.”

The two also cited a letter sent on July 6 of 2009 to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano which raised several large American carriers’ reports of wasting up to 60,000 gallons of fuel a month because of the rule.

“Given the current state of conservation efforts by both the motor carrier industry and the United States and Canadian governments, this wasteful approach is unnecessary,” Graves and Bradley said in asking for the adoption and implementation of a “reciprocal agreement” they had petitioned for back in 2008.

The Trucker staff may be contacted to comment at editor@thetrucker.com.