Highway investment, cooperation with rails highlight ATA presentation to shipper forum

“We would probably rather pay high fuel prices and have freight to move, than have cheap fuel and not have any freight,” said Bill Graves, American Trucking Associations President and CEO of the current economic climate. (The Trucker/ Kevin Jones)

By KEVIN JONES
The Trucker Staff

5/7/2009

FRISCO, Texas — The upcoming highway bill — and whether it will be fair to trucking and freight transportation — is at the top of Bill Graves’ list of things that keep him awake at night, or so the American Trucking Associations president and CEO told a meeting of shippers, carriers, and logistics professionals here.

“This is about where truckers work, where we live every day: out on the nation’s highways,” Graves said. “We know the benefits to reducing congestion. It helps us meet the deadlines the shipper community is expecting from us. It helps us reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It helps us maximize the driver and the tractor and the trailer. There are all sorts of reasons that we as nation, in keeping our competitive position, need to reinvest and modernize our infrastructure system.”

He added that China, by 2017, will surpass the U.S. in the number of Interstate-quality miles of roadway.

“We are quickly falling behind the rest of the world,” Graves said. “It will take a substantial effort on the part of Congress and a substantial understanding on the part of the motoring public, to help get us get a robust reauthorization for surface transportation.”

He encouraged attendees to get involved in the policy-making process — especially as Congress prepares to set the federal transportation budget priorities for the next six years. And such active participation was a familiar theme at the Transplace 2009 Shipper Symposium. A speaker earlier in the day referred to it as “pallets don’t vote, passengers do.”

Also on the political theme, and on Graves’ bedtime worry list, is “figuring out President Obama and this new Congress.”

While Graves professed respect for Obama, he questioned whether the president’s promise of open bi-partisanship could withstand a solidly Democratic Congress — one with an aggressively partisan leadership and the political clout to have its own way.

Graves similarly expressed concerns for Obama’s campaign commitments to labor unions and environmental activists.

And so the ATA list also includes “card-check,” or the Employee Free Choice Act, and cap-and-trade legislation, or the energy reform plan which Graves called “a huge tax increase on the business community.”

And then there’s California.

“It just gets ‘curiouser and curiouser’ every day,” Graves said. “Every time you turn around, there’s a new series of regulations.”

After mentioning the state’s emissions and proposed fuel standards, along with a host of Los Angeles Port issues, Graves explained that his real worry is the “macro perspective.”

“I don’t want California to be the next Wall Street, or the next U.S. auto industry,” Graves said. “I don’t want California to be the next bailout because they’re so financially under water.”

Transplace Chairman and CEO Tom Sanderson questioned Graves about “a ticking time bomb” in trucking: finding enough long-haul drivers when the economy turns around.

Graves noted that some truckload carriers were moving toward regional operating models, with the aim of getting drivers home more often. The increasing density of population in the U.S. should also drive shorter lengths of haul.

Graves also addressed driver standards.

“We clearly understand we’re going to have to make our industry more attractive to drivers, but the requirements for drivers are going to go up,” Graves said. “It’s going to be a more professional vocation, and hopefully part of that will encourage people to look at trucking as a lifelong career.”

The trucking leader also had a few words about railroads.

“The relationship [with trucking] is as good as it’s ever been,” Graves explained. Any notion of “the Hatfields and McCoys” is in the past.

As to the recent television ads which tout the rails’ ability to transport more freight with less fuel — and that rail is more environmentally beneficial — Graves said “it’s all absolutely true,” and that he didn’t “take great exception” the railroads’ self-promotion.

“We as a country need to keep an eye on the importance of freight rail as a component of what we do in the movement of freight,” Graves said. But, he noted, ATA has developed an ad campaign of its own which emphasizes that tracks don’t run to supermarkets, or to homes, or to shopping centers.

“We can take it to where you need it,” he said of trucks and truckers. “And that will always be the case.  But there are some really tremendous future benefits for the business community to see us working together [with rail].”

And as Graves pointed out, trucking will be all the more important in the future. With a population predicted to be 400 million in 2040 (up from 300 million today), the industry will have to grow. ATA expects trucking to hold on to a 70 percent slice of the U.S. freight pie for the next decade.

Among other comments, Graves noted that the fall in fuel prices hasn’t necessarily made business better for truckers.

“We would probably rather pay high fuel prices and have freight to move, than have cheap fuel and not have any freight,” he said.

Graves also said ATA wasn’t “getting a lot of traction” in its efforts to limit truck speeds at the national level, and that an ongoing push for increasing truck weight limits — part of a “more productive trucks” program — is receiving “more interest” but he doesn’t anticipate a change coming from Congress “anytime soon.”

Still, “people are beginning to understand that when we go back to the tonnage that we’re moving and the population growth, we’re going to have more vehicles on the road,” Graves said. “Anything we can do to enhance the productivity of that vehicle, of that tractor and that driver and that trailer, helps us with our congestion issue, with our fuel consumption issue, with our greenhouse gas issue — and we can do it safely.”