After being cancelled earlier this year, the pilot program allowing Mexican trucks to carry cargo on U.S. roads may be back on. This is due to a six billion dollar lawsuit aimed at the U.S. government as well as the steep tariffs imposed on U.S. goods as punishment. Industries on both sides of the border have been calling for resolution.

The program was a long delayed response to NAFTA’s call for the creation of a trans-border trucking program to exist by the year 2000 and represents the first step toward compliance. For many, this news raises concern over the safety issues that initially delayed the project.

In 1995, the government responded to concerns that Mexican trucks could not pass U.S. safety checks by restricting them to designated commercial zones within twenty miles of the border. Goods destined for other areas of the U.S. and Canada were required to be transferred to new trucks to continue their journey. The safety issues in question are related to Department of Transportation studies that show forty one percent of Mexican trucks did not pass safety checks in 1998. In comparison, there is a twenty five percent failure rate for U.S. trucks and a seventeen percent failure rate for Canadian trucks. But these failures seem to be primarily related to certification, logbook issues, and English language fluency rather than poor equipment. When a meeting was called earlier this year to address these concerns, the American Trucking Association noted that the pilot program was working fine.

We hear a lot about the economic stimulus package and rightfully so, it is the moment of change that we pin our hopes for an improved economy to. What is it going to do for the fundamental problem of freight volume has not been addressed. This is an important question. In the past, one of the first predictors of depressed economy’s new health has been the growth in freight. But today that is simply not the case and the stimulus package is aimed entirely differently. It’s not going to deliver a radical change to freight volume and the trucking industry.

What it might do is help to stabilize and slowly grow industries that will create freight volume. The stimulus package has only begun to work upon the economy and as a result,
we simply cannot expect to see much change before the onset of 2010. The major areas of growth targeted by the package are energy, automotive, and infrastructure. Of these three, infrastructure has the most potential to impact freight volumes, both directly and indirectly, as long as automotive continues to struggle. Directly, because infrastructure projects will demand materials that need to be shipped. Indirectly, because successful infrastructure will increase jobs and consumer confidence, which may then increase spending and retail sales. Freight volumes will remain constant for the foreseeable futures and then, as an indirect effect of the stimulus package they may increase.

At the moment, it’s enough to know where we stand and plan for the future.