'We Have To Stop The Silliness': Troy Nehls Blasts Proposed Truck Safety Regulations

4 months ago

During a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing prior to the Congressional recess, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) questioned witnesses about truck speed limiter proposals, and Build America By America provisions.

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Transcript

00:00Mr. Nels. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hugh, good to see you. You've been in front of this

00:05committee before talking about some of the negative consequences of this speed limiter,

00:11this mandate. To remind the colleagues here, the DOT is considering limiting every single

00:16truck on the road 60 miles an hour regardless of what the posted speed limit is. Your experience,

00:22you got a lot of experience behind the wheel of a big truck, right? Do you believe this mandate

00:27would actually reduce speeding on our roads, or do you think that DOT is ignoring unintended

00:33consequences of this rulemaking? No, I don't believe it's going to reduce. It'll reduce

00:37speeding maybe on the interstate highways, but it's not, like I said earlier, more inexperienced

00:44newer drivers, and unfortunately we have this churning all the time in trucking where new

00:48people are coming in. It will cause them, and we've seen this, motor carriers use these things

00:53now as a driver management tool, fuel management tool. If you look at the data, they're still

00:59getting speeding tickets, maybe not on the interstate, so it's probably a two-lane road or a work zone.

01:05And what does the safety data tell us about the risk for crashes when you have trucks that are,

01:10now we're forcing them, we're forcing them to travel below the posted speed limit or slower

01:15than the flow of traffic? What does the data say? There's plenty of data out there to show,

01:20but if there's a 10 mile per hour differential in speeds between traffic, that creates 227 percent

01:28more interactions between cars and trucks, which interactions is where we have accidents.

01:35Aside from the safety concerns related, what does this do to our nation's supply chains?

01:39How would that affect? What's going to slow our supply chain down, it's actually going to have

01:44a reverse effect with congestion, because we're going to need more trucks to haul the same amount

01:48of freight that we're hauling now, and with that being said, it's going to put more trucks on the

01:53highway, which will be traveling 10 mile per hour below the speed limit or more in different sectors,

01:59which will again cause more congestion and more accidents. You're right, thank you. Mr. DeWitt,

02:04share with us some of your members' experiences with obtaining Build America, Buy America waivers.

02:11My state, there's a good example in my state, we apply for two, they have a waiver, it's the end of

02:16January, and we still are awaiting approval. We haven't heard anything. How are the other states

02:22dealing with this, with the DOTs? How are they dealing with some of this? I would have to check

02:29to get a better answer for all the other states, but I think my recollection, what I'm

02:34understanding is, I think everybody's having similar issues with regard to how it is being

02:41interpreted. I mean, if you look at this, the Buy America, this is an example from Florida,

02:46this is one of our members that, this is a generator, in a project that he had, he was

02:51required to go through and they wanted to understand where every single part in this generator was made,

02:57how much it cost, and then how that fits within the system. I think things like that are just,

03:03there has to be some common sense applied, I think, it would make the most sense on something

03:11like that. Yeah, I agree. We have to stop the silliness. We really, really do. I yield back, sir.

03:17Gentleman yields, Ms. Sykes. Thank you, Mr. Chair and Chairman Crawford and Ranking Member

03:24Norton for holding this hearing today. Grateful to be able to continue.

'We Have To Stop The Silliness': Troy Nehls Blasts Proposed Truck Safety Regulations

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