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OVERSIGHT OF THE OFFICE OF MOTOR CARRIERS AND OVERSIGHT OF BUS SAFETY
Wednesday, May 26, 1999
House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Ground Transportation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m., in Room 2167, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Thomas E. Petri [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
Mr. PETRI. The subcommittee will come to order. We are meeting today to hold our fourth and final hearing in this series examining the Office of Motor Carriers and especially within the Department of Transportation, and at this point I would like to yield to the chairman of the full committee, Mr. Shuster of Pennsylvania.
Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it because I do have to leave here to go to another meeting on aviation, which is also very dear to our hearts, and I want to commend you and the ranking member for moving ahead on this. We are going to hear from the former chairman of the committee, a good friend, the Honorable Norm Mineta, who for the past three months has been looking into the matters pertaining to the Office of Motor Carriers, and in fact I have already had a prebriefing, and it sounds like he is once again certainly on the right track.
I would like to comment on what we have learned so far in our hearings, both in terms of the placement of the Office of Motor Carriers and in terms of the effectiveness of the program. It seems that virtually everyone except the Department of Transportation has come to the conclusion that the current placement of the office severely handicaps the office's ability to carry out effective motor carrier safety reform.
Now, opinions vary as to what the solutions are, but I think there is no question that we have got to strengthen the office. There are too many layers of bureaucracy between the Secretary and the head of the Office of Motor Carriers. The Federal Highway Administrator has too many issues on his plate to be able to deal with all of them effectively, and I think we need to elevate the position.
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How do we do that? There are different approaches to it. I know our distinguished former chairman is going to give us some very thoughtful recommendations today, and I look forward to our moving ahead because I think the bottom line for all of us is exactly the same, which is to see to it that we make our highways safer--for trucks and cars and people and the various conveyances that are on them, and I commend you and the ranking member for moving ahead today, and thank you.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you. Today we will hear from the Honorable Norm Mineta, former Member of Congress and chairman of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee. We are very happy to see you here today. Chairman Mineta has the unenviable task of investigating motor carrier safety. We are eager to hear his report, and I am sure that we will benefit from the analysis that he brings us today.
We will also hear from the Department of Transportation and give them an opportunity to respond to matters raised during the previous three hearings on the transfer of the Office of Motor Carriers.
Our third panel will discuss bus safety. We will hear from a representative of the National Transportation Safety Board from the State of New Jersey where four serious bus accidents occurred during a 2-week period in December of last year; from the Amalgamated Transit Union and from representatives of the motor coach industry.
After today's hearings, I plan to work with Ranking Member Rahall to develop legislation to address many of these issues, especially the issue of organizational placement. I believe we already have agreement on many of the broad principles that such legislation would embody, and I would hope that we would be able to move this legislation this summer.
We look forward with great interest to hearing from all of our witnesses, and with that, I would like to yield to Mr. Rahall.
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Mr. RAHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On behalf of all of my colleagues on my side of the aisle as well, it is indeed our honor to welcome our distinguished former and richer chairman of the committee Norm Mineta as he presents his testimony today and his recommendations to improve motor carrier safety. It was indeed my honor to serve as Norm's chairman of the Surface Transportation Subcommittee, a position that he also once held. We worked on several pieces of legislation affecting motor carriers, including the Trucking Industry Regulatory Reform Act of 1994, the freight undercharge issue, the deregulation of intrastate economic regulation of motor carriers and a number of other issues, and of course, safety was always paramount in our concerns.
Indeed, as I was preparing for today's hearing, I recalled in 1994 when I chaired the subcommittee we held a hearing on motor carrier safety, and at that time in welcoming a witness, full committee Chairman Mineta stated the following words: We have gained from your knowledge in the past, and we trust that the information that you will give us today and through the course of these hearings will enable us to pass whatever might be necessary to protect the public interest, end quote. And as we are prone to say on the floor of the House, I associate myself with the remarks made by the gentleman from California, and I certainly so do that today in welcoming you, Norm, to the subcommittee.
As my colleagues know, and I commend Chairman Petri for holding these hearings, this is a fourth in a series of motor carrier safety hearings. From the testimony we have received to date, the Inspector General, the GAO, safety advocates, state organizations, labor and the trucking industry, it is very clear that the fundamental safety enforcement measures such as compliance reviews and inspections have declined while at the same time the number of trucks on the road today continues to increase. It is unfortunate but true that every witness that has been referred to by our full committee chairman Mr. Shuster except the Transportation Department itself has suggested that the Office of Motor Carriers has not provided the necessary leadership to address these matters.
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In my view, the issue is not whether the OMC lacks necessary funding and authority. It does. The issue involves one of focus, one of leadership, one of the level of attention that these matters receive within the pecking order of DOT.
Yesterday, Secretary Slater and Administrator Wykle unveiled a safety action plan aimed at reducing truck-related deaths. I suspect that this is no accident this announcement came just a day before these hearings, Mr. Chairman, but unfortunately the plan does not really contain anything that OMC should not have been doing all along. No more wrist slaps for safety violations, of course we all agree. Shutting down unfit carriers, should have been done in the past. Increasing compliance reviews, supposed to have been done in the past.
So I certainly applaud and welcome the administration's recommendations and announcement. However, with all due respect, these elements of the safety action plan do not exactly foster a sense of new direction and strong leadership in addressing the problems plaguing motor safety.
So into this breach—I am waiting for the drums to roll—comes our committee. We will come forward with proposed legislative remedies. The question before us is no longer whether these remedies will be surgical in nature. The hearing record built to date clearly does not support that
course of action. Rather, the hearing record does support, as will I, a more dramatic and comprehensive set of witnesses. With that, Mr. Chairman, I will be glad to recognize our full committee minority ranking member Mr. Oberstar.
Mr. OBERSTAR. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for continuing this set of hearings, and I join in welcoming our witty colleague, former committee colleague, former chairman, my classmate of class of 1974, and may I say dear friend as well.
I don't know about that financial status, Mr. Rahall. He does not have to file financial disclosure reports any longer. We don't know. His condition may have deteriorated since leaving the House. But, what has not deteriorated is his good sense of humor and his smile, nor does he have the increasing amount of grey in the hair that the rest of us who stay in the Congress have.
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Thank you for undertaking this very daunting task on behalf of the Department and on behalf of the travelling public. Your years of experience and your dedication to transportation suit you appropriately for the task that you undertook, which you present to us today. I read in great detail your testimony last night, and I would just observe very briefly that far more important than tinkering with boxes in an organizational structure, our task should be to establish principles by which safety in the motor carrier arena must be governed, and then reading it with those principles, establish the structure that will get us there. Let us not start with organization. Let us end with how organization may serve the purpose of principles that will necessarily guide safety.
You have in your presentation provided us the road map, the guideposts, that we need to get to the objective of a safer highway environment, a safer environment for cars, which are smaller than they were 20 years ago, and trucks, which are larger than they were 20 years ago, and to reduce fatalities, increasing safety while maintaining the efficiency of the motor carrier sector.
Thank you for the contribution you have made.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you. Mr. Franks, any opening statement?
Mr. FRANKS. Chairman Petri, I want to congratulate you for convening today's hearing. I think it may in fact be among the most important we have held to date. I also want to welcome our dear friend Norm Mineta under whom—he was the first chairman of this committee under whom I served and it was wonderful to work with Norm. Great to have you back.
I am also delighted that today's hearing, Mr. Chairman, is going to provide us the opportunity to focus on bus safety, an issue that too often seems to be somewhat off the radar screen, but through today's hearing we can put it back in the middle of our radar screen and ask some questions.
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As you noted in your opening statement, New Jersey did experience four very serious bus accidents over a very brief time, over the Christmas holidays, but subsequent to that there have been any number of accidents, most notably I suspect the Mother's Day accident in Louisiana, as tragic as that was.
We need to make certain that the Federal Government is doing all that it can and ought to to promote safety for those millions of Americans who every day find themselves riding buses to a place of work or as part of some recreational trip. So I look forward to today's hearing, Mr. Chairman. I would ask unanimous consent to add a statement for the record.
Mr. PETRI. Without objection. Mr. Lipinski.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I simply want to welcome my former colleague and former chairman to the hearing this morning. It is a pleasure to see him, and I want to say that I have always believed that the gentleman sitting to my right and Norm Mineta are the two most knowledgeable men in America when it comes to public works, infrastructure, transportation and aviation. Nice to see you, Norm.
Mr. PETRI. Let's see, are there any other requests for opening statements? Mr. Blumenauer?
Mr. BLUMENAUER. I just hope, Mr. Chairman, that in the course of this series of activities the committee is undertaking that we will also be able to focus some other attention on dimensions of safety, including protection from a tax that goes the other way. There are also other dimensions I hope we can work into as the proceedings continue, and I am looking forward to hearing from the distinguished former chair of the committee.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Mr. Mineta.
TESTIMONY OF HON. NORMAN MINETA, FORMER MEMBER, U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, AND FORMER CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC WORKS AND TRANSPORTATION
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Mr. MINETA. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It really does give me a great deal of pleasure to be back here in the committee room and have this honor to appear before all of you. I have got to admit very frankly that the view is vastly different from this side of the room, but in any event, it really is a pleasure, and I want to thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
Mr. PETRI. You like all the portraits up there?
Mr. MINETA. That is right, and I want to thank you and Chairman Shuster and to Mr. Oberstar, Mr. Rahall, for your continued leadership of and the stewardship of the work of this committee as well as subcommittee.
I take it, Mr. Oberstar, you were talking about my physical condition and not my fiscal condition.
Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I would like to again thank you for this invitation to appear before the Subcommittee on Ground Transportation as you discuss the oversight of the Office of Motor Carriers. As a former Member of Congress and former chair of this great committee, it is indeed a pleasure and distinct honor to be with all of you to share some thoughts about a very important subject matter, that is, Office of the Motor Carrier safety subject.
Earlier this year in February Federal highway Administrator Ken Wykle and Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater asked that I undertake an independent review of the motor carrier safety functions and operations within the Department of Transportation, and my charge was to review and find out what was working or not working, as the situation might be, and to identify actions and strategies to reduce both the number of highway traffic fatalities and injuries as well as what kind of strategies can we have to reduce highway traffic fatality and injury rates. So we were looking both at bringing the numbers down as well as the rates, and originally, the task was really again to think out where should the box be located in an organizational chart.
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Now, as I looked at this issue, then two primary approaches were used in the conduct of my review. The first approach drew heavily on preceding and concurrent activities which were also focused on motor carrier safety, including the several congressional hearings and reviews that included GAO, the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Transportation and the NTSB, and all of these activities provided invaluable input to my review.
Secondly, within the time that was available my review included consultation with many stakeholder groups and program administrators and their staff. I held three roundtable discussions with 14 different primary stakeholder groups and individuals, representing the safety and enforcement communities, transportation and manufacturing industries, labor representatives and others to listen, seek, clarify and to validate key issues, problems and solutions.
In addition to the roundtable discussions, I also met individually with roundtable participants and oversight groups. My consultation also included discussions with other stakeholders such as program managers and staff within the Department of Transportation. Several written comments were received and considered as part of my evaluation.
First of all, I want to acknowledge the fact that my review was in part made easier because of some of the attention, focus and work that was being done by others. For example, prior to and during the course of my review several coordinated actions and changes were taking place within the Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration and, more specifically, within the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety. Consequently, many of the findings and recommendations that will be contained in my report and included in this testimony were reflective of some of the Department's already proactive initiatives.
Now, to assist the Department in meeting its strategic transportation safety goals and priorities and to strengthen the Department safety efforts, I have proposed eight areas for attention and have provided the Department with a series of recommendations for each of these areas that I focused on.
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First of all, increased surveillance, compliance and enforcement activities. The foundation for the motor carrier safety programs' enforcement functions are, A, surveillance and inspection; B, compliance; and C, enforcement. Combined, these functions have corrective and deterrent impacts on unsafe management and operating practices. The Office of Motor Carriers has over the past few years expanded its activities well beyond its enforcement functions, thus causing less time to be dedicated to its compliance and enforcement work. With rapid motor freight industry growth, coupled with large increase in new carrier entrants and related shortages of qualified drivers, it is apparent from reviews and testimony that emphasis on targeted enforcement activities is needed.
My recommendation for actions include, increase the number of compliance reviews by both State and Federal staff so that all high risk carriers and at risk carrier segments are reviewed and prompt follow-up actions to be taken; increase enforcement activities and penalty levels; for the direct Federal portion increase the number of safety specialists and redirect noncompliance review activities to other than safety specialists; for the States provide additional motor carrier safety assistance program moneys, namely, the MCSAP funding, and target those to performing additional compliance reviews in States and where there is no compliance review or very low compliance review activity.
Other actions that I suggest in this area include increasing the number of MCSAP inspections, fortifying the safety hotline, extending regulatory coverage to the shipping and delivery supply chain and improving program evaluation methods.
Second area, initiate increased southern border crossing safety inspections. Substantial increases in motor carrier transport activities at the U.S. border crossings with Canada and Mexico were brought about by the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. The General Accounting Office reported in 1997, as did the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General in December 1998, that trucks entering the United States through border crossings in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were not meeting U.S. safety standards and four border states' readiness for enforcement varied significantly.
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The primary problems reported are too few qualified safety inspectors and deficient or nonexistent truck inspection facilities at the main border crossings, and again, I have offered some specific recommendations which are in the testimony.
Thirdly, issue motor carrier safety regulations. Over the course of several years, several major rules have been in the process of being written, reissued or delayed for a number of reasons. With the enactment of major surface transportation legislation and other related legislation in the past 8 years, there is a tremendous backlog of implementing regulations sitting there to be developed.
So I am recommending several actions. Streamline the rule-making process within the Department of Transportation by establishing clear priorities, schedules and accountabilities at each phase or step by conducting concurrent rule-making processes and reviews and by eliminating redundant or nonvalue-added steps.
Secondly, increase the staff resources devoted to motor carrier rule-making activities with additional qualified personnel, a minimum of 10 to 12 new FTE technical human factors, economists and legal personnel. Three additional recommendations have been made in this area to help the rule-making process.
Four, improve safety data in information systems. The basis for practically all motor carrier safety enforcement decisions, resource and budget decisions, as well as research and rule-making decisions, are information and data driven. For example, determining the cause of truck crashes is a critical information need that could drive efforts to reduce truck crashes. Therefore, the effectiveness of carrying out the motor carrier safety program rests entirely on accurate, complete and timely information.
I have proposed a number of recommendations for the safety data and management information area. Two primary recommendations include assuring adequate long-term budgets for States to specifically collect and upload motor carrier crash information through a cooperative effort with MCSAP and undertake an in-depth crash causation study as soon as possible.
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Five, create new motor carrier safety entry requirements. The motor carrier industry is expanding, and new carriers are entering at a rapid rate. Studies show that new carriers with less than 3 years experience have higher crash rates and lower rates of safety compliance than do more experienced motor carriers. There are minimal requirements in securing motor carrier safety operating authority and licensing at the present time at the Federal and State level.
So, I have recommended to the Federal Highway Administration three actions which would create a comprehensive motor carrier safety fitness program for new carriers before the end of 2000 and utilize a third party approach for conducting safety fitness assessments and providing safety, education and training for all new entrants within a preset time period.
Six, create licensing, training and testing programs for new drivers. Studies show that new and inexperienced drivers are most likely to be involved in crashes and have higher proportion of traffic violations and out of service rates for violation of driver safety standards. Follow-up and reporting systems that would help to ferret out the worst drivers are ineffective and the performance reporting and tracking system which is accessible to CDL licensing bodies, state authority and licensing at the Federal and State level should be instituted.
Therefore, I feel that, again, we have enforcement agencies and courts that are necessary to report and complete driver background history, including all traffic and safety standard violations and convictions.
Now, again, here two primary recommendations include the establishment of minimum commercial driver safety training criteria to raise the level of driver safety awareness and performance for all new entrant drivers, coupled with a commercial driver's learning permit and on-the-road apprentice training and the improvement of the commercial driver licensing system of regulations to identify problem drivers and all enforcement activities in a national registry for access by enforcement and by the industry.
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Seven, step up truck and bus crash avoidance initiatives. The professional truck and bus driver must maintain a constant vigilance to avoid unsafe situations which would lead to a car truck or a bus crash. Opportunities for improved driver crash avoidance are available through road safety features and safety rest stops. Several strategies and off-the-shelf technologies are available, and new technologies are being developed which would provide the professional driver with better tools for avoiding truck-car incidences from occurring.
Again, I have recommended three primary actions in this area.
Number eight, undertake motor carrier safety program management initiatives. Mr. Chairman, during my review, I looked for management improvement opportunities that could enhance the motor carrier safety program delivery efficiency and effectiveness. The new program manager for the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety, Ms. Julie Cirillo, has demonstrated a very clear understanding of the issues and problems. She has begun to focus on strategic changes and has taken a number of steps to improve the delivery of the motor carrier safety program in working with General Wykle, the Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, and there are other organizational and management improvements that the DOT and the Federal Highway Administration and the Office of Motor Carriers and Highway Safety should undertake.
Now, among the several management improvement recommendations and opportunities, I have proposed to the Secretary and to the Federal Highway Administrator that the level of the motor carrier safety functions be elevated within the Department of Transportation by, A, giving joint and equal motor carrier safety title and responsibility to the Federal Highway Administrator; B, establish a Deputy Administrator for Motor Carrier Safety within the Federal Highway Administration; and C, establish an equivalent Executive Director for Motor Carrier Safety.
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Now, I believe that this recommendation will clearly establish the importance of the motor carrier function within the Federal Highway Administration and the Department of Transportation at the least cost and disruption to the program.
Now, along with the organizational change, I have recommended the establishment of key organization and program performance criteria to measure and ensure the recommended organization and program changes are being effectively implemented. Other important management recommendations include the establishment of a clear, achievable motor carrier safety goal that the Department of Transportation, together with its partners and stakeholders, can accept and participate in its achievement, and I have also strongly suggested that the DOT use performance-based systems for managing all of its motor carrier safety programs and functions and increased staffing with new or restored personnel ceilings in critical areas and reconstitute the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee.
So, in conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I have presented my findings and recommendations to the Secretary of Transportation and to the Federal Highway Administrator as they requested, and so they are now in the process of reviewing them for possible adoption or incorporation into whatever the Department's safety plans might be. So, again, I want to thank the committee for this opportunity and make myself now available for questions.
Mr. PETRI. I want to thank you for favorably responding to the request of General Wykle and Secretary Slater to conduct this review and commend you on the thoughtful and diligent effort that you have made. I also hope that as we go forward and as the Department goes forward in attempting to act on your recommendations and sift through and prioritize them, that you will continue to give us the benefit of your advice and criticism during that process. Mr. Rahall, any questions?
Mr. RAHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I certainly commend you as well, Norm, for the time and the effort, the remarkable amount of time that you spent on this issue. The administration certainly looked to a very informed and very wise individual in selecting you to head this commission. You have established quite a record. It appears you have brought in a lot of people, including many that have been before our subcommittee.
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During our record that we built in these hearings, it basically came down to two schools of thought, of which I am sure you are aware. One is remove OMC, put it over in NHTSA. The second school of thought was beef it up and keep it within FHWA, I am sorry, actually it was to make a separate entity but keep it within the DOT. You seem to be coming down on beefing it up but keeping it a part of FHWA. I guess my question is, to what degree did you consult with the administration during your hearings and during your meetings, rather, in your recommendations, and I guess to what degree were you informed of their announcement earlier this week which perhaps seems to want to jump ahead and beat the gentleman from Virginia who was making a big deal of his proposed move over to NHTSA. Was there a great deal of consultation in that process?
Mr. MINETA. Mr. Rahall, there was not and this was strictly an independent review, and I undertook this to look at it from A to Z, and from the time I was given that task, it was Mr. Tom Edick, who I would like to introduce to the members of this committee. Mr. Edick was a 30-year-plus veteran of the Federal Highway Administration, and prior to retiring, was a head of the Federal Lands Program, but he came out of retirement to help me staff this study, and it was really Tom and myself who conducted all of these consultations with the panel of people who we put together, who are knowledgeable in the whole field of motor carrier safety. Tom is right behind me.
Mr. RAHALL. So your task was really to be totally independent?
Mr. MINETA. Absolutely, no consultation with the Secretary, with Mr. Wykle or anybody else, and as I say, the question originally was where do we put the box but really what came out of that, as you look at that, is what kind of an organization do you really need to effectively perform motor carrier safety, and then after you determine that, then you can say, well, this is where the box belongs, and so as you have indicated, part of the thing that generated this whole issue was when Chairman Wolf put in the legislation in the appropriations bill, as I recall, that OMC ought to be moved over to NHTSA.
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Well, in doing that, if you separate the regulatory aspects from the enforcement, you can't move just regulatory over to NHTSA and keep enforcement at Federal Highway. It seemed to me you have to keep the two together. On the other hand, if you want to create a new modal agency, then it seems to me the budget requirements would go up like this and I am not sure that the Congress or this committee was even willing to go that route in terms of properly authorizing the amounts of money necessary to create a new agency.
So what I have done is to take the Federal Highway Administration where the OMC, Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety was one of its many functions. What I have done is to say, rename the Federal Highway Administration to Federal Highway and Motor Carrier Safety Administration, create a Deputy Administrator for Highways and a Deputy Administrator for Motor Carrier Safety, so elevate it, Office of Motor Carrier, from being one of the programs in Federal highway, bring it up here so you have two equal, focused pieces of Federal Highway Administration, Federal—I mean the Deputy Administrator for Highways doing their grantsmanship and all the engineering and infrastructure and operations work as it relates to highways and the Deputy Administrator for Motor Carrier Safety doing all their work.
Now, earlier this year in their reorganization they did take Office of Motor Carrier and renamed it Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety, but frankly what I have done here is to move or keep highway safety over on the highway side, not on the motor carrier side, because here this is a design function, and they have got infrastructure and operations, and it seems to me highway safety can either be infrastructure division or it could be in the operations.
Mr. RAHALL. So you feel comfortable with the Administrator's recommendation and feel it has kind of set the parameters within which your report will come and help fill in some details——
Mr. MINETA. What I'm saying is beef up the Federal Highway Administration because if you took this amount of money to create a new agency, you will get this amount of benefit. On the other hand, I think you can get that same amount of benefit by creating the Deputy Administrator for Motor Carrier Safety, use less money but give it the kind of personnel and leadership that it requires to give the hot focus of attention to motor carrier safety because we have two things to do. One is to bring down the number of total deaths and the other hopefully to bring down the rate at which fatalities and injuries are occurring.
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Mr. RAHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Mr. Franks.
Mr. FRANKS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mineta, one of the current criticisms with the current arrangement is that the concerns about truck and bus safety can't compete for attention from the leadership at FHWA with the massive Federal highway aid program. I am gathering from your remarks that your recommendation of a separate Deputy Administrator for Safety would create a focal point for those safety concerns separate and apart from the highway concerns. Is that a better idea than a separate and freestanding safety-related agency?
Mr. MINETA. The only reason I don't go to the freestanding, separate agency is because of the cost involved. I just don't see either the appropriations committee or the authorizing committee willing to, let's say, set aside that kind of money to go to a separate agency, and my feeling is that to the extent that we are not going to be able to have the money to go to a separate, freestanding agency as another mode within the Department of Transportation, I just feel you have to beef up and pull OMC out from under Federal Highway itself and make it a program of its own, separate and distinct from the Federal highway program.
Mr. FRANKS. Let me ask the underlying question. If this Congress were prepared to create a freestanding safety-related agency, provide it with the money and the staff, would safety on our roadways be enhanced?
Mr. MINETA. That plus—I think one of the things that has to be worked out between the agency and the industry, all the stakeholders involved, is a strategic plan to really deal with how to get that traffic fatality and injury number, as well as rate, down, and my experience from having chaired the National Civil Aviation Review Commission in 1997 was that if you look at the safety record of aviation, the last 30 years, as Mr. Oberstar so well knows, the rate has not changed, and yet here in 1999 we are saying that by the year 2010 the number of operations will increase by 70 percent. When we deregulated there were roughly 250 million passengers flying in the air. Today that has risen to 650 million, and yet we are going to see this tremendous increase between now and the year 2010. Well, if you use that same rate against that increased level of operations, you are going to be facing six to seven major crashes a year in the United States and one per week internationally. Well, again the same thing, and in that NCAR report we said that there had to be a strategy developed by all the stakeholders on how to drive that accident number, as well as the rate, down, and I see it no differently here as it relates to motor carrier safety. It has to be organization and it has to be strategy with all of the stakeholders involved in that in order to drive those numbers down.
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Mr. FRANKS. On behalf of all those folks who rely, for example, on bus transportation as their primary mode, your belief is that through creation of a Deputy Administrator for Motor Carrier Safety, safety for motor coach passengers would be protected to the same extent as if we were to create a freestanding, independent safety-related agency?
Mr. MINETA. Yes, sir.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Oberstar.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, Norm, thank you so much for your continuing contribution in the arena of public service. As you did with the Civil Aviation Review Commission, you have advanced the cause of safety by your report for us today. I am disappointed that the administration jumped out ahead of you, however. I think they should have waited to have your report presented at this hearing.
At the outset of my remarks, I said we should be guided by principles, and I will put principles in four general categories: Safety mission; sound objective research as a basis for decision-making; third, vigorous compliance monitoring and enforcement; and fourth, adequate staffing and funding to carry out those principles. I also believe, based on my own experience observing departmental structure and restructuring, it is better to proceed incrementally than to make dramatic changes and swings. Sometimes we get caught up in organizational box reshuffling to make change. I think we ought to proceed incrementally, and in that regard, I think your suggestion of broadening the concept of the Federal Highway Administration to give it an emphasis on safety is a good step in that direction. It is very much like FAA's responsibility to safety and regulation and to management of air traffic. The Office of Motor Carrier does not have that operational role, but you need to keep those two functions together, because they are interrelated, as in aviation. I think you are moving in that direction in this recommendation.
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As I looked over your report, I was struck by the number of references to funding for States for their monitoring and oversight functions. What do you see as the proper relationship between DOT and this Motor Carrier Administration and the States?
Mr. MINETA. Well, as you know, Mr. Chairman, in 1984, I believe it was, Mr. Oberstar, we set up the motor carrier safety assistance program and the roadside inspection responsibility went to the States, and we allocated moneys through the MCSAP programs to the States. Many states don't put any more money into the MCSAP program than what they get in terms of allocation from the Federal Government. There are some states like California that get 4.7, 4.8 million but they add another $45 million into the motor carrier safety program. So they are doing additional things like terminal inspection programs and doing things like state conducted compliance review efforts, and so I feel that, as you said originally, in terms of one of your principles, vigorous compliance. One of the things that I have indicated in the report is that one of the ways you get a reduction of this traffic fatality issue is through stringent compliance reviews, inspections and enforcements, and so compliance reviews are generally at the Department of Transportation level where they go in to check with the books of the carriers, and then the roadside inspections are done by the States through the MCSAP program.
So what I am saying is that MCSAP program ought to be really expanded in terms of funding level, and not only do they do the roadside inspections but also let them increase the number of compliance reviews that they are conducting against the carriers because there are some states that do no, zero, compliance reviews and others, vast majority, who do very little and——
Mr. OBERSTAR. In this structural proposal, you would have this new entity doing less oversight than the States who are actually the operational end of the inspection and enforcement process?
Mr. MINETA. Yes, because part of the problem is that in the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety right now you have roughly 237 inspectors. We have well over 400,000 trucking companies out there. There is just no way that that small band of 237 safety specialists are going to be able to deal with over 400,000 trucking companies. So the question is, all right, how do we then—what kind of a template are you going to use to go after the potentially high risk carriers in order to have compliance reviews being conducted, both from the Federal level and also to a delegated responsibility to safety specialists who conduct compliance reviews with their MCSAP moneys at the State level, and it can be done both at the Federal, as well as the State, level through the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety as it is now and through the MCSAP program at the State level.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, will we have a second round?
Mr. PETRI. Yes, yes.
Mr. Duncan.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and first, I would like to say to Mr. Mineta that for those who weren't here, Norm Mineta was a really outstanding chairman of this committee, and I thought was extremely kind and fair to those of us who were in the minority at the time, and I certainly appreciate that.
Congressman Mineta, I suppose my concern is a little different from some people. Everybody wants to emphasize safety, and I certainly do, too. On the other hand, you can go overboard on anything, and what my concern is this, we deregulated the trucking industry several years ago, and in this country and all over the world in any highly regulated or overregulated industry it ends up in the hands of a few big giants and the small companies go by the wayside or have trouble surviving, and right now, since the earlier deregulation—when I drive—I usually fly, but when I occasionally drive the 500 miles between here and Knoxville I see several hundred trucking companies, little mom and pop operations a lot of them, and you mentioned that there is 400,000 trucking companies now, and I guess I want to just express a hope that in this—I notice that yesterday in the press conference that the Secretary held that he wanted to—they announced they were going to double the number of compliance reviews and eliminate the backlog, and I hope that we can achieve some balance in doing this so that we do everything possible in regard to safety but we also don't eliminate the opportunities for the little man or woman to enter and survive in this business. Do you understand what I am getting at?
Mr. MINETA. Absolutely.
Mr. DUNCAN. We want to have as much freedom and opportunity in this country as possible, and so I don't know if you even came across this. I noticed in your report here the number of accidents has gone up unfortunately, fatalities have gone up. Are more of these accidents coming from the small carriers or the large carriers or did you even come across anything like that?
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Mr. MINETA. There are two parts. Let me, first of all, Mr. Duncan, say that in terms of when we deregulated the trucking industry, what we really did was to deregulate the economic regulation of the trucking industry. We did not deregulate safety.
Mr. DUNCAN. Right.
Mr. MINETA. But now with this tremendous economy that we have, with the tremendous need for the movement of goods, the number of trucking companies has increased tremendously, and what we have found is that the propensity for truck accidents is not so much the small as it is the new entrant. So, one of the recommendations I have in here is that in terms of new entrants we really ought to have some kind of an educational program for new entrants in terms of what their responsibilities are and an educational program to be able to really bring them up to speed in terms of safety issues and compliance issues so that we don't just leave a new entrant out there.
There are a lot of truck drivers working for somebody who says, man, I want to form my own company, and they slap on the side Mineta Transportation Company, and I am now—I get a permit, DOT number, and I am off driving and now a truck driver, but yet, there are a lot of things I may not be knowledgeable about as the new owner of this trucking company, and part of this report says that we not only ought to be dealing with that, the safety fitness of that new person, but also make sure that they are educated as to what the requirements and responsibilities are going to be.
Mr. DUNCAN. Well, like I said, I have those concerns, and you know, I hope people recognize that competition—that I am in favor of some regulation, but also, competition does as much to improve safety as a lot of the things that the regulations do. In fact, sometimes more because competition forces companies to keep their equipment in good shape and go with new equipment and so forth, and when you don't have the competition, things deteriorate, and so I just hope we achieve some balance in here and don't go overboard.
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Mr. MINETA. The other thing is that in this whole supply chain or transportation chain, there are a lot of players in there, stakeholders. It is not only the driver, it is not only the carrier. It is the shipping community that also has a responsibility, and I come in and they say I want that load there by 4:00 o'clock in the morning. Well, I may not be able to get to the New York market by 4:00 tomorrow morning with my load of flowers that I have to have to the rose market in New York. I have already given 8 hours and I have got another 8 hours to get to New York. Well, I am going to be under tremendous pressure from the shipper to be at the flower market at 4:00 tomorrow morning, and it is not just the driver who is saying I have got to find a way around the rules.
So everyone along that chain has to be involved in this whole safety issue and—because the other thing is, too, if I say I am sorry, Mr. Duncan, I really can't take this load, well, tomorrow—then today you will say, OK, I give it to Horn, he'll take it, he'll drive the truck, take the load up to New York, and when I come in tomorrow to get another load from you, as a dispatcher you will say, Mineta, you're not reliable, I am going to give it to Oberstar and I am out.
So I am going to say, yeah, geez, I am really tired but I have got to get these roses to the flower market in New York by 4:00 in the morning, I am going to take it, and that just puts the tremendous pressure on that driver to do that.
Mr. DUNCAN. Well, perhaps we should consider putting some fine or doing something to some of the shippers if we find in an investigation that they are making it unsafe or unreasonable demands.
Mr. MINETA. Bingo. And that is part of this report recommendation.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you.
Mr. MINETA. Absolutely.
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Mr. PETRI. Mr. Borski.
Mr. BORSKI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And I want to commend my friend and colleague and former chairman for his most impressive presentation today and report. Very delighted to see you once again and to thank you for answering the bell one more time, the call of your country; and you have performed again a great service. I can think of no one who has a better understanding or grasp of the issues, has more experience. Again, I just want to commend you for an outstanding job.
I have one question for you, if I may, Mr. Chairman. On your number 6, your sixth recommendation, to create new driver license training and testing programs and improve driver record reporting systems. You noted in that recommendation, pointing out how studies show that new and inexperienced drivers are likely to be involved in crashes and higher proportion of violations and other safety violations and so forth, which again I would like to commend you on.
I did want to mention that last week I was able to join a demonstration right here on the Capitol grounds for the Motor Freight Association that was very eye-opening to me. I got to climb up into a truck and look through those rear mirrors and see what you can't see, I guess, while you are out driving.
I have teenage daughters who are about to enter the permitting process and going to be starting to be new drivers themselves, and my guess is that new car drivers are most likely to get in violations and accidents themselves. And I was curious if you looked at all of—any recommendations we may make to the States to try to better train our young people who are becoming new passenger drivers, the dangers of driving in traffic with these heavier vehicles. The trucks are getting bigger all the time. And it was a thought that occurred to me while I was visiting that, and I was wondering if you looked at it and have any thoughts.
Mr. MINETA. On that one, I did not look at it. Although in the conversations that I was having with the stakeholders, there is no question that in terms of truck crashes that a great deal of what goes on is as a result of an improper lane change by a vehicle, by a private passenger vehicle. And so that, yeah, that is an element in it. But I did not address that or really focus on that part of it. But it is very definitely, just from my exposure to it, a real need in terms of further education requirements, in terms of young driver licensees.
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Mr. BORSKI. I expect that, like many inexperienced truck drivers, experienced passenger vehicles, the longer one is on the road, the easier it is to recognize the difficulties that come. I would be interested in seeing if we could make any recommendations, Mr. Chairman, to the States on training.
Again, I want to thank the gentleman for a very impressive work product.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Horn.
Mr. HORN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. MINETA. Are you going to take the load of flowers to New York, Mr. Horn?
Mr. HORN. Well, I didn't know you knew I was a night owl, but it is good to see you back here, Mr. Chairman. And you were very kind to me, just as you were to my colleague, Mr. Duncan, and introduced me to a lot of people when I was a freshman on your committee; and I am forever grateful to you for that.
I am going to take you a little beyond the part of the Transportation Department you so well have analyzed and made recommendations. I would like to look at the Department as a whole for a minute. Over the last several years when I have been involved in the year 2000 compliance of Y2K, some call it, the Department of Transportation has generally drawn Fs from us in terms of their lack of movement in trying to solve that problem.
Now, it is interesting in the history of this that the Social Security Administration started in 1989, a very able programmer within Transportation raised the question in 1987, and if that had gone up the hierarchy so that various managers, executives above could have done something about it, if they recognized the problem, it would have been a different situation. And they are still dragging along.
We hope FAA will make it. The Administrator, as you know, has the authority in law to ground planes for safety, if there is a problem there. But I was just curious, looking at the Department as a whole and drawing on your experience on this committee, being chairman of the committee and now this review, do you get the feeling that there is a management process in that Department where something that is a problem, be it safety or be it computers in this case, that it can go up a hierarchy and get the attention it deserves?
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Because if that programmer's idea, which was absolutely 100 percent, went up there, the Secretary, it seems to me, could look around and see the FAA Administrator and others around the table and say, would this impact you? That never happened. And I just worry about rigid bureaucracies and ones that are sort of fiefdoms.
I happen to have been Assistant to the Secretary of Labor under President Eisenhower, and when he came into that Department it was strictly a bunch of fiefdoms. It was places where people retired to. And he took Women's Bureau and the Veterans and Unemployment and all that and he said, let's think in terms of manpower, human resources 10, 20, 30 years down the line. It turned out our studies were absolutely on the mark when we got to 1970, 1980 and 1990 what this country would look like.
That was a new vision. Does transportation have that vision? Inter-modal might be one. Safety, obviously, cuts across, also. What is your thinking on that? Should they be reorganized to get some of these jobs done?
Mr. MINETA. Mr. Chairman, next question.
Let me, first of all, I think what you folks on this committee have done has started the ball rolling. Like a lot of things, to get things done it still needs financial resources. And what you folks did in TEA–21 and what I hope you will be able to do, Mr. Duncan, in AIR–21, it is not a question of are there sufficient funds. The budget process has been sort of a dam to be able to let the funds flowing for the purposes for which those taxes have been collected. We found that true of the highway trust funds, and you folks corrected that in TEA–21.
Now, under Mr. Duncan's leadership in AIR–21, what Chairman Shuster is proposing in AIR–21, again, we are going to be able to link the trust fund and the purposes for which those funds are being collected so that the trust fund doesn't serve as a dam flowing those funds. And I think once that is done, yes, the kinds of monies that we will be able to have to do these things will enable the Department to do some of these very tough tasks that they are charged to do.
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But, right now, I would say that, under Secretary Slater, there is probably no one who understands more the human element than he. But, you know, it is like anything else, as you so well know, there are cultures within the Department of Transportation. There are fiefdoms. And so it is a question of reorganizing the Department as well as getting the monies to do several things. And I think again, as I said, what you have done in TEA–21 and what you will hopefully do in AIR–21 will enable the Department to do those things.
Mr. HORN. Well, you are telling me the fiefdoms are there, but is there a way to get ideas up if they are sitting down there in the bureaucracy? This was the Federal Highway Administration that could have been ahead of everybody; and that old boy network said, oh, that is nothing.
Mr. MINETA. I think the work of NCARC, the National Civil Aviation Review Commission, and the recommendations that we made, and there were 21 of them, and as I recall 18 of them were incorporated into the Department's legislation for the reauthorization under—for aviation. And so, to that extent, I think they are very open.
And the same thing with the Gore Commission on Safety. There were many recommendations that came out of there. Mr. Oberstar sat on that, as did John Paul Hammerschmidt. And a lot of those recommendations in the time that I was still here were incorporated into legislation here by the Congress.
And I find the Department to be open to those kinds of suggestions. And I think, as you were able to recall, the experience of working with Secretary Slater when he was Federal Highway Administrator and his willingness to really listen to all points of view. But I think the Department is open. They have a good ear. A lot of times they are just restricted from doing things, more by money than policy reasons.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Mascara.
Mr. MASCARA. Thank you. And welcome, Norm; it is good to see you again. I am delighted to see you are putting to use the vast knowledge that you gained as a Member of Congress and as chairman of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee.
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For a person who drives the Pennsylvania Turnpike every week commuting back and forth to Washington, D.C., to Pennsylvania, I have some concerns and I have seen them firsthand and experienced them. And I realize that there are no easy answers to the safety issues.
But given the large number of agencies involved in implementing whatever safety programs we have, including the 50 States, did you address or can we address the uniform application of safety rules and regulations throughout the United States. I mean, are we even talking about that?
Mr. MINETA. What I observed is the lack of uniformity in terms of the reports and the data. Part of it comes from the fact that NHTSA has its own system and Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety has its own system. NHTSA has something called FARS, Fatal Accident Reporting System, and so they report only on fatalities. The Office of Motor Carriers involves property damage as well as accident reports involving injuries. And then on top of that——
So you start with two different reporting systems at the Federal level. You have 50 States with each of them with their own accident reporting system. And each of those States have another 1,500 communities, cities, counties and whatever other local agencies. So as the State is trying to get the data from the local agency in order to put their report together for OMCHS or for NHTSA, there is really no consistency in terms of that data. And that is one of the things I am saying in this, is to get some kind of uniformity.
And then OMCHS ought to be working with NHTSA in improving that reporting capability and make a specific recommendation of a $4 million amount of money in order to bring the NHTSA and the OMCHS reporting systems together in terms of consistency.
Mr. MASCARA. Well, I am generally a States-righter and a 10th amendment guy, and I hate to see the heavy hand of the Federal Government coming down on business people.
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As I said, there is no easy answer to this, but I have had several trucking companies in my district that have gone into Chapter 11, claiming that they were abiding by all of the rules. And maybe perhaps Pennsylvania had better laws and more strict enforcement of those laws and competing with other companies from other States across the United States that do not have the same regulations and do not police those regulations to make sure that people are abiding by the laws and regulations, that he couldn't compete, and they are having a difficult time.
And that is the reason I asked the question about uniformity. How can somebody in Pennsylvania who used to have 500 trucks, who now has 200 trucks, who is now in Chapter 11, compete with somebody in Missouri or wherever or that State doesn't perhaps have strict enforcement of the laws?
And, as you said, we have 400,000 trucking companies. And what startled me is when you said that due to deregulations—you mentioned the airlines, that as the number of passengers rise, the number of fatalities or crashes are going to occur. So then the same thing is occurring now as a result of deregulation and 400,000 trucking companies now in business, do we have to accept those fatalities and crashes? And we shouldn't accept them. We should say we have to do better and enforce the laws and make sure that we try at least to implement the laws uniformly across the United States.
Mr. MINETA. That is where my concentration was, really. At the issue of traffic fatalities, how do we drive that down? Are we properly organized to do that? Do we have the data to come up with a strategy for doing that? And that is what I looked at in terms of the report that I did submit.
Mr. MASCARA. Good to see you again, Norm.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
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Mrs. Fowler.
Mrs. FOWLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just want to welcome you back and again add my praise and the thanks that you have already heard when I was a freshman in this Congress.
We have got a bridge being constructed now in Jacksonville, Florida, that you were instrumental in getting in; and Ms. Brown and I will not take the credit for your having getting stuck on that bridge when the drawbridge went up, which certainly got your attention.
Mr. MINETA. I missed my plane as a result of that drawbridge being up.
Mrs. FOWLER. It was a dramatic example of the problems we were facing with it, and we appreciate all that you did.
Mr. MINETA. I took care of that drawbridge on I–75 as a result of that.
Mrs. FOWLER. We promise we didn't plan on that drawbridge going up, but it sure helped us. But we do appreciate it very much.
And I am just so glad that this administration is using your expertise and knowledge and appreciate the time that you have put into the study. I want to commend you that even though you are not in Congress anymore that you are still very concerned about stewardship of taxpayers dollars.
I think that your recommendation of not establishing a totally separate agency with all the bureaucracy and costs that go with that but rather this deputy administrator within the motor carrier administration might be the answer. I have got to still review this more, but it sounds like maybe the solution we have been looking for to solving the question we all are concerned with, making our highways as safe as they possibly can be but doing it in a cost-effective efficient manner. So I commend all the work that you have put into this.
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And I was really interested, too—I read through the eight recommendations that you have made as far as improving our motor carrier safety programs. I was particularly interested in the ones on improving the safety inspections of these trucks coming across our borders. Because it is—as 2000 kicks in and we will be having these trucks driving across the—coming in from Mexico, we have got to make very sure that they are meeting U.S. safety standards.
So I want to thank you for the time and the effort that you are putting into this and for continuing to share your knowledge and expertise with the Congress and helping all the taxpayers in this country. And thank you again for being with us.
Mr. MINETA. Thanks, Tillie. I always thought that you and Ms. Brown and Mayor Austin were responsible for that 18 wheeler being on its side when I was coming into town and then for the drawbridge to be up as I was leaving town to go to the airport and missing my airplane. But we finally took care of the drawbridge on I–75.
Mr. PETRI. Ms. Johnson, any questions? Or Ms. Brown?
Ms. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I simply want to greet the former chairman and thank him for his service while here and away. I think you have answered most of my questions that I have right now. I might be around for the next round. Thank you.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Ms. Brown.
Ms. BROWN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You sure look good. It is an example of life after Congress.
We in Florida and the people in the country thank you for that new Fuller Warren Bridge. It was a disaster for anyone that needed to cross it, and you know Florida is a gateway to the rest of the country.
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And I am really concerned about—having been involved in transportation, as you know, for over 16 years, I am concerned about the additional trucks that are going to be coming in from Mexico. What are some of the recommendations? You have given us in writing some of them, but what would you think would be the some of the major things that we from the committee need to do to prepare?
Mr. MINETA. Well, I think—from a committee perspective, I think the Department has all the tools necessary. What I recommended here is an increase in terms of the number of inspectors but also the increased utilization of technology in terms of the border crossing.
The other part of it is that—and I mentioned three of the four border States. Because California did put in additional monies of their own in terms of meeting its responsibilities on the inspections, and they beefed up their own forces and put in additional monies. Texas probably has been the toughest because they have said, well, this is a Federal responsibility, and we are not going to do anything about that.
So, to the extent that it is unfair to California to say, hey, Federals, you ought to really put the resources down there, but the bigger problem is that, under NAFTA, in the year 2000 these trucks are no longer going to be restricted to border States or to truck transfer points. They are now going to be able to drive through the border and go to Chicago, New York, Seattle, wherever they want to go; and we just really have to deal with that.
And the only way you can deal with that is by having more inspectors. And the problem is just by having inspectors looking at these trucks it is not going to be sufficient, because you can't have that many more inspectors. So you are going to have to utilize some kind of trend, what do you call—transponder technology or some other technology in order to be able to pre-clear trucking companies.
There is a program of the Federal Highway Administration, the Department of Commerce in terms of inspectors and Customs inspectors from Treasury and the others who are at the border, and I think all of that has to be continued in terms of their coordination efforts as well as the responsibilities of the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety in terms of the inspection responsibilities.
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Mr. PETRI. Mr. Pascrell, any questions?
I just wonder—Mr. Oberstar is coming out. He had a second round that he wanted to ask. But while we are waiting for him, I wonder, you touched several times in your opening statement and also in response to a number of questions on the suggestion that some have made of transferring this truck safety equipment to NHTSA, which you thought, I guess, wasn't the optimal solution. Could you explain to us why you think that isn't the way to go?
Mr. MINETA. Well, first of all, there is no question that, in terms of rulemaking, NHTSA is probably better at it. They have a staff of 50, 60 people in the rulemaking section. At the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety they have got five or six people; and, right now, those five or six people are really doing a zero base review of all their regulations and not spending that much time on other new regulations that ought to be processed.
And so to the extent that NHTSA may be a better agency for that, but if you do that, then you are separating rulemaking from the enforcement function. And at least in my looking at it I just didn't think you ought to split rulemaking from enforcement, put rulemaking over at NHTSA and keep enforcement at OMCHS.
On the other hand, if you put rulemaking over there, again that is an—I guess you might call it a cultural intrusion in terms of enforcement on motor carriers safety. It is really more operational, whereas NHTSA's enforcement is really of their own rules and regulations.
And so when I was talking to the NHTSA people I said, well, what about the hours and service rule? Do you think you could have done it any better? Do you think you could have done it in a shorter period of time?
And I would say the general response was no. Part of it because NHTSA, in terms of rulemaking, is technologically oriented, whereas this is more behavioral in terms of hours of service. And so, anyway, as I looked at it, I finally decided, no, it really doesn't make sense to have OMC, which is an operational agency, over at NHTSA, a regulatory agency.
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Mr. PETRI. Is there anything to the concern which I think—which I feel—and I don't know if it is a valid one or not—that you have an existing bureaucratic structure, the Department of Transportation, also Motor Safety, working with the States and they have established bureaucratic relationships and the States have the bulk of that day-to-day inspection responsibility. And if you suddenly break that up, it could result in confusion and some resistance rather than some improvement in safety if we are not careful.
And since they are working with the State Department of Transportation on a hundred and one other things anyway, it behooves the States to cooperate fully on the safety side because they are getting grants, they are working on all kinds of other things. Whereas, if you move it, you may not have that tacit incentive to cooperate in the safety area.
Mr. MINETA. But one of the things I do point out in this report is that the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety, as it is known now, really has to improve their outreach efforts with the States. On the other hand, NHTSA has a good outreach effort with the States; and so I have said here that the OMCHS has to really improve that outreach effort.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Oberstar.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Norm, for staying with us for so long.
I am greatly concerned about the question of how we, through either legislation or through governmental reorganization, can inculcate into this agency a culture of safety.
The very first paragraph of the FAA Reorganization Act of 1958 says in its opening paragraph that 'it will be the mission of this agency to maintain safety at the highest possible level.' You are very familiar with that paragraph. Not only the level of a safety you can afford, not only the level of safety that you think you are prepared to offer, but safety at the highest possible level, invested within the new Federal Aviation Administration in six different places in the law, references to safety that must be conducted.
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Now, the same Americans who grip their seats with white knuckles when they board a plane are as careless as one can imagine on the road holding a driving wheel with one finger, slicing in front of trucks, cutting them off, slowing down, talking on their car phones, all sorts of things, some of which aren't permitted on planes.
How do we create the political will within this structure to improve safety? One way is to get tough. But getting tough—I looked at the figures for 1994, 1995, 1996. A total of 54 carriers' operating authority permits have been pulled out of 400,000. We know there are many, many more that are candidates at least for review.
You cited in your testimony 20 percent fatality increase, while the overall fatality rates of driving remained constant; 35 percent growth in new motor carriers; 7 percent increase in miles traveled. Fatalities are going up. Cars are smaller, trucks are bigger, there are more operators. We know that it is the smaller operator that has the biggest problem, the newest entrant that isn't prepared.
The trucking industry is not monolithic. There are at least four major segments. You have cited them in your testimony on this. Answer or guide us in the fundamental question of how we create a true culture of safety within this entity.
Mr. MINETA. Well, that was the vexing question that I had. Why is it we have one airplane crash, two people killed, and people think the sky is falling?
Mr. OBERSTAR. And 42,000 killed on the highways.
Mr. MINETA. We have 43,000 killed on the highways, 5,355 are truck-related, truck crash fatalities, and it is sort of a ho-hum.
Now, part of it I guess I rationalize by saying that when people get on an airplane they are—they have lost control. They have now given their bodies to a pilot in an aluminum cylinder going through the air. And when they are behind the wheel holding this steering wheel somehow, even with an 80,000 pound truck three feet away, they still feel they are in control.
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And so unless there is a public consciousness about that whole issue, we could put it in 16—say the word ''safety'' in 16 places in law. But, again, it is like anything else. We have got to get public support on this.
I think the effort of the Department now in terms of buckle up we have already seen happens in terms of the children's death, with being in a proper child-restraint seat. And I think we have got to just do that kind of public consciousness-raising focus. And that is what I am trying to do with motor carrier safety, is to get it out from under just as another program within Federal Highway, bring it up here, and make it a deputy administrator for motor carrier safety. Give it the kind of resources and hot focus of publicity in order to get the public consciousness up about the safety aspects of it.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you. I think that is a move in the direction of answering that question. I think it is the incrementally right and responsible move.
If I have one further moment, Mr. Chairman, there is another element in this safety equation we haven't talked much about, and that is the shippers themselves. If they aren't prepared to accept a shipment when the truck arrives and the driver has to wait around for an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours and then goes beyond his 10-hour window of driving opportunity, then the human factor comes into it. Unsafe or the customer at the receiving end, isn't prepared to accept the shipment, same consequence.
So in TEA–21 Congress directed the Department of Transportation to tell the Congress how it would manage authority over shippers if we were to give them such authority. They haven't submitted a report on it yet. But is that a factor?
Mr. MINETA. That is very much a factor.
As I was pointing out in my earlier exchange with Mr. Duncan about my getting the flowers to the flower market in New York, it is not only the shipper's responsibility, but there is another element in there, and that is the duty of the driver or the obligation that the drivers are placed under in terms of loading and unloading. They are having to unload or load a truck and then having to drive another 10 hours on top of that. Again, what about the human factors and the fatigue that is brought on by them loading their own trucks?
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And I think—and I have said here the Department ought to be looking at that as well.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you. Thank you for helping us to look more broadly at the issue of truck safety.
Mr. PETRI. And thank you for being so generous with your time.
Mr. MINETA. Not at all. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. PETRI. The second panel is made up of Eugene Conti, Jr., the Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy of the Office of the Secretary of Transportation and a frequent visitor to this subcommittee. Kenneth Wykle is the Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration.
TESTIMONY OF EUGENE A. CONTI, JR., ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR TRANSPORTATION POLICY, OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION; AND KENNETH R. WYKLE, ADMINISTRATOR, FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
Mr. PETRI. Gentlemen, welcome.
Mr. Conti, would you like to proceed? I think we will try to stick more technically to the 5-minute rule for the remaining panels.
Mr. CONTI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity you and your colleagues have provided for me to testify before the subcommittee today to describe the Department's commercial motor vehicle safety program activities and our plans for the future. Administrator Wykle and I have submitted a longer statement support the record, but I do have some very brief oral remarks.
We wish to thank you again for focusing attention on this. I know this is your fourth hearing, and that indicates the subcommittee's seriousness with which it takes these issues.
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The Department is committed to reducing deaths and injuries to the maximum degree possible. The progress we have made in the past is not enough. And, recognizing this, Secretary Slater announced yesterday that the Department is committing itself to achieving an aggressive goal of reducing fatalities resulting from large truck and bus crashes 50 percent within the next 10 years.
We intend to reach that goal in partnership with this committee and the Congress, our partners in State and local governments, industry, labor, the safety community and groups, and all other affected and interested groups who will work with us.
We especially appreciate the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's leadership in TEA–21 to provide stronger enforcement tools, stiffer penalties and funding for better motor carrier safety information systems.
We also would like to thank the former chairman of this committee, who you just heard from, for his exceptional efforts to review this program and to provide us his suggestions for improvements. And I think you witnessed today why we value his counsel so much, because he did provide us a very serious review and a serious look.
Continuing to work together with the Congress, the Inspector General, the General Accounting Office, the National Transportation Safety Board and our other partners, we believe we can save more lives.
The motor carrier industry has grown and changed dramatically over the last 30 years. You heard a lot of those statistics earlier, and I know your earlier hearings have covered them as well, so I won't dwell on those. We do know, however, that in 1998 the preliminary statistics show a slight reduction in the number of fatalities. We want to make sure this trend continues over the next 10 years.
Before I talk about the overall program, I want to just mention briefly some of the issues related to bus safety, because I know the recent crashes in New Jersey and Louisiana have been especially disturbing to particular members of this committee. Although some of these may have been precipitated by driver-related factors, all the crashes tend to call into question the crash protection features of these vehicles, especially in rollovers.
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The NTSB has also highlighted this fact in recent hearings they held, and the industry has offered to work with us on this issue, Mr. Chairman, and we intend to accept their offer.
I will add that I was quoted this morning in USA Today saying that we are going to mandate seat belts within 90 days. And I know some members of this committee may have the experience of talking to a reporter and reading the paper next day and not really recognizing what was said. I will say here publicly that I did not say that. In fact, I said exactly the opposite. I said the industry has come forward and we are willing to work with them and the exact nature of what our recommendations will be will be determined by that discussion and discussion with other interested parties.
And we certainly aren't going to mandate that in 90 days or any time in the near future. We are committed to working with them to identify the kinds of improvements that could be made in design and will improve the roll-over protection without sacrificing the good performance these vehicles now exhibit in frontal crashes.
Mr. Chairman, I will turn now to the more comprehensive program. This program really involves not just the Federal Highway Administration but NHTSA, our Research and Special Programs Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, and our Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Administrator Wykle will provide more details about the elements of this program in his remarks, but let me just indicate we are taking aggressive action, immediate action in five broad areas: increased enforcement; enhanced regulatory efforts; improved information systems; new research and technology initiatives; and expanded public information, education partnership and outreach efforts. In addition, the administration has amended its fiscal year 2000 budget, asking Congress to provide almost $56 million more to expand the capabilities and to further aid our State partners.
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Looking forward and preparing for the future, Secretary Slater has asked me to lead a 90-day effort that will engage all affected parties in frank discussions about the long-range strategy necessary to reach the aggressive 50 percent fatality reduction goal. The resulting agenda from those discussions will involve the integrated and coordinated efforts of all the surface transportation administrations within the Department and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Some actions that we will consider in those discussions are improving the crashworthiness requirements to reduce fatalities and possibly establishing a national commission to study how pay incentives affect drivers' decisions to drive additional hours.
Administrator Wykle will provide more details about the kinds of issues we believe need to be on the table to reach that goal. Together we believe we will be able to achieve these reductions.
And that concludes my oral statement, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Wykle.
Mr. WYKLE. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, I am pleased to again appear before you today.
I appreciate the attention this subcommittee and Congress have exhibited in terms of focusing on truck and bus safety. Over the past 4 months we have listened to the testimony of those interested in improving safety. We have reviewed the reports of the General Accounting Office, the Department's Inspector General, the NTSB and Mr. Mineta, who you have heard from today in terms of his independent review of motor carrier operations.
The memories of the recent tragic crashes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and Louisiana are still fresh. I want to again express my deep sympathy for those injured in these crashes or who lost loved ones. We are committed to doing all we can to reduce the number and severity of transportation crashes. I want to recognize the hard work of the many dedicated employees of the Department who strive every day to improve safety.
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I note that preliminary truck crash data for 1998 indicated that we had about 100 fewer fatal crashes than in 1997. This is but the first step in our efforts to significantly reduce those avoidable tragedies.
I want to outline for you the actions we have under way and plans to improve safety. Bus safety receives special emphasis. Each year, we provide funds to the States to conduct 33,000 motor coach inspections per year. We train 500 State inspectors each year to conduct bus inspections.
Last month, we assembled a bus inspection strike force that looked at bus operations in New Jersey, Nevada, the District of Columbia, and at U.S. and Mexican bus operations in Texas. And, we will initiate a driver fatigue study for buses shortly.
We have restructured the Federal Highway Administration, combining responsibility for motor carrier and highway safety to ensure a comprehensive perspective encompassing the driver, vehicle and highway environment. We have increased the visibility of the program and selected a new leader. But, based on Mr. Mineta's report, we need to do more in terms of raising the visibility.
We adopted a strong enforcement policy. We will double the number of compliance reviews, initiate more enforcement cases and increase penalties against violators in accordance with the authority recently provided to us by TEA–21.
But this is not enough. This summer, we will complete final rules to prohibit trucks from crossing railroad tracks until a truck can completely clear the tracks without stopping and to disqualify drivers who violate railroad crossing warnings.
This fall, we will publish a rule to implement authority given us in TEA–21 to shut down unsafe carriers. And we are working aggressively to revise a 60-year-old hours-of-service rule. We must align the rule with the 24-hour body clock and provide for more rest.
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We recognize the need to improve the quality of safety data and to get better information on crash causation. We are enhancing our safety information systems, and we want to improve the use that we make of that data.
I have written to all the governors urging them to take steps necessary to ensure that commercial drivers who lose their driving privileges do not have those privileges reinstated early. The Department amended its fiscal year 2000 budget request to add $55.8 million for increased commercial motor vehicle safety enforcement, improved data collection, and safety technology development.
We believe that it is critical that we leverage technology to improve safety and reduce the number of fatal truck and bus crashes, technology that will help drivers avoid crashes in the first instance. We want to look at devices to control the speed of trucks and buses. We need to evaluate the testing for and monitoring of CDLs, and we need to strengthen the requirements that new entrants must meet to put trucks and buses on our roads.
We appreciate Congress's strong support, and we look forward to working with this committee as we explore additional ways to improve safety.
We have heard much about how our State and local partners can help by collecting, reporting and using data and by increasing enforcement and taking other actions to reduce crashes. We want to explore additional ways to work with our partners to reduce crashes and fatalities. They must shoulder their share of the responsibility. Safety is a personal responsibility. All of us must work together to achieve our objectives.
This concludes my testimony. I look forward to your questions.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Mr. Rahall, any questions?
Mr. RAHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Conti, let me begin with you. The original purpose of your testifying today—the original purpose was to give you—and near the end of these hearings—was to give you a chance to respond to the allegations that have been made against OMC during the course of all these hearings. And day before yesterday the administration comes out with your plan, and I have reviewed that, and I commented on that in my opening comments. But I would like to ask you a few questions in the context of your original purpose in coming here, which was to respond to allegations and not defend or talk about the administration's plan announced 2 days ago.
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Mr. CONTI. That is fine. Thank you.
Mr. RAHALL. All right. By all accounts, there has been a drop-off in level 1 inspections, with greater emphasis placed on level 2 inspections. Compliance reviews have also declined. Allegations have been made that OMC has been sacrificing these fundamental safety enforcement strategies in its push for more performance-based programs, or what the IG has termed as a collaborative approach to safety. Is this or is this not an accurate portrayal of what has been occurring?
Mr. CONTI. Well, I think the evidence is pretty clear that the number of compliance reviews had declined. The number of those statistics, you know, are not in dispute. And I think what we started last fall really in collaboration with the Administrator and others in the Department was really to look at this program, to look at this agency and try to figure out some things to improve it.
At the same time, we had a lot of other activities going on. The IG was in, looking and producing the report that you talked about. GAO, I believe, has done a report. I don't think it is final yet, but it should be final soon. I haven't actually seen it myself, but I know it is under review. Mr. Mineta was asked to start his independent review. So there has been a lot of activity looking at these issues. I don't think they have been coordinated or, you know, orchestrated in any way. But we have all been working on these issues during the same time frame.
Mr. RAHALL. OK. So it is a collaborative approach.
Mr. CONTI. No, I think they were all independent efforts, but looking at the same sets of data and the same sets of issues. And I think we have come out this week—the Secretary announced a plan, the Secretary announced a new goal.
You know, we had met with Mr. Mineta. Last Friday, I think, was the first time the Secretary has talked to him about these issues, you know, in several months. I know it is the first time I have talked to him directly about it.
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The Administrator and I went to meet with him back in February, I believe, when we gave him the charge to conduct the independent review. And I don't believe I talked to Mr. Mineta between that time and last Friday when he presented his recommendations.
Mr. RAHALL. All right. A number of important rule- makings are languishing in OMC including, for instance, the 1991 ISTEA requirement that OMC establish mandatory training standards for driving of LCVs and, in 1990, the congressionally mandated requirement to establish our uniform program for HAZMAT carriers. My question is, how can delays of this magnitude be explained?
Mr. CONTI. Well, I don't know that I can explain them. And I don't want to defend them either, because they are unacceptable.
I will say that in the last 6 months there has been change in leadership in the office. I think all of us have paid more attention to what is going on there in terms of rulemaking. We have committed to get specific rules out in the very near future. I know some of those, the hours of service rule, for instance has been languishing for 10 years. So we understand the urgency of getting on with the business, and we are committed to do that. I will not defend the past, and I don't intend to do that.
Mr. RAHALL. The question of leadership, that is referred to quite often, and you referred to leadership in response to the question. The concerns have been raised over how the chain of command now works in the OMC in the aftermath of the reorganization. In other words, Ms. Cirillo, who is with us today, is not an associate administrator but rather a program manager. Could you clarify the chain of command? For instance, who do the field personnel report to?
Mr. CONTI. I think possibly the Administrator would be better able to answer that directly, but I can comment. And I do think there are issues there. I think we are looking at them.
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I do know that we looked with great interest at Mr. Mineta's recommendations. I have had some discussions with this committee's staff about areas that we would like to work with the committee on in terms of improving that chain of command and increasing the accountability and so on. So I don't have a specific response to, you know, say that we would support a certain structure, but I do think we are willing to work with the committee on that. And I would like——
Mr. RAHALL. Mr. Wykle.
Mr. WYKLE. Yes, sir. I will comment on that, sir.
A little over a year ago, when we undertook the review of the overall structure within the Federal Highway Administration, we recognized that the Office of Motor Carriers did not have the proper visibility that we felt it needed within the organization and there was some segmentation to it. It had been kind of separate from the agency since the time it came over from the ICC some 20 years ago, and so we wanted to try to bring all the pieces of safety together into one core business unit to highway safety which is the design and the construction on that which the motor vehicle operates. We wanted to have the vehicle itself in terms of size and weight and the application of technology, those types of things, in the same core business unit, as well as the driver, covering the commercial driver's license, drug and alcohol testing. So bringing those three components together.
We also wanted to send the signal that there was one person in charge of all of that and was responsible to me for the direction of that program, and it was our feeling that the designation as program manager would send that signal. The program manager was totally responsible for motor carrier and highway safety. And so that is why we made the title change.
Now, since we have done that we have certainly received feedback and comments that some felt we actually diminished the visibility of the office. That was not our intent. So we very much appreciate Mr. Mineta's comments in terms of changes that we can potentially make to raise the visibility, because that is what we wanted to do. We wanted to send the signal that we are putting more emphasis on motor carrier operations and highway safety.
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In terms of the reporting chain, the previous organization had State directors in every State separate from the Federal aid side, but they are located in the same buildings in the majority of the cases. We are continuing that.
I did direct and ask that they work more closely together, that they try to share administrative resources, the same computer system, other types of administrative support so we could gain as many economies there as possible.
We did eliminate the regions that we had before. Where we had eight—excuse me—nine, we have gone to four resource centers. But we still have a motor carrier individual there in that resource center, and in the majority of the cases the State directors report to that individual just as they did under the previous organization. And I say majority because I have given the resource centers the flexibility of structuring the reporting chain for the Federal aid side and the motor carrier side to best meet the capabilities that they have there in their organization.
So some resource centers split that, where motor carrier would supervise say five Federal aid people as well as five State directors. And the other individual, the resource center director, would do likewise. Others kept it split strictly along functional lines.
And then Julie, at the headquarters level, as a program director, a program manager, is responsible for the entire program, providing the guidance, the policy and the direction; and she has been doing that very effectively in terms of putting out policy directives.
As we implement TEA–21 we go to the additional authorities authorized for us under that in terms of increased fines, out-of-service orders and those types of things. I would submit to you that there is no one in the field that does not know that Julie is charge as a program manager of motor carrier highway safety.
Mr. RAHALL. Thank you. I have questions, but I will just announce that for the second round.
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Mr. PETRI. Mr. Franks, any questions?
Mr. FRANKS. General Wykle, thank you for being here.
Let me try to understand a little bit better the current condition of the law. After reading some details about the Louisiana Mother's Day bus crash, let me ask about drug and alcohol testing. In the instance of an individual driver who has been detected as having used drugs, they need to enter a rehabilitation program, and then they are subject to a very aggressive, frequent set of random drug tests, as I understand it. Is that correct?
Mr. WYKLE. Basically correct, yes, sir.
Mr. FRANKS. If an individual who has been detected as using drugs moves across State lines and applies to another bus company for employment, how is the information garnered that allows the new prospective employer to know that when he was at his last job he had been detected as using drugs?
Mr. WYKLE. Well, right now, there are two criteria or two situations. If the driver was using drugs while operating a vehicle and apprehended by an enforcement officer and then charged and convicted of that, then it goes on his driving record. And each new employer is required to ask for the driving record of those potential individuals that they may hire. So it would show up there.
Now, if it was found through a random testing and they are not driving the vehicle, then that information is known to the employer but is not necessarily available to the next employer. The new employer can ask for that information, and they are required to do that. But the previous employer is not required to provide that information because of Privacy Act and privacy considerations.
And that is one of the issues we are working on right now, to try to fix that so that when a potential employer inquires of a previous employer about the record of the individual they not only get what is officially on the record because of violations and convictions but things that may have been found during random tests or other methods.
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Mr. FRANKS. Let me better understand a company's access to the CDL and the driving record of that bus driver. Is there universal and complete access to the information on someone's driving record, interstate?
Mr. WYKLE. There is generally universal and complete access to the driving record, but again, one of the weaknesses in the system is, it is only the data that is posted to the system. So if for some reason a previous driving infraction in another State was not posted, then of course the potential employer doesn't know that. It is only as good as the data in the system, and again, some of the criticisms from the reports and so forth is that the database is not complete in all instances, and that gets at many causation factors.
I mean, first of all, the law enforcement officer that makes the stop on the side of the road and issues the citation has got to ensure that the paperwork is properly filled out and submitted. As an example, were they speeding? Yes. How fast were they going? Because, again, to work toward disqualifying a driver, it has to be 15 miles above the speed limit, as an example, for automatic disqualification, and so that kind of technical information has to go in there; and as it moves through the judicial process, if the judge negotiates or agrees to reduce that for any reason or kind of pocket veto it, put the person on conditional driving conditions, that doesn't get entered in the base system.
So those types of actions preclude a potential employer having complete and accurate total information.
Mr. FRANKS. In the case where a bus driver gets a ticket for a moving violation, how is an employer notified of that violation?
Mr. WYKLE. Well, the employer either has access to or has a third party that he has to contract with that can query the State driver's licensing office and through an automated system call up any individual's driving record and find out what is on there. So they can do that as frequently as they like, but they are required to do it, required to do it, prior to hiring.
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Mr. FRANKS. Sounds like a seamless system, there are no problems with that.
Mr. WYKLE. There is no problem. In fact, we can do it right in our office. I mean, we have access. Naturally, that could be an approved organization to access it with your password and things like that.
Mr. FRANKS. You have it right in your office.
Mr. WYKLE. We have it in our office where we can call——
Mr. FRANKS. Do bus companies have it right in their office?
Mr. WYKLE. Well, they either have it in their office or, as I mentioned, they contract with an agency to provide that for them. So the information is available, but it is only as good as the database.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Rahall.
Mr. RAHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me ask a question about one of your recommendations in your release this week. How do you expect to double the number of compliance reviews each inspector conducts each year? I mean, it would seem to imply, and are we to understand these inspectors currently have so much time on their hands and their workload is so light that they now are expected to do twice the amount of work?
Mr. WYKLE. No, sir, that is not the assumption to make. Again, we have a three-part strategy in terms of motor carrier highway safety. The first is risk-based performance with enforcement, trying to identify the highest risk carriers in terms of going and conducting compliance reviews and then taking the appropriate enforcement action against them.
The second piece is leveraging technology, making maximum use of technology, whether it is encouraging and championing onboard recorders, using technology at border crossings, bypassing weigh stations, those types of technologies, and partnering, partnering with all the interested agencies, whether it is industry, safety advocacy groups, labor in terms of outreach and, of course, the session you and I attended last week in terms of the no-zone campaign, educating the travelling public.
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Our field investigators have been responsible for working all of those types of programs and additional tasks that we might give them. So it is a management issue and how you prioritize time. We have told them, we have directed them to spend more time on compliance reviews and less time on the other types of activities that they were doing, i.e., partnership, outreach, training and education. We are going to pick some of that up with the Federal aid side of the house as an example.
Now, just to reflect back a moment, the IG, our own IG did a report in 1997 and indicated that we needed to have a more effective way of targeting the highest risk carriers. As a result of that, we have implemented this risk-based system, and we tell the investigators periodically which carriers they are to go look at based on that risk, and so we are increasing that number, and we are holding them accountable for meeting that, but we know they will not have as much time to do these other types of things, and we are going to pick that up, too, with other capabilities within the organization.
Mr. RAHALL. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Franks.
Mr. FRANKS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, just a couple of questions. I need to understand the qualitative difference between a roadside inspection of a bus and an inspection at a permanent facility. Tell us how many interstate buses were pulled over for roadside inspections last year, and among those, how many were removed from the road?
Mr. WYKLE. I will give you approximate numbers.
Approximately 33,000 roadside inspections were done, and the out-of-service rate for mechanical reasons on those buses was between 21 and 23 percent. So roughly one out of five was put out of service.
In addition to that, or in conjunction with, another 5 to 7 percent of the drivers were put out of service, because of violations of hours of service regulations, as an example. So the two are not necessarily additive because one could have been put out of service for two of those reasons, but that is a rough——
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Mr. FRANKS. And the out-of-service violation is detected by the driver's log?
Mr. WYKLE. Generally speaking, yes. Whenever the investigator pulls them over to do the inspection, one of the first things they do is check their logbooks, and so they do a review of that.
Mr. FRANKS. When you do a roadside inspection, the extent to which you can look at the condition of the brakes, is it a meaningful inspection of brakes if you are in a roadside inspection?
Mr. WYKLE. Well, let me kind of put a caveat here.
For the motor carrier vehicles, the tractor trailers, if you will, we pull them over a pit, and so the inspectors actually get underneath of them, measure the plates——
Mr. FRANKS. Stick with buses for me. I am a bus guy.
Mr. WYKLE. On the bus side, we generally don't pull them over while they are loaded with passengers. We do that at destination, and so we do the destination roadside spot inspections primarily, and we do get underneath them, creepers and so forth to get underneath the buses, or have ramps that we can pull them up on to look at their brakes, to look at their lights, to look at their safety features on the buses.
Mr. FRANKS. What percentage of these roadside inspections take place at points of destination? My sense was that they were kind of arbitrary and you pull them over where there was heavy traffic volume of these buses, but you are telling me it is really only done at points of destination?
Mr. WYKLE. Not only, but primarily.
Mr. FRANKS. If it is not done at a point of destination, what is your opportunity to look at the brakes?
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Mr. WYKLE. Well, we go to the carrier's place of business, and so we do have inspect——
Mr. FRANKS. I am talking about the particular bus you have pulled over now.
Mr. WYKLE. Maybe I am not understanding your question. If the bus is actually en route from point A to point B?
Mr. FRANKS. Right, and midway in between you pull a bus over.
Mr. WYKLE. We don't do that very often, but if we do that, it is normally at, you know, a weigh station or some other location where we can get them off the road and have access to the proper facilities. But because of the passengers and inconvenience to the passengers, we have primarily avoided en route inspections, but we do do it at destinations. So it is very effective at destination, also.
Mr. FRANKS. I will reference Mr. Conti's remarks earlier about the USA Today story, and I guess I will issue a blanket disclaimer, but they say in that story today, when Federal motor carrier inspectors show up at bus companies to inspect their buses, they check only the vehicles parked on the premises.
Critics suspect that the companies deliberately keep their worst performers parked somewhere else when the inspectors are coming by. Is that true?
Mr. WYKLE. Are you asking me to comment on that or Mr. Conti? I will respond to that.
Mr. FRANKS. Yeah.
Mr. WYKLE. To the best of my knowledge, we inspect or look at the buses that are present there. I have been personally on a compliance review, not for buses, but for trucks; and we asked the company, where are all of your vehicles? Which ones are in your maintenance facility? Which ones are in your lot ready to go? Do you have any at off-site locations?
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Now, if they are dishonest with us, then naturally we don't know that unless we find it out from some other method, but we do ask and we inquire about the location of those buses. So, if there are multiple locations, we go and do a random sample at all of those as well as at destination.
Mr. FRANKS. Mr. Chairman, I have many more, but I will defer. Thank you.
Mr. PETRI. Mr. Oberstar.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WYKLE. Is that a signal?
Mr. OBERSTAR. The exciting portion of this hearing is over, lights have been turned out. You heard Mr. Mineta's presentation. You reviewed his testimony ahead of time. What is your reaction to his proposal for an expanded title and a heightened awareness of safety within the Federal Highway Administration by elevating the Office of Motor Carrier, giving it a greater safety mission?
Mr. WYKLE. Sure. Well, I certainly support Chairman Mineta's recommendations, and as you mentioned, I had a prebrief. Plus, he was present during the briefing with the Secretary, as well as heard his testimony this morning, and his recommendations will be very, very helpful to us. We are in the process of already implementing many of those.
As I mentioned in my opening comment, before any of this review of motor carrier operations started, from a public view we recognized the need to raise the visibility of this business unit, if you will, within the agency, and so we attempted to do that with our restructuring.
So we very much appreciate the feedback from Mr. Mineta in terms of perception external to us, and we will work to do additional things in accordance with his recommendations to raise the visibility and to do the types of things you mentioned, sir, in terms of the culture; and it is a cultural change that we are going through and increasing the emphasis and the attention to safety, and we want people to live and breathe that every day.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. I certainly commend Secretary Slater for his commitment to safety, both when he had your position as head of the Federal Highway Administration and becoming Secretary of the Department. He has been vigilant in all modes of transportation on the safety issue, and I have great confidence he will move in the right direction.
The Department has asked for an additional, as the Secretary announced yesterday, $56 million for upcoming fiscal year 2000, in addition to what it has already requested for motor carrier safety programs. How are those funds going to be distributed between States and the Office of Motor Carrier, and how will those funds be distributed among several functions—State grants, hiring new staff, purchasing new equipment, additional research?
Mr. WYKLE. $17 million of that request would go to data and improving the quality of the data because we understand the importance of that, as Mr. Franks asked, as an example, and the driver's licensing side and recording of violations, as well as crash data, causation data, all the data types of elements. We want to put $28 million per year into enforcement, the MCSAP program as an example, crash investigations, that type of work, and then approximately $5 million into the technology side in terms of roadside brake indicators.
Again, I don't know whether you had the opportunity to sit down the other day at the session, but a way to more easily and accurately determine using technology, the condition of brakes on trucks and vehicles at these roadside spot inspections, and we want to put some additional money into increasing the number of inspectors along the border to comply not only with the IG's recommendation, but certainly Mr. Mineta's recommendation.
So those are the broad breakouts of categories and how we would use that money. Roughly half of it would go into MCSAP.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Will this be a one-time catch-up fund or will this be sustained funding? Some of it may be perhaps?
Mr. WYKLE. I would think it would be more sustained over time, yes, but certainly, we need to catch up and then some amount of it would be sustaining the programs because we don't want to surge and then fall back; we want to sustain it.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. From 1994 through 1996, I cited to Mr. Mineta, DOT issued 54 out-of-service orders. Is that an accurate assessment of the state of trucking safety? Are there only 54 miscreants?
Mr. WYKLE. Well, again, the way the system is designed and set up, we go and do the compliance review. If we find the carriers are unsatisfactory, currently we are required to give them 45 days to fix the things that we found before we can put them out of service. So many of them would go and take action to correct things that were identified.
Mr. OBERSTAR. How many such orders were issued in that period of time; do you know, offhand?
Mr. WYKLE. I don't have that. We will get that for the record.
[The information received follows:]
FHWA issued 614 compliance orders from 1994 through 1996. A compliance order directs the motor carrier to take specific actions to remedy safety non compliance.
Mr. OBERSTAR. It is important to present a more complete picture of safety. Not every—as in aviation, not every airworthiness directive--noncompliance results in shutdown of a carrier. FAA goes after all the carriers and makes sure they have carried out those ADs in their inspections.
So to get a more complete picture, it would be useful to have that information.
And just one final observation: I am glad you heard my appeal for the culture of safety. That culture of safety within this entity that you heard, or within the Office of Motor Carriers, whether it rises in some other iteration or as an extension of the Federal Highway Administration, has to be more than just catchy phrases and campaign slogans. It has really got to penetrate into the people who administer or the person who is at the head of that new function within the Federal Highway Administration or elsewhere within the Department, and I urge the Department to come forward with some very clear thinking.
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That is maybe your role, Mr. Conti, and certainly that of the Secretary as we finalize this.
Let's not get engaged in a race to beat this or that organization, or this or that group, or this or that committee of Congress, to announce a program, but let's think constructively about the best way to assure the travelling public the highways are as safe as we can possibly make them.
Mr. WYKLE. We will certainly do that, sir, and I appreciate your comments. I would just add that on the highway side certainly for the work that we have done, we are recognized as a safety agency. We are a premier safety organization from the standpoint of the interstate, four times safer, as you know, than any other highways. As I have indicated to our employees, we want to bring that same vision, that same dedication, to motor carrier safety, combined with highway safety.
And Ms. Cirillo gets very high marks from the field and all the other organizations in terms of her knowledge and commitment to safety; and if you have had the opportunity to read her bio, you know she comes with a very strong safety background and is carrying that same message throughout everything she does.
Mr. OBERSTAR. I happened to have a good visit with Ms. Cirillo, and I appreciate her work.
And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you. I think I would probably be remiss to let this panel go without putting a question that sort of touched a bit directly on you, and that is the issue of the proper location of the Office of Motor Carriers, something that has been talked about. Former Chairman Mineta made his recommendation there; it has been outstanding for over a year now. We have had hearings on it, hearing from different people. Strong and differing opinions have been voiced by safety groups, labor, State Department officials and the trucking industry.
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We thought for a brief moment yesterday, the Department of Transportation had taken a position or made a recommendation to us on that. We really do feel we have an obligation as a committee to move forward, and we would appreciate it if we could get some input. We would like to know the benefit of your thinking on any change before we get down the track, but we need to move down the track. So could you tell us when the Department is going to take a position on that issue?
Mr. CONTI. Well, Mr. Chairman, I will take the first crack at this, and then if Administrator Wykle wants to add anything, that is fine. I think what the Secretary did yesterday is basically indicate that his preference right now is to beef up the activity, beef up the office, really get into specific actions, hold the Federal Highway Administration and everybody within this whole area, not just within Federal highways, to start showing results in terms of reducing fatalities.
He has not made a decision about ultimately where this activity belongs, but I think he did follow the recommendations of the Inspector General very carefully, and the Inspector General's report, he essentially said he saw two real options. One is to beef up the Office of Federal Motor Carrier Safety and to increase the resources, do a lot of the things that were recommended and that we have now put into place.
The second option was to create a separate motor carrier safety administration, but the IG did point out that that is not a silver bullet in solving some of these problems either. So I think right now I would say, the Department has made the decision that we were going to continue with the organizational structure we have, beef it up, support it, elevate its visibility, do all the things that the Administrator has talked about here.
I did say earlier that we would be certainly willing to work with the committee on structuring a bill in terms of improving the office and elevating status and so on. I think what I can say today is that we will be willing to work with the committee as you proceed on your legislative activity.
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Mr. PETRI. Let me just observe that this isn't really just a question of talking about moving boxes within the Department or something of that sort, but it does raise the issue of whether the Department is actually willing to step up and make difficult but important decisions in the area of highway safety; and we can explore options a lot, but at some point, we have to decide either we are not going to forward with options, that none of them show any significant improvement, or make some change because we hope that that will lead to improvement.
We appreciate getting some input because you are going to have to execute, and the proper way of proceeding, at least I learned once from the General Goodpaster years ago, and he learned it from General Marshall that people who have to carry out decisions should be asked to have their input. They may not follow their recommendations, but will at least have an opportunity to express themselves before they are told, you know, to take that hill or whatever it is that they are supposed to do.
We very much believe they should participate so they have an opportunity to appreciate the process being followed in this instance, if it is at all possible.
Mr. WYKLE. We will be very happy to do that, Mr. Chairman, and work very closely with you and the committee on that.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you. Thank you very much. I apologize for your panel coming up a bit late. We need a minute or two to reorganize because the next panel is quite large. So we will take a minute or two break and resume shortly.
[Recess.]
Mr. PETRI. The subcommittee will come back to order. The third panel is comprised of Mr. Joseph Osterman, who is the Director, Office of Highway Safety, National Transportation Safety Board; Mr. Richard Kamin, Assistant Commissioner of Division of Motor Vehicles, New Jersey Department of Transportation; James Crawford, the Executive Director of South Jersey Transportation Authority; Robert Molofsky, who is the general counsel, Amalgamated Transit Union; Francis Tedesco is the National Board Member of the American Bus Association and the President of Academy Bus Tours, Inc.; Norman Littler is Vice President of Government Affairs, United Motorcoach Association; and Jack Haugsland, who is Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer of Greyhound Lines, Inc.
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Gentlemen, thank you all very much for coming. I think you are familiar with the procedure of the committee. Your full statements will be made a part of the record, and we invite you to summarize them in approximately 5 minutes.
Mr. RAHALL. Mr. Chairman, before, may I ask unanimous consent that a statement by the International President of the Transport Workers Union of America, Mr. Sonny Hall, be made a part of the record?
Mr. PETRI. Without objection, it will be made a part of this record.
Mr. RAHALL. I would note that Mr. Hall just makes several compelling points regarding the differences between regulating trucks as opposed to intercity buses. In effect, he notes that a bus is not a truck and a passenger is not a cabbage. However, that is how existing regulations seem to treat the matter.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you. Mr. Osterman.
TESTIMONY OF JOSEPH OSTERMAN, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF HIGHWAY SAFETY, NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD; C. RICHARD KAMIN, ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER OF THE DIVISION OF MOTOR VEHICLES, NEW JERSEY DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION; JAMES CRAWFORD, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SOUTH JERSEY TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY, STATE OF NEW JERSEY; ROBERT MOLOFSKY, GENERAL COUNSEL, AMALGAMATED TRANSIT UNION, AFL-CIO; FRANCIS A. TEDESCO, NATIONAL BOARD MEMBER, AMERICAN BUS ASSOCIATION, AND PRESIDENT, ACADEMY BUS TOURS, INC., HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY; NORMAN LITTLER, VICE PRESIDENT OF GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS, UNITED MOTORCOACH ASSOCIATION; AND JACK HAUGSLAND, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, GREYHOUND LINES, INC., DALLAS, TEXAS
Mr. OSTERMAN. Good morning, Chairman Petri, and members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of the National Transportation Safety Board to discuss the oversight of the Office of Motor Carriers and bus safety in general. Chairman Jim Hall has asked me to express his disappointment to you and the committee that he could not be here with you today due to a death in his family.
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Between 1986 and 1996, the number of vehicles on our highways grew by 16 percent. During that same period the mass of those vehicles increased by over 20 percent. Many of our interstate roads, which also serve as major truck corridors are over capacity and ill-suited for heavy vehicle traffic. Safety on our highways is challenged by more volume, more mass and more pressure to the operators. This change in the nature and the use of our highway system is the reason Safety Board Chairman Jim Hall is focusing Board resources on two important highway safety issues this year. One is heavy truck and bus safety, and the other is putting child safety first in the design of our motor vehicles.
The Safety Board plans to conduct three major hearings on truck and bus safety this year. The first, a three-day hearing that focused on oversight issues, was actually held in April. The Board will convene a second hearing this summer on the subject of technology applications for heavy vehicle safety, and a third hearing will be held in the fall on issues related to NAFTA and heavy vehicle safety.
Testimony at our first public hearing reinforced the NTSB's concern that neither the government nor the truck and bus industries have a coordinated safety agenda. The hearing testimony identified four specific areas of concern. While these four items are discussed in detail in my long testimony, I will briefly review them for you now.
The first area is better data collection. Currently, there is little uniformity in the data collected by the fifty States following highway accidents. As a result, even though the States transmit their data to the Federal Government agencies, both the OMC and NHTSA, comparative analysis of the causes of accidents between states or nationwide is impossible because there are few common data points upon which to base that analysis.
A second area is better oversight of all stakeholders, including drivers, companies, shippers, brokers, consigners, freight forwarders and tour operators, and I make it a point to spell out all of those because the issue goes far beyond shippers. These programs need to be extended to ensure that all stakeholders are held accountable for public safety.
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In addition, testimony indicated that current programs must be improved if they are to be effective. Currently, the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety does not have an effective program for removing the worst motor carriers from our roads. In addition, the current commercial driver's license system hinders everyone's ability to identify deficient drivers of heavy vehicles because it often does not reflect all driving convictions.
The third area is better use of technology, both on the roads and in vehicles. Technology such as on board recorders, collision avoidance systems, electronic braking systems, and intelligent transportation systems are available today and can be used to prevent crashes and save lives.
The fourth area is better countermeasures. These efforts can range from educational opportunities for all drivers on better ways to share the road to more rest areas for commercial drivers, to different pay systems for drivers so that they are paid by the hour rather than by the mile, and updating the 62 year old hours of service regulations, a recommendation the Safety Board made over 10 years ago, would also be included in that list.
In the past 5 years, the Safety Board has investigated six motorcoach accidents that resulted in 42 deaths and 154 injuries. In an average year, more than 360 million bus passengers traveled 28 billion passenger miles in North America. About 945 million of those miles are by motorcoach. The American Bus Association estimates that about 4,000 motorcoach companies operate 26 to 28,000 commercial buses for charters, tours, regular route service and special operations. The greatest users of those motorcoaches are some of our most vulnerable citizens, children and senior citizens. As these segments of our population increase, and they are projected to do so, so will their reliance on motorcoaches as a form of transportation with the corresponding increase in motorcoach traffic.
As you are aware, the Safety Board is investigating three recent tragic motorcoach accidents. The first occurred June 20th, 1998, near Burnt Caverns, Pennsylvania, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It resulted in the death of six occupants. A second occurred Christmas Eve 1998 on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, and resulted in the death of 8 passengers. The third occurred just 2 weeks ago in New Orleans, Louisiana, that resulted in the death of 22 passengers.
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Although these investigations are ongoing, the safety issues that are being examined in these accidents are exactly those that I mentioned previously, qualification and licensing of drivers, the use of advanced technology concerns for speed control, bus crashworthiness, occupant ejection, and motor carrier oversight by both Federal and state level officials.
If we are to improve highway and vehicle safety it is clear that effective leadership is needed, along with the desire to be more proactive and a willingness to be innovative to try new approaches to solve not only the problems at hand but those we know will loom in the future as our nation and economy grow and expand.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That concludes my testimony, and I would be happy to take the committee's questions.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Mr. Kamin.
Mr. KAMIN. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members. It is an honor indeed to appear before this committee. I serve two titles in New Jersey, one as Director of Motor Vehicles as well as an Assistant Commissioner for the Department of Transportation, and one of our key responsibilities is the regulation of commercial bus transportation and safety as well for our students in school buses.
I think to be here today for the official release of the Mineta report is important, and as often happens when something occurs here in Washington, a report is very good at identifying the concerns and the problems but not necessarily as helpful as it could be where the solutions might be. I think this Congress has found over the years, you might find, look to the States to help with this one as well, just as you have with education and just as you have with welfare reform.
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And in New Jersey, we are the premier commercial bus inspection program in the country. You mentioned before about the 33 to 35,000 annual inspections roadside. New Jersey alone does 17 percent of those inspections. We have 400,000 trips to Atlantic City annually. Commercial bus trips, 10 million passengers. We have about 6,000 commercial buses in New Jersey. Of those about 2,000 are tied up in New Jersey transit. We have about 500 motor carriers in that regard.
What we do in Jersey is inspect those buses twice a year in the terminals. This is where the action is. This is where you get a chance to look at those records. This is where you find out whether or not those carriers are complying, and I can tell you that the responsible bus companies do comply. There is competition, and safety overrides profits as far as their approach to business. An accident that has fatalities is not very good for business. I am sure you would understand that.
We also, before placing a bus into revenue service, there is a complete review of all the credentials, including the license plates and insurance requirements and all of the Federal regulations, and if the bus does not meet it, then there is essentially registration denial. The bus is not on the road. We have worked with the motor carrier, the MCSAP and have approximately 1.4 to $1.7 million a year comes to New Jersey for our application to that program, and we use that for roadside and coupled with our state police to conduct safety inspections on trucks, and the new technology is there, alluded to, of infrared testing, GPS for positioning—you can track the truck if you need to track the driver.
In fiscal year '97 New Jersey conducted 6,218 roadside inspections, again mentioning that 17 percent, of the total national figure were 17 percent. During these inspections a thorough check is performed on each of the buses along with a check of the commercial driver license, medical certificates, driver's logs, and if a bus is failing these inspections they are immediately put out of service. Logbooks are examined. If the driver is found to be in violation of the excess of the 8 hours, he also is placed out of service for at least another 8 hours. Why do we want to do this? Because it affects two very important industries, transportation and, in New Jersey, tourism.
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Approximately 1,100 buses a day make a trip to Atlantic City, and if they are not being properly maintained and it would affect that industry as well. In May of this year, New Jersey began an aggressive program, the first of its kind in the country, to target unsafe commercial buses by issuing summons, fines that can reach now as high as $5,000, another that the Mineta report referred to and appears to endorse.
I also—I am not testifying today on behalf of this organization, but I am a member of the board of directors for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, and we talk about the world getting stronger. We represent the several States, the fifty States, the continental United States as well as the jurisdictions into Canada. I expect Mexico to soon to be joining that organization, and if you are looking for a vehicle to try to coordinate much of what is trying to be accomplished by the report and the goals of this committee, I think you will find AAMVA to be a strong ally.
I think the responsibility the companies have is to always choose safety over profit, take advantage of the technology, remember that there is bar coding out there, and quite frankly, Mr. Chairman, members, this isn't rocket science. A lot of it is how do we best invest those dollars. I think they are best applied at the state for the administering of programs of this nature and to assure the public that bus transportation is a safe way to go. It clearly is in New Jersey.
Thank you.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Mr. Crawford.
Mr. CRAWFORD. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I head the South Jersey Transportation Authority, an independent agency of the State of New Jersey. The authority operates the Atlantic City Expressway and the Atlantic City International Airport, but among our key responsibilities is the coordination of transportation planning and the regulation of motor carrier operations in the popular resort community of Atlantic City. I am the one who has to deal daily with those 1,100 buses, those 400,000 buses a year, that come in and out of Atlantic City.
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Your hearing today focuses attention on an industry that is committed to safety, and according to my personal experience over 14 years as a bus regulator, an industry which welcomes the opportunity to improve safety, training and techniques. As Mr. Kamin pointed out, we host over 1,100 motorcoaches a day. We also have 300 bus trips on regional transit and another 140 on a regional jitney service. In fact, it becomes clear that almost one-third of all the visitors to Atlantic City come by motorcoach, and 25 percent of the employees come to the city by transit. Atlantic City is a bus-dependent resort.
During December 1998 serious accidents struck four motorcoaches involved in Atlantic City travel. While the causes of these accidents and their investigations have not yet been released, it is clear that actions needed to be taken quickly to overcome both visitor fears about bus travel and also to overcome the problems that were causing this. It was important to ensure that the drivers were reminded of their central importance in bus safety.
The South jersey Transportation Authority, in conjunction with the Atlantic City Bus Operators Association, the Department of Transportation, both at the state and Federal level, the New Jersey state police and others, conducted four one-day training sessions for motorcoach drivers. More than 800 drivers attended these four-hour sessions. At each there were a number of safety tips offered to the drivers as well as explanations on motor carrier law, safety checks and responsibilities. Also, there was suggestions given as to how to handle difficult and unusual situations that they may face in their day-to-day activities.
These sessions were well attended and valuable according to all who attended. However, we realized that safety is not a one-time concern. Therefore, additional sessions are being planned for the summer and late fall to reinforce the importance of driver attention and professionalism to the overall safety of any bus trip.
Any bus accident is serious and regrettable. Fortunately, in New Jersey the accident history for motorcoaches, notwithstanding those four serious accidents, is historically very positive. There have been no major accidents due to mechanical failure since the last major fatal bus accident that occurred in 1992 in Vernon Township wherein six passengers died in a New York state registered bus. That bus accident was caused at least in part by mechanical defects that should have been caught during routine inspections.
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As I indicated earlier, the SJAT regulates the bus parking lots where most of the 1,100 buses daily stop for 4 to 8 hours rest. For 10 years the authority or its predecessors operated such lots. Key to the regulations in controlling the approval of these lots is the establishment of facilities for drivers and for inspections of the buses during the downtime while the passengers are not on board. This downtime is an opportunity for the drivers to get away from the tensions and intensity of driving, but we should never be so naive as to expect that every driver is going to spend that entire downtime sleeping. Drivers can regularly be found walking the boardwalk, shopping in the mall or generally going about daily activities of life, and this is not bad. It represents a stark difference from the pressures and indeed real pressures associated with driving 40 passengers hundreds of miles. I believe and my agency has affirmed that the opportunity to rest is an essential part of any motorcoach layover terminal and that rest should be encouraged.
Mr. Chairman, there is a number of issues in terms of vehicle safety that we all should be paying attention to, but in conclusion, vehicle safety and driver safety must go hand in hand. Proper inspections with a requirement to repair major defects before out-of-service violations are removed and the vehicle permitted to operate should be encouraged and monetary civil penalties such as we have adopted in New Jersey should are encouraged, and we should do everything possible to ensure that driver training is not only mandatory but that it is put into effect on a regular and continuing basis.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity, and I ask that my remarks be included in the official report.
Mr. PETRI. They will, and we thank you for your testimony.
Mr. Molofsky.
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Mr. MOLOFSKY. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be here, Mr. Chairman. I appear here on behalf of Jim La Sala, the President of the ATU. I am general counsel for the union. Our union represents 165,000 employees in the transportation industry involved in over-the-road, intercity, school bus, and paratransit operations. We represent employees in over 25 intercity bus companies based in some 15 states but operating in all fifty States and throughout all provinces in Canada. We have a long history of working with this committee and others on both sides of the Congress and with the administration developing legislation and which is currently before you today for reconsideration in light of the safety concerns shared by all of us. We certainly support your intense focus on all of these issues and the need for potential changes.
We believe, as others have said, that a refocused, restructured and, yes, well-funded Office of Motor Carriers should be established and can play a pivotal role in ensuring effective development and enforcement of our nation's transportation safety laws. Indeed, we are pleased to be here on the same panel as Greyhound Lines, Inc., whose 4,000 employees are represented by the ATU and with whom we have worked closely together to maintain and improve the company's excellent safety record.
Some of the issues that have been raised today relate to the fact that joint labor management programs at the companies that we represent and those represented by other unions within the AFL-CIO. These have led to a general recognition that the unionized properties have an extraordinarily safe and effective safety record.
Throughout the ATU's 106-year history, safety has been our paramount concern. We have been at the forefront in the fight for the 6-day workweek, and the 8-hour day. We helped this committee many years ago when the CDL laws were first pending and worked with the DOT and our counterparts, including the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators in developing the rules. We have stressed substance abuse to eliminate the use of drug and alcohol by and amongst the employees we represent and have supported their efforts to continue to work if possible through rehabilitation programs.
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We are now working with Congressman Blumenhauer and other members of this committee and the U.S. Senate to advance H.R. 1080, a bill designed to protect America's transit workers and the riding public from assaults, both on the bus and in the maintenance garages, establishing a uniform employee safeguards and penalties for those who would seek to assault individuals charged with such an extraordinary responsibility for the passengers that they carry.
Today, as we look at the legislative and regulatory framework to improve on our industry safety record, I must stop and emphasize one major point. A truck is not a bus. As you continue to look at any restructuring within the OMC, within the Department of Transportation or otherwise, that point must be in the forefront of your minds. This is a bus safety hearing. A lot of the overview and a lot of the records and issues which have been raised here focused on the trucking industry and not the bus industry. As you consider a variety of solutions, we, with our industry counterparts, would support the establishment of a separate bus division within the Office of Motor Carriers, wherever it lands, to make sure that the unique issues and concerns of bus drivers, their equipment, the industry and the operations that they conduct are properly addressed and remain a key focus.
When the CDL and the laws and licensing requirements were first established, we fought along with many to make sure that the standards for measuring a CDL license for a truck or bus driver were not going to be the same for a transit or school bus operator as for a truck driver. It didn't happen, and I think to the extent that you are moving to strengthen or reform licensing requirements it should be reexamined. There are differences when you get behind the wheel of a bus or a truck that the licensing requirements should reflect.
We are also prepared to work with this committee, our industry counterparts and the DOT as you explore the introduction of new technologies to improve commercial motor vehicle safety. Here, too, we urge a word of caution. Yes, perhaps there is a significant and improved role that black boxes and global positioning systems can play, but we urge when you move forward on these areas and collision avoidance systems, seatbelts and window reinforcement that you take a careful look at the technology and what contributions, they will make in the bus sector.
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I want to turn to one last point in the time remaining and that is to highlight a serious gap in the regulatory and structural framework affecting safety on our Nation's highways, and that is the absence of any rules, regulations, licensing requirements, drug and alcohol testing requirements, state laws or otherwise that regulate the drivers and the equipment involving intrastate passenger vans. It makes no sense that when the Federal Government funds through the FTA van operations, intrastate vans running throughout our cities' metropolitan areas to our airports and other terminals, that they are subject to some of those rules and regulations, but when a private company operates on its own, which is the vast majority of such efforts, they are not subject to any controls and regulations. The 1998 law sought to fill that gap by lowering to 8 plus a driver the controls for interstate vans, but they omitted any consideration for intrastate van operations, and we urge you to take a look at this to fill that gap.
And with that, I would conclude my testimony and be prepared to answer any questions you may have. Thank you very much.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Mr. Tedesco.
Mr. TEDESCO. Thank you, Chairman, and members of the committee. I am a National Board Member of the ABA and also President of Academy Bus located in New Jersey. We operate a fleet of nearly 600 motorcoaches throughout the U.S. and Canada and are a full service passenger transportation company provider. I appreciate the opportunity you have given ABA today to present our association's views on oversight matters relating to OMC. Furthermore, we appreciate the opportunity to discuss general safety issues and other concerns of the intercity motorcoach industry.
ABA is the national trade association for the intercity bus industry. We have approximately 700 member companies that operate buses in intercity service, 100 of whom provide regular route scheduled service. There are approximately 3,500 to 4,000 motorcoach companies in the United States operating over 35,000 over-the-road motorcoaches. ABA represents approximately 20 percent of these companies, which is two-thirds of all motorcoaches used in interstate passenger transportation.
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I would like for us to address the issues concerning OMC. Over the years, ABA has developed a good working relationship with OMC. We have invited officials of the agency to attend our business meetings to provide timely information on implementation of regulations and to openly address any industry concerns. We are optimistic that the restructured OMC will provide a framework to continue this partnership.
With regard to the proposal to move OMC from the Federal Highway Administration to NHTSA, we feel that it is more important to ensure that no matter where OMC resides, the motorcoach industry must be viewed as separate and distinct from the trucking industry. A motorcoach is not a truck. ABA has worked tirelessly over the past several years to distinguish our industry from that of the trucking industry. We strongly believe that there should be a separate approach towards regulating each industry, particularly given the unique scheduling and driving patterns inherent to the motorcoach industry.
One area which distinguishes the motorcoach industry from the trucking industry is the issue of hours-of-service regulations. The DOT is considering changes to the rule that could increase a driver's hours behind the wheel. Other advocacy groups may want fewer hours. We strongly oppose any change to current hours-of-service regulations for motorcoaches without benefit of industry-specific research.
Certainly, there are many areas in which OMC could improve its operations and regulatory oversight. Foremost, it is critical that they begin to collect more data and statistical information that would greatly enhance the effectiveness of new regulations. This additional date would allow OMC proposed rulemaking to better address the issues facing the motorcoach industry. Safety has always been the industry's number one priority. It is for this reason that the recent motorcoach accidents, particularly the Mother's Day accident in New Orleans, deeply saddens us. ABA and its member companies believe that even one fatality is tragic and is too many. Still, travel by motorcoach remains the safest mode of transportation available to the public. The NTSB and Congress have looked at the safety record and practices in the motorcoach industry and acknowledged that bus travel continues to be the safest mode of transportation.
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Motorcoach operators and manufacturers have taken a proactive stance for safety. Our efforts to promote the highest standards of safe design and operation have met and are exceeded stringent Federal and state regulations.
I would like to take a moment to address several issues that have been raised as a result of the New Orleans crash. The first issue pertains to driver qualifications. Whether or not a driver is properly qualified depends on many factors. They include a medical examination and a card issued by a physician, past performance and driving experience. Perhaps now is the time to create a national database in which driving data, including drug and alcohol testing information, could be accessed without fear of retribution.
The second issue concerns window design and construction. NHTSA should reassess window design. The new design should function to retain passengers inside the coach in an accident but should be able to be removed in an emergency situation.
Third issue involves seatbelts on motorcoaches. Since the safety of our passengers is critical, we are always searching for additional ways to prevent deaths and injuries that result from motorcoach accidents. In our view, compartmentalization of our passengers, namely, the protection of bus passengers in frontal impact collisions by the seats in front of them, has been very effective. With this system, statistics show 4.3 fatalities per year from 1987 through 1996. However, we encourage Congress to provide National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration with the necessary financial resources to conduct crash testing on motorcoaches too in order to determine how seatbelts and overall construction would affect system. ABA's goal is to ensure that any mandated use of seatbelts comes only after proper research and testing. To guarantee the safety of our passengers is critical that any mandate heighten safety features already present in motorcoaches.
The final issue involves collection and utilization of data. The three previous issues I discussed can only be resolved through appropriate research resulting in accurate and useful data. Perhaps if such motorcoach research and data were already available, some of the challenges we face would be easier to resolve.
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I would like to give my perspective on safety issues. Academy has always been a champion of safety. We believe that safety and true customer service are synonymous, and we have dedicated significant corporate resources to support that philosophy.
From initial driver qualification screening and a comprehensive driver-training program to a state-of-the-art maintenance operation, we exceed regulatory requirements to ensure we maintain a quality feel and driver pool.
Dedicated field safety staff, a comprehensive driver database, significant safety incentive programs, internal loss control department and ongoing safety training and compliance are also a component of our daily operation.
Academy continues to maintain a compliant and safe operation as satisfied by our satisfactory audits from regulatory agencies. We take great pride in our accomplishments in the safety arena and will continue to keep our focus on passenger safety issues.
We transport approximately 600,000 passengers each month, and we continue to rank among the largest and safest, and as Mr. Oberstar had mentioned, safety can be talked about but it is truly a culture within each organization and that starts at the leadership, and I, as the president of Academy, continue to make that commitment to you and to the committee here.
Thank you.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
Mr. Littler.
Mr. LITTLER. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to present testimony today on matters relating to motorcoach and highway safety. My name is Norm Littler. I am Vice President of Government Affairs for the United Motorcoach Association. UMA is the Nation's largest association of professional motorcoach operators. We represent nearly 800 coach companies and some 200 industry manufacturers and suppliers. Our members provide regular scheduled service, charter, tour and contract service, airport shuttle, commuter service and various types of special operations.
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We commend you for holding this hearing and for asking interested parties like the United Motorcoach Association to come before you and offer constructive suggestions on how to improve highway safety and bus safety in particular.
For many years UMA has been a leading edge of promoting innovative methods of improving bus and motorcoach safety. Our organization enjoys a close working relationship with the National Transportation Safety Board as evidenced by our party and witness status in their ongoing review of bus safety and bus crashworthiness. UMA is also a party to the board's investigation into the circumstances surrounding the recent tragic bus accident that claimed 22 lives in New Orleans.
Historically, a large part of the focus of enforcement and regulatory community has been on the commercial vehicle itself. The Department of Transportation and NTSB studies of highway accident statistics indicate that as many as 95 percent of all accidents involving a commercial vehicle directly relate to human factor failure on the part of a driver or one or more of the vehicles involved. Less than 5 percent of commercial vehicle accidents are directly attributed to a mechanical failure in the vehicle. Because of these disproportionate percentages, my testimony today will focus on several driver and operations-related recommendations which if implemented in a timely fashion we believe will go a long way towards preserving the remarkable safety record of the motorcoach industry. Recent highly publicized coach accidents notwithstanding our safety record parallels that of the school bus as the Nation's safest mode of ground passenger transportation.
Our recommendations focus on human factor failings which we believe can lead to the greatest improvement in commercial vehicle safety if implemented in a timely and resolute manner by this Congress.
First, the commercial driver's license program is flawed. Commercial driver's license program is not working. When the Commercial Vehicle Safety Act of 1986 was passed into law one of the statutory provisions was the creation of a commercial driver's license program. The program did not create a Federal driver's license but instead continued to allow the states to issue commercial licenses under a uniform set of minimum national standards. Two of the primary intents of the program were to ensure that operators of commercial motor vehicles do not hold more than one license and that states testing and licensing programs are conducted in a uniform manner to conform with the Federal minimum standards. The CDL program has been in effect since April 1st, 1992.
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UMA believes that the CDL program contains flaws which can only be corrected through legislative action. The process of uniformity that Congress envisioned by allowing the States to retain the right to issue commercial licenses has not occurred and shows no signs of being achievable without a mandate that provides for a uniform identifier of license applicants. Congress has mandated the biometric identifier be incorporated into the CDL process. Unfortunately, no single technology yet appears to provide a solution or can be agreed upon by participating parties. Fingerprinting has not provided the solution. States employing fingerprinting are not uniform regarding the fingers or thumbs which are printed. The mere mention of employing social security numbers is accompanied by howls of protest as does the mention of creating a unique code to identify the individual. Bad drivers know this loophole well and are able to slip from state to state and reapply for driving privileges. Even though states are required to query the Federal Highway Administration's Commercial Driver's License Information System, CDLIS, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's National Driver Register, the NDR, during the application process for commercial licenses, without a unique identifier in place the process is still more or less a crap shoot. Keep in mind also that the NDR is acknowledged to be a national bad driver database, regardless of the driver's status in the commercial field. No database exists which focuses on the performance or safety records of the professional motor vehicle drivers in the Nation.
Mr. LITTLER. Another problem with the CDL program relates to the data path. Driver performance data are not reaching the employers. Employers and prospective employers are required by statute and regulation to review a driver's past driving record and report serious violations to the Federal Highway Administration.
Most employers, however, are unaware that the CDLIS and NDR data are available to them through a tedious, written, notarized request to the State licensing agency. Nowhere in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations or in any other information provided to the motor carrier is mentioned what data is available to the employer or that the employer has the right to access the data. In fact, nowhere in the standard copies of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations are either CDLIS or the NDR mentioned.
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Changes needed in the commercial drivers license program. While UMA acknowledges that the CDL program in place today is an improvement on the system that existed before it, we are sincerely concerned that the existing has fallen far short of its congressional intent and even farther from its capabilities.
While States have implemented comparatively uniform skills and knowledge testing for commercial drivers in conformance with Congress' original mandate, the heart of the CDL program remains elusive. What Congress intended to be a central data base of unique driver records has never even approached that goal.
Rather than serve in the classic, most useful, ways of a complete data base, CDLIS is referred to as a ''pointer'' system. Anyone desiring information about a commercial driver is directed by CDLIS to the driver's record within the licensing State. There is no attempt within CDLIS to combine or compare State records. In many cases, the data fields within individual State license files are not compatible. Even if they were, there is no mandate for State licensing bureaus, enforcement agencies or employers to enter any specific information on a driver's record.
Mr. PETRI. Your entire statement will be made a part of the record, and we appreciate your being here today.
Mr. Haugsland.
Mr. HAUGSLAND. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of Subcommittee.
Mr. Chairman, it is a real honor for me appear before your committee. I was born and raised and educated in Wisconsin and spent a good portion of my life in the Fox River Valley.
Mr. PETRI. We have a lot names like Haugsland up in our part of the world.
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Mr. HAUGSLAND. I bet you do.
Greyhound Lines, as the only nationwide intercity bus operator, has taken a leading role on motorcoach safety issues; and hopefully our experience will help the subcommittee on the key motorcoach safety issues. I am going to make five basic points.
First, motorcoach transportation today is extraordinarily safe. Changes in the regulatory framework must not jeopardize that safety record, but they must enhance it.
Second, enhancing driver performance through comprehensive driver training and compliance with safety standards should be the primary safety concern.
Third, changes in bus design such as seatbelts and improved window design may enhance passenger safety. However, these changes are not without risk to an already safe mode. Therefore, DOT and the industry should move forward expeditiously to test whether these changes will, in fact, enhance passenger safety.
Fourth, technology, when properly adapted to motorcoach use, has the potential to improve motorcoach safety. DOT and the industry should work together to develop that technology.
Fifth, commercial passenger vans are a more serious safety threat than motorcoaches. DOT must start regulating these vans, as Congress has directed.
All statistics support that motorcoach travel is extremely safe. Thus, any changes to existing bus safety standards and practices must meet the threshold test of doing no harm to the current outstanding bus safety record and then must be shown to enhance bus passenger safety.
The vast majority of motorcoach drivers on the road today are very professional, safe drivers. Greyhound's drivers are all represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union who we work very closely with in the development of driving training programs, safety programs and the extremely important issue of the driver work cycles. We believe that is one reason we have such an outstanding safety record today.
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But when a motorcoach driver is in an accident and the motorcoach is the cause of that accident, driver factors are usually involved. Thus, the focus of both the industry and the government should be on enhancing driver performance.
Whether motor carrier safety enforcement remain in the Federal Highway Administration or is transferred to another agency, there should be a rededication to the effective monitoring of driver performance. There are a number of steps that should be taken:
First, OMC should step up its enforcement of hours of service regulations for commercial motor vehicle drivers. Driver fatigue is one of the primary causes of poor driver performance, and the hours of service regulation are intended to prevent driver fatigue.
Second, there is a real need for a comprehensive mandatory national CDL information system in which all driver information is stored and available to employers and law enforcement officials. Because of the gaps in the current system, current motor vehicle operators can accumulate driving infractions without current or future employers knowing about these infractions. This information gap needs to be filled as rapidly as possible.
Third, a similar information problem exists with regard to drug and alcohol testing. The driver in the recent tragic New Orleans accident had previously tested positive for drugs in a pre-employment test and had been denied employment by Greyhound. There is no collection point for information about an applicant who is denied employment because of a positive pre-employment drug test and, thus, no way other than through the applicants for potential employers to know about the positive test. This problem should be fixed quickly.
Turning to the motorcoach itself, the NTSB recently conducted a hearing on bus safety issues. The hearing revealed that in recent years there have been significant changes in technology and bus design that warrant reexamination of the seatbelts on motorcoaches and changes in motorcoach window standards. Greyhound supports such examination and looks forward to working with DOT on both of these issues.
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Furthermore, there are several areas of technology that, when properly tested and adapted for motorcoach use, could enhance safety and performance in the motorcoach industry. They include the use of on-board recorders, electronically recording driver hours operated and bus engine performance, and the use of communications equipment and global positioning systems for vehicle tracking, emergency response and effective transportation of passengers with disabilities.
Finally, with the advent of NAFTA, there have been a flood of commercial passenger vans providing service throughout the United States without any Federal safety regulation. Despite the fact that Congress has twice in the last 4 years enacted legislation intended to make these vans or ''camionetas'' subject to appropriate Federal safety regulation, OMC has not yet proposed such rules.
Greyhound has submitted evidence through OMC indicating there are approximately 100 fatal van accidents per year, killing roughly 250 people, many times more than get killed in bus accidents.
We appreciate the opportunity to present this this afternoon to you. Greyhound is celebrating its 85th anniversary this year after being founded in Hibbing, Minnesota. Thank you.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you for your testimony.
It is appropriate, I think to start off the questioning with Representative Franks, whose leadership on this issue and hard work has helped us bring this panel together. Representative Franks.
Mr. FRANKS. Thank you very much.
At the outset, let me say, Mr. Chairman, 14,000 bus companies transporting 340 million passengers a year. The number of deaths over the last decade has averaged at about six per year, against the backdrop of 40,000 highway deaths a year. This is an extraordinarily safe industry, and every stakeholder is to be commended.
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There have been some delinquent actors, there have been some companies engaging in irresponsible practices and some drivers who candidly have been irresponsible, but, in the aggregate, this is an extraordinarily safe mode of transportation.
But, as it grows in popularity, the challenges become ever greater; and in order to make it successful and to keep those growth numbers on an upward trend line, we need to all be doing our share. And that is why I think all of you appearing today have been extraordinarily helpful to the subcommittee.
Mr. Osterman, let me start with you. I am not going to have time to ask everybody the questions I want, so everybody will get some questions in writing, and I look forward to getting those responses.
Mr. Osterman, let me reference more press accounts, press accounts that suggest that some time this summer or early this fall the NTSB will come out with its strongest recommendation to date as to the mandatory use of seatbelts in buses. Can you verify that that projection is true or not?
Mr. OSTERMAN. The Safety Board report has to be considered by the full Board, which will occur this summer.
We do know that the majority of the occupants that are killed, in the investigations we have conducted, are done so through ejection. A motorcoach has large passenger windows, as opposed to other types of windows. This a primary problem, and we saw you that manifested in New Orleans just 2 weeks ago.
I can't verify what the Board will adopt or recommend in the end, but we will examine not only window retention and design standards, as mentioned earlier, but the issue of seat belt and seat design.
Mr. FRANKS. Seven years ago, the NTSB did an analysis of brake safety, as I understand it; and you concluded that deficient brakes are a greater problem than statistics might otherwise indicate because deficient brakes were not being uncovered by State and local agencies making inspections. What has happened over the last 7 years?
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Mr. OSTERMAN. Your reference to our report is exactly correct, Congressman. We discovered in our investigation and in additional work that we did that the number of out-of-adjustment brakes was far greater than what was being reported by the Office of Motor Carriers. The contribution of brakes to the accidents that we have investigated has been significant.
Over the last several years, the introduction and the mandatory use of automatic or ABS brakes and automatic slack adjusters for pneumatic brake systems has contributed somewhat to an improved condition for these brake systems, although it continues to be dependent on the operator, the driver specifically, to make sure that his brakes are in adjustment.
Additionally, there is some new technology on the horizon with electronic braking which will give much more time to service application for brakes than what you currently experience with pneumatic braking.
Mr. FRANKS. Mr. Kamin, I am stunned to learn that 17 percent of all the roadside inspections of buses take place in our home State of New Jersey. Administrator Wykle indicated that the vast bulk of these roadside stops occur not when you pull a bus over but only upon reaching its destination in an effort not to inconvenience the passengers, which I can, at least in part, understand. But your inspections in New Jersey, are those done only upon a bus reaching a destination or are they pulled over on the side of the road?
Mr. KAMIN. It is a combination. It is primarily done when reaching the destination. But we have set up those programs to work for the drivers as well to rest, and the balance we have as administrators. And I think what you are looking to as well is to not impede business, not to impact what they are trying to do, as well as provide the safety for the passengers.
And to the compliance or the threat of compliance, quite frankly, is what gets the adherence towards it. And Jim Crawford may want to add a comment or to about how we do that with our several locations.
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Mr. FRANKS. I am instructed by the red light. I might ask for one more round.
Mr. PETRI. Sure.
Mr. Blumenauer, any questions?
Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Molofsky, I appreciate your reference in the testimony to the other side of the equation in terms of providing safety for passengers and operators from criminal acts; and I just wondered if you might elaborate briefly from your perspective of the needs that are arising out there and the merits of extending Federal criminal protections, sanctions against people who would take liberties with the safety of operators and passengers.
Mr. MOLOFSKY. Thank you.
One item that is lost in some of this discussion is that the drivers and the mechanics are really the first line of defense, whether anything is federally required or not. It is their bus. They are driving the bus, and they are the ones responsible for the passengers throughout the trips that they run.
And if time permits I have some comments too about how to improve their rights to make sure that the equipment they are getting on and operating is safe; and, if they have any concerns how they can express those without any retaliation from their employers.
We heard from Mr. Mineta on shipper issues and the pressures that can arise there. So, too, as employees check out their equipment, they should have some assurance that they are not going to be hurt as they carry out their job and function.
In Seattle last year, there was a deranged individual who shot and killed one of our members and injured many people in the process. The injuries were minimum and no passenger was killed because of the actions of that bus driver and his defensive driving in preventing a far worse event, although he himself lost his life.
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And more recently, as some of you may know, in Ottawa someone walked into a maintenance garage and shot and killed four of our members last month.
We think that the bill that you have introduced and others are supporting in this committee and in the Senate would establish a unified Federal set of penalties allowing, but not requiring, but allowing the Federal authorities to come in and investigate those assaults and batteries and attacks on both employees operating the buses as well as the passengers; and we think it is an extraordinarily valuable deterrent and a much needed protection for the employees and the passengers they are carrying.
State laws vary across the board. Some States have good laws directed towards bus operators and actions on the bus. Most do not; in contrast to police and fire where, more likely than not, such actions would result in felony prosecutions. What we are seeking to do is unify this to improve safety for the passengers and our members and the other employees in the industry.
Mr. BLUMENAUER. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, at some point I would like to pursue further with you and the committee the notion of what we do with over 300,000 workers who are involved in interState transit right now, ensuring the safety of I think it is 6 million passengers. And, for that matter, there are 30 million schoolchildren who are on buses every day, and I think the consideration of having safety standards similar to what we provide for other categories of transport is something that might be worthy of consideration.
In the time that remains there is just one other reference here. Mr. Molofsky mentioned it. Mr. Haugsland talked about the need for vans right now having sort of a second tier of protection and some concern that we are moving forward. I just wondered if either of you gentlemen wanted to elaborate a little bit about the problems that we are going to see and the need in terms of the expanse of this type of service in the future making it perhaps a greater problem.
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Mr. HAUGSLAND. I can touch on that.
Houston, Texas—I will use as the example, in Houston, Texas, you can go down to certain streets and there are literally dozens and dozens of vans that will take you to virtually any destination you want to go to in the United States. These vans do not operate under the same safety regulations and guidance that we do. They will—in a van that may comfortably accommodate 9 or 10 people they will put 14 or 15 people. One driver will drive extraordinarily long distances to the destination in that van because the driver is probably compensated on the number of individuals that they have in the van.
With NAFTA, this gets to be a bigger and bigger problem. As the border becomes more and more transparent, there are more and more people seeking transportation into the interior, farther into the interior from the border States. And this situation continues to grow and grow, and it is a serious, serious safety issue.
Mr. MOLOFSKY. I would just add one point to that. And that is, in New Jersey and almost every State here, why is it that a 9 or 10 passenger van, whether they cross State lines or not, is totally unregulated? We are not talking taxis, that is a separate issue.
But on passenger vans that are paying passengers driven by a paid operator, they should expect a tested and licensed operator operating equipment that meets certain standards. As we sit here, there are none. You have passengers taking people from Newark—from Gateway Hotel in Newark, New Jersey, to the airport. You have people coming here and going from downtown D.C. to National or across State lines--on unregulated vans.
Our goal and our effort in this committee and with DOT is to ask the question, why should those who were operating—riding on those vehicles, as well as those who are transporting children, Medicare patients to doctor appointments, not be subject to the same safety standards that apply to others?
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You could step back and say to yourselves, the most vulnerable are the least protected on vans. And it makes no sense, as we heard from the statistics earlier, more people are killed in van accidents than in buses. And there may be a good reason for it: They are totally unregulated.
Mr. BLUMENAUER. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. PETRI. Thank you.
I am informed by counsel that not only buses and vans and taxis but there are also limousines and they sometimes travel interstate, too; and we have to try to separate all those out, understand what is involved.
Mr. Franks.
Mr. FRANKS. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
I would like to pose an issue about hours of service. Regardless of what changes are made, I am concerned about enforceability. I am concerned about folks when they get on a bus knowing that that driver has not exceeded the legal limit and how either the union in conjunction with the operating companies can police what level of service that driver has recently rendered. I would just kind of like to open it up.
Mr. Kamin, how do we know—how does any passenger gain sufficient confidence that, despite the fact that the hours of service legislation in Washington, D.C., says they shouldn't work more than 8 or 9 or whatever hours, that they haven't gone beyond that? How do you police this?
Mr. KAMIN. I think the technology is there to apply the smart card technology, just as you do now with a telephone debit card. It is good for five bucks. It is good for 8 hours today. You can control it that way.
Mr. FRANKS. Smart card would operate, what, the bus somehow or what are we talking about?
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Mr. KAMIN. Intercontact to the main frame, just as you—and we are quickly moving to on-line, real-time verification of licensure not only for CDL but also for the normal drivers. We are interconnected with our entire court system; 560 courts are wired to us electronically. So that information can interplay.
And as the several States further cooperate, the CDLIS enforceability——
Mr. FRANKS. All right. Your answer may make sense in terms of a driver not driving that long. But what if that driver has been working a second job unrelated to transportation or has been out partying all night? How do we police this? What do we do?
Mr. HAUGSLAND. Mr. Franks, if I may, that is a concern that we have with some of the proposed changes with hours of service. Today, we feel that the hours of service work for us. We have learned to work with them. They have been in place for many years. In regular out-service you know a driver can drive up to 10 hours. We drive no more than 9 and a half. But you can regulate it, you can manage it, and we do our run cycles with our ATU members to make sure that we stay well within those guidelines.
Our concern is that if hours are service are changed, for example, to 14 hours on, 10 off, 12 and 10, whatever some of the proposals are, it could have in the motorcoach industry a negative impact on driver earnings. Then they will go out and find that second job, and that will be where you start to lose some of the controls.
We feel strongly that in hours of service they need to be separated, the trucking industry and the bus, the motorcoach industry. There are two different issues, and we have learned to live with them. We can't pull over on a roadside and take a 2-hour nap with up to 55 people looking at the back of your head. It just doesn't give the feeling of security.
Mr. FRANKS. Mr. Molofsky, real quick, because I have one more.
Mr. MOLOFSKY. Very quick. I agree with what he said. I think it may however be beyond the scope of this hearing.
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But people don't choose to have second jobs. They are compelled to for a variety of reasons. That should be borne in mind.
We have worked with the scheduling on Greyhound and others, and we share your concern. And, frankly, unless you are going to have some lie detector test, you will not know whether somebody has gotten a job working in the supermarket and then driving a charter at night. You just can't.
Thank you.
Mr. FRANKS. I think this is our greatest challenge to be candid. I know, reading the accounts of one of the New Jersey accidents, for example, passengers indicated that they saw the bus driver nodding off. And whether we retain the current hours of service statute or amend it, in reality our ability to police and enforce that requirement is, to me, an extraordinarily important variable; and it is going to take all of us working together.
Mr. MOLOFSKY. Some of it is the length of charter trips, frankly; and I think that has been addressed in some of the reports presented to the committee.
Mr. KAMIN. We are looking as well, Congressman, to have nighttime mobile power teams, to have power and lights to be able to check and enforce through MCSAP funds, a new approach.
Mr. FRANKS. Mr. Chairman, I have a whole list of more questions. I am going to jettison those questions, put them in writing to the panel, and thank you and the members of the panel for coming forward today.
Mr. PETRI. I want to thank all of you and your organizations for the work that you put in in preparing your testimony. If you get some mail from the committee, it will be from Mr. Franks. Thank you very much.
This committee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:28 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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