In comments filed with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) this week, the Truckload Carriers Assn.(TCA) joined with the New Jersey Motor Truck Assn.(NJMTA)
in responding to the agency's notice of intent to consider the Negotiated Rulemaking process for the roadability of intermodal chassis.
The associations support the convening of a negotiated rulemaking, and volunteered their representatives to participate in this process. In urging the need for a rulemaking, TCA and NJMTA pointed out five reasons why a "commercial solution" (i.e., a contract or a set of "best practices" agreed to by private parties) would not work. Their reasons are as follows:
1) Not every water, rail, and/or motor carrier is a signatory to the Uniform Intermodal Interchange Agreement (UIIA), which means regardless of the terms that may be eventually agreed upon by the parties in their private deliberations, those terms will not be binding upon any carriers -- regardless of mode -- that are not signatories to the UIIA;
2) The UIIA is essentially a private bi-lateral contract that can be amended at any time;
3) A commercial solution cannot ensure the level of compliance and thereby facilitate the degree of safety of intermodal vehicles on the nations roads and highways that the public deserves, as can a regulation;
4) A commercial solution could not legally relieve motor carriers from their current responsibilities they are being held to under federal and/or state vehicle safety requirements with respect to intermodal vehicles; and
5) In the absence of a federal solution to this problem up to now, the trucking industry has had to seek legislation solutions in individual states (i.e., South Carolina, Illinois, Louisiana and California) to address this problem. While these state laws all have similar purposes -- to ensure the "roadability" of intermodal equipment -- they are not identical in substance or their enforcement.
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