I would like to welcome our many colleagues, Federal Highway Administrator, Rodney Slater; Associate Administrator, George Reagle, and representatives of the various other interest groups who will be testifying today.

I know your appearance before the subcommittee will provide valuable information to us as we continue to try to improve motor carrier safety around our Nation.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. RAHALL. The Chair recognizes the distinguished Chairman of our full committee, the gentleman from California, Mr. Mineta.

The CHAIR. Thank you very much, Chairman Rahall. Let me first of all thank both you and Mr. Petri, as well as the other Members of the Surface Transportation Subcommittee for holding this very important hearing today. The motor carrier safety laws and regulations that govern transportation on our Nation's highways are paramount to the health and safety of our people.

I welcome our colleagues who will be testifying today regarding bills that they have introduced relating to motor carrier safety and the size and weight issue, which has once again reached a point of considerable concern and controversy. I look forward to hearing the testimony from administration officials regarding our safety laws and regulations as well as their comments on the need for additional changes regarding the size and weight issue.

In that regard, it is a pleasure to welcome Administrator Slater and Associate Administrator Reagle in today's hearing. Knowing how important safety is to not only those of us who write the laws and implement them but to those of you in the transportation industry, I look forward to listening to the testimony of each of today's witnesses who represent a broad range of the surface transportation industry and appreciate their appearance and their input into the legislative process.

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 public interest.

Mr. Rahall and Mr. Petri, thank you very much for holding these hearings.

Mr. RAHALL. Thank you, Chairman Mineta.

Do other Members of the subcommittee wish to make opening statements?

Mr. Quinn.

Mr. QUINN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to recognize you and Mr. Petri for allowing me to join the subcommittee today. While not a Member of this subcommittee, I am of course a member of the full committee. I appreciate the opportunity to be hearing testimony on issues that are important not only to the Nation but to my district in Buffalo, New York, and western New York State.

Last year, the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing at my request on truck cargo securement regulations, and enforcement. Specifically, in western New York, we had a serious problem in shifting cargo which involved some 20-ton steel coils. In one instance, these coils crushed three cars and killed four people.

This particular issue of cargo securement, like other issues today and our discussion this morning about truck size and weight, are important ones, and certainly ones that relate to public safety. It is important that we hold these hearings today and I appreciate the opportunity to join them.

I also want to welcome and to thank the Federal Highway Administrator Rodney Slater for his appearance today and also for his hard work on the issue that is of particular interest to me, the steel coils and cargo securement, as well as for his visit to Buffalo, New York, earlier this year.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for moving ahead on this and other issues and I appreciate the opportunity to participate.

Thank you.

Mr. RAHALL. If no other Members of the subcommittee have opening statements, we will move on with our list of witnesses.

As mentioned in my opening statement, our first witness is a dear friend and colleague of ours. He is the distinguished Chairman of our Subcommittee on Aviation, and has been a leader in the effort to make motor carrier safety indeed safer for our Nation. He worked with us very closely in the development of the National Highway System legislation, and it was during drafting of that legislation and debate on that legislation that we discussed in earnest these hearings upon which we are embarking today.

Jim, we welcome your leadership and especially your personal appearance today.

TESTIMONY OF HON. JAMES L. OBERSTAR, A
REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM MINNESOTA

Mr. OBERSTAR. I thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for making these hearings possible and taking a very close, and I hope, careful, thorough, critical, analytical look at the motor carrier safety issues, particularly the one that I wish to address this morning, not only in and of itself but in the total context of our highway program.

Let me state for the record, make it clear, that I come here as an advocate for trucking. If you use it, eat it, wear it, sit on it, it probably came here by a truck.

I have long been a supporter of the trucking industry in this country, but of responsible trucking. And I don't want this legislation that I have introduced and that I proposed in the course of the National Highway System markup to be mischaracterized, as it has been, and some of the things that I have seen in correspondence and in other forms have caused me to stop and wonder if they are talking about the same bill I am talking about, and they certainly aren't.

The critics have very, very seriously misrepresented, to put it mildly, the legislation I introduced. It is good to have an opportunity to clear the air and make it evident what is proposed in my legislation. And I say that I came to the conclusion that this legislation is needed as we drew near to the eve of moving the National Highway System bill through our committee.

Earlier in the year, when it appeared that the other body, as we affectionately call our friends across the way, was not going to act upon highway legislation, I thought, well, this could wait. But then

you and Chairman Mineta, Mr. Shuster got the signal that the Senate might move if we did, so our bill started moving and I thought that would be the time to offer this language.

I deferred offering the amendment on your commitment to hold these hearings, and with the prospect of another vehicle by which to advance the cause of highway safety. I spent several years as Chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee looking at highway safety, bridge safety, and the trucking industry. And much of my 30 years in this body, first as Administrative Assistant to my predecessor John Blatnik, administrator of this committee staff, and now as a Member, following that crucial link in our national economic structure, the Federal Aid Highway Program, and I have seen trucks grow every time we have expanded, improved, added to our national portfolio of highways and bridges. Trucks over the years have gotten bigger and cars have gotten smaller. If there is anything I hear again and again from people about the highway system, apart from fix our road, expand our road, improve our bridge, it is, can you do anything about keeping trucks from getting bigger? If you don't think that is necessary, try driving cross country, as I did last summer, in a Ford Escort loaded with college stuff for my two daughters on the way to Milwaukee and Marquette University and across Wisconsin on to Minnesota and St. Thomas University, and being "whooshed" from one side of my lane to the other as trucks zipped by; and try to pass one of those double bottoms in a Ford Escort. You think you are never going to get there.

I just don't want them getting bigger. This legislation would establish a freeze on existing weight standards and truck lengths, and currently on the Interstate most States have 53 feet. There are some States that permit longer trucks, 10 that have 57 feet, and one that allows 60 feet. These truck-trailer rigs could continue to be used.

Second, the bill would restore authority to the Department of Transportation to review State claims of grandfathered rights to operate trucks heavier than the Federal standard. That language is known as the Symms amendment.

It came, Mr. Chairman, as you may well recall, out of nowhere. There were no hearings on it in the Senate, it was simply offered by Senator Symms and accepted in their Senate committee markup to what became the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982.

We were confronted with it, and it just says, States: You look at your own regulations and decide whether you, in your program, have, in fact, grandfathered rights to operate trucks longer or heavier than the Federal standards.

But DOT ought to make that decision. These are Federal-assisted highways, they are operated in the name of all people. Funds from all over America come to build those highways, the public nationwide has an interest in them, they are not operated just for one or another State.

Third, would require the Department of Transportation to define what a "nondivisible load" is. I understand something about nondivisible loads.

You can't see this too well, but that is a 220-ton mining truck moving down the highway. It is going from Minnesota to the West

Coast, actually to Vancouver, Washington. It is so big it needs two flat-bed trucks to haul it. That is a nondivisible load.

That is fine. Those two trucks are specifically certificated, the load distribution has been carefully analyzed, they move at a particular speed, and they are carefully calibrated so that one truck is not lower than the other and doesn't bend the load. That is clearly a nondivisible load.

But there are lots of loads hauled in excess of 80,000 pounds that clearly are divisible and could move in more than one truck, not side by side, in sequence. Those are the kinds of loads that I think need to be very carefully defined.

I feel that at this point, at the very outset of our designating a post-interstate highway system, the National Highway System, is the time we need to think about the infrastructure on which these trucks are going to be pounding. One truck of that size does as much damage to road surface as 9,000 cars traveling over the same road surface.

Think about the effect on our bridges. There are 576,000 bridges in the United States, 176,000 of them, according to the hearings that our Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee conducted several years ago, were declared deficient, structurally deficient. They carried 85 percent of the bridge traffic of this country.

Those bridges need to be replaced. If you think you can run heavier than 80,000-pound loads over those bridges, you have got another think coming. Forty percent of the bridge decking of this country is approaching 40 years of age and older.

The reason? 1956 is when we authorized the Highway Trust Fund; that is when the big money started flowing to build major bridges. Those bridges now are in need of major redecking.

What we need is more than $2 billion a year to reconstruct those bridges. But why should we permit heavier trucks than are now operating on the highway system to operate in the future and accelerate the rate of deterioration of that bridge decking and of our highway system?

I said earlier that I have watched trucks grow and cars get smaller. In 1946, the length on trailers was 36 feet; in 1960, it went to 40 feet; to 45 feet in 1974; to 48 feet in 1984; to 53 feet in 1990.

To put this in a little perspective, in 1946 the average Buick was 18 feet long. Today, our Ford Escort is just about 152 feet. That is a pretty small size to compare to one of those double or triple trailer behemoths roaring down the highway.

If you have ever followed one of those trucks as they are trying to make a turn, now it says "Caution, wide turns, stay back." They have signs on the back end. If you don't happen to be paying too close attention, you could get really caught. And I have seen trucks get stuck trying to make a turn. And I think that we have to consider the pounding that the highway system takes when you put vehicles of that size-I have a few others in here to show, big pieces of equipment, oftentimes double trucks going over.

Now, one or two of those is fine under conditions where they have enough axle weight and it is distributed properly, but if we continue to allow trucks to grow without some restraint, then I fear for the future. We are just going to be spending more and more

money and seeing more and more demands from the States and local governments for rebuilding of our roadway that is going to deteriorate seriously. In addition to which the safety problem will continue to grow.

I am just saying enough is enough. Don't allow the trucking sizes and weights to get bigger than they are. They are big enough.

I know the argument has been advanced that, well, if you don't let them get bigger, then we will have more trucks on the roadway. There are going to be more trucks anyway. There isn't enough capacity in this country in the railroad system to haul all the goods that we need to move. We are going to have more trucks.

I just don't want to have more trucks that are bigger. I don't want to see safety problems deteriorate. I don't want to see our surfaces deteriorate.

We have got billions of dollars invested in our highway system, $100 billion in the interstate alone. We have a $3 trillion portfolio of public works facilities in which rolling stock moves. We have the opportunity here now at this point in the post-interstate era to take an important step to protect it by passing this legislation. I urge the committee to move on it.

I will be glad to respond to any questions, Mr. Chairman. [Mr. Oberstar's prepared statement follows:]