������ý

Members of a key House panel began hearing proposals Tuesday from members of Congress about ways to fund a six-year highway reauthorization bill without exceeding Highway Trust Fund revenues that are mostly derived from federal gas and diesel taxes.

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, told a group of shippers attending a Washington legislative policy forum Tuesday that he plans to get a long-term transportation reauthorization bill on the House floor sometime in May.

American Trucking Associations is “poised” to file a lawsuit against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration if the agency adopts a proposed rule that would cut driver time to 10 hours a day, ATA Chairman Barbara Windsor said.

A bipartisan group of Senators has introduced a bill that would create a national infrastructure bank to issue loans and loan guarantees for transportation and other infrastructure projects of regional and national significance.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Transportation to study and establish a maximum number of hours that drivers may be detained at loading docks without being compensated.

A shipper group has expressed “profound disappointment” over a so-called fact-finding investigation by the Federal Maritime Commission into numerous U.S. importer and exporter complaints about “perceived malpractices” by ocean carriers that resulted in supply-chain service disruptions and rate and surcharge increases in late 2009 and 2010.

The president of the National Tank Truck Carriers has asked the National Transportation Safety Board to withdraw and reopen its investigation into a fatal 1997 tank truck accident that he said has become the “poster child” of the agency’s longtime campaign to require purge retrofits for cargo tank wetlines.

California environmental regulators have pledged to cut truckers some slack early next year while enforcing the state’s amended transport refrigeration unit rule that will require all refrigerated trucks and trailers be equipped with low emission TRU retrofits or engines on their 2003 trucks and trailers by Dec. 31.

Although private sector employment increased by 159,000 overall during the month of October, for-hire trucking employment only grew by 300, according to the Labor Department.