Category: Fuel Tax
No light at the end of the tunnel: ATA’s Graves pessimistic about transportation bill
Posted on 05/10/2012 by Admin
As of Tuesday, Congress has started discussing the new transportation bill in earnest, with the House and Senate coming together in a conference committee.
Survey finds mixed interest in LNG
Posted on 05/08/2012 by Admin
Plenty of people in the trucking industry have been talking about the potential for natural gas in transportation, particularly with rising interest in liquefied natural gas, but just as many are still skeptical it seems.
New Jersey legislators call for delay on new tolls
Posted on 05/04/2012 by Admin
The trucking industry is starting to see tolls cropping up all over the country, or steadily climbing on the roads and bridges where they’ve already been introduced.
California gets go ahead for fuel standards, but opposition remains
Posted on 04/30/2012 by Admin
Pulling up to the pump has been stressful enough in recent weeks with diesel prices hanging around record highs, but the courts have added a little more uncertainty for drivers in California.
Public pressure needed for transportation bill
Posted on 04/30/2012 by Admin
As the House and Senate get ready for the upcoming conference committee, one group of experts is looking more to the American public than Congress to get some movement on the new transportation bill.
Major carriers making switch to natural gas
Posted on 04/23/2012 by Admin
With diesel prices still high, major food distributor Frito-Lay has announced plans to add dozens of new natural gas-powered trucks.
ATA gets behind bill to up fuel tax
Posted on 04/17/2012 by Admin
Congress doesn’t look likely to get anywhere with the transportation bill anytime soon, but some figures in the trucking industry have gotten behind a somewhat surprising approach to the funding squeeze for the country’s roadways.
Last Wednesday, April 4, two U.S. representatives from opposite sides of the aisle - not to mention opposite sides of the country - came together to propose a bill that would help fund transportation projects by increasing the diesel fuel tax. In exchange, Jim Gerlach, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, suggested getting rid of the 12 percent federal excise tax on large trucks entirely.
Industry support for proposal
Plenty of drivers probably aren’t too keen on the idea of even higher diesel prices when they’re already hovering around all-time highs across most of the country. But the bill got some surprising support from the American Trucking Associations, which saw the bill as a fair trade off for the industry.
“The proposal by Congressmen Gerlach and Blumenauer would not only reinforce the ailing Highway Trust Fund, but would provide a boost to U.S. manufacturing and speed adoption of environmentally friendly technologies,” Bill Graves, president and CEO of the ATA, said in a statement. “It is exactly the kind of pro-growth, deficit-trimming legislation that lawmakers should be looking at as they seek to address our nation’s economic woes.”
Graves explained that increasing the fuel tax would help provide more consistent funding, rather than relying on more variable truck sales.
Boosting truck sales
Graves noted that the bill could cut the average cost of a new truck by around $15,000. Between the new emissions requirements imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection, which has helped create a strong market for used trucks, and the slowly recovering economy, many businesses had been wary of investing in new trucks recently.
Logistics Management reports that a policy implemented as part of the stimulus bill helped reverse this trend by offering 100 percent bonus depreciation on capital spending. This helped spur a major boost in truck sales, but the policy ended at the start of the year along with many of the stimulus programs.
The Trucker reports that class 8 sales had their second-best month in the past five years in March, reaching more than 17,000 trucks. But this still leaves sales 29 percent below their peak back in 2006, and the federal government is still trying to encourage adoption of a variety of new technologies, from emissions controls to the more controversial electronic on-board recorders. In the absence of the depreciation program, ending the excise tax would help with that goal.
Opposition strong with fuel costs high
Despite the ATA’s support, however, Logistics Management suggests that the bill is not terribly likely to make it through Congress in an election year.
Oil prices have started to come down a bit as passions cooled a bit around Iran, which plans to open new talks about its nuclear program, and a few questions about the global economy have cropped up. But at the same time, politicians around the country have made a strong show of trying to lower fuel prices.
California State Senator Bob Dutton recently introduced a new bill that would cap the state fuel tax, keeping costs from going up any more once gas prices hit $4 per gallon. Meanwhile, The San Francisco Chronicle reports the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission has abandoned a proposal to add a new fuel tax after polls unsurprisingly found people opposed to the idea.
New Brunswick attaches new fees to IFTA
Posted on 04/12/2012 by Admin
While many parts of the U.S. are looking to lower the fuel tax to help spare drivers from high prices, one province in Canada has taken nearly the opposite approach.
Companies looking at gas-to-diesel to ease fuel prices
Posted on 04/05/2012 by Admin
Plenty of carriers have started to weigh the benefits of switching their fleet over to compressed natural gas, particularly with diesel prices still hanging around their record high and discussions in Washington regarding changes to the fuel tax.
Congress only manages three-month extension for transportation bill
Posted on 04/04/2012 by Admin
While it may not be the solution that anyone was looking for, Congress last Friday passed a three-month extension of the crucial transportation bill.
