Thread: Mexican truck program about to end

Mexican truck program about to end

By Cindy Skrzycki

BLOOMBERG NEWS
2:00 a.m. March 4, 2009

The vision of Mexican 18-wheelers trucking goods across the United States has, well, run out of gas. At least some safety advocates hope so.

The Senate is close to passing a catch-all government spending bill that would seal the U.S. border to Mexican long-haul trucks, ending a 15-year project whose goal was to let U.S. and Mexican trucks carry products from Albany to Acapulco.

Barring a last-minute reprieve, the cross-border trucking project will be killed by a provision entombed in the $410 billion legislation that the Senate began debating this week. The project, inspired by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, was intended to ease the flow of the $230 billion in U.S.-Mexico trade carried by trucks, while deepening the relationship between the two neighbors.

Instead of orderly trade, the trucking pilot program the Bush administration has run for the last two years has caused rancor within the domestic trucking industry, shouting matches between federal regulators and congressional overseers and bad feelings about the failed promise of NAFTA.

The objections have been mostly about safety and economics. Jacqueline Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, said the project ignored “serious safety deficienciesâ€

I'll believe it when it happens and then only maybe.

[quote]“For us, it was bringing a more fluid movement of goods over the border,â€

This is good and I hope it will be finally forgotten about .......Mexican trucking in this country would be hazardous as well as more American jobs disappearing to cheap laborers!