Federal officials are making permanent a controversial three-year pilot program that allows Mexican truckers to haul goods inside the U.S. beyond the border zone. FMCSA will soon start accepting applications from Mexican truckers who didn’t participate in the pilot but want the authority to operate beyond the U.S.-Mexico border region.
The move is likely to be met with significant backlash from groups representing independent truckers and labor interests, who teamed up in 2011 to unsuccessfully sue DOT in an attempt to scuttle the program.
Critics maintain that FMCSA didn’t have enough participants to determine if it would be safe to make the program permanent, an assessment the DOT’s Inspector General agreed with.
FMCSA maintains the program is safe, saying the agency’s decision also took into account safety data from the nearly 1,000 Mexico carriers already allowed to operate beyond the U.S. border zone. A FMCSA analysis determined that those carriers and the 15 pilot participants operated just as safely as U.S. and Canadian carriers over the life of the program.
