Trucking organizations like the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association applauded the U.S. Department of Transportation’s move to withdraw a 2022 proposal requiring speed limiters on commercial motor vehicles.
The DOT’s move comes after the agency received more than 15,000 public comments, mostly from professional truck drivers, about safety concerns and policy concerns surrounding mandating top speeds below posted highway limits. In a notice, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said they based their decision to withdraw their proposal on “significant policy and safety concerns and continued data gaps that create considerable uncertainty about the estimated costs, benefits and other impacts of the proposed rule.”
“The old ways of doing things in Washington are over,” Lewie Pugh, executive vice president of OOIDA said. “After nearly 20 years, big trucking’s proposed speed limiter mandate is dead. This failed proposal represented the worst of Washington and the worst of trucking: big corporations trying to use big government to undercut small businesses and increase corporate profits. Not only would this proposal have harmed working class Americans – small business truckers in our communities – it would have made our highways less safe for all motorists.”
The proposal would have required trucks over 26,000 pounds to cap their speeds at 60 miles per hour, even on roads where the speed limit was as high as 80 or 85 miles per hours. Drivers, safety advocates and others warned that the proposed rule would create dangerous speed differentials, increase road-rage incidents and impair truck drivers’ ability to avoid collisions by speeding up quickly.
“Studies and research have already proven what we were all taught long ago in driver’s ed classes—that traffic is safest when vehicles all travel at the same relative speed,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said. “Limiting trucks to speeds below the flow of traffic increases interactions between vehicles, which can lead to more crashes.”
While the withdrawal would prohibit the speed limiter rule from moving forward during President Donald Trump’s term, OOIDA is pushing Congress to enact legislation that would permanently bar FMCSA from issuing a speed-limiter mandate.