Mexican truck pilot program failing due to lack of interest [View all]

[jmowreader]

I picked up the latest copy of The Trucker (www.thetrucker.com), a newspaper for commercial drivers. They've been following the Mexican truck pilot program pretty closely.

Understand that not just any Mexican company can get accepted to the program. There is an investigation and a pre-authority safety audit to ensure Americans will be safe around Mexican trucks. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration wanted 46 carriers to participate in the program and to do 4100 truck inspections. So far, there have been seven carriers approved with a total of nine trucks and eleven drivers. They have made a total of 146 crossings and their trucks have been inspected 135 times. And so far, of all these inspections there has been one problem found: a burned-out clearance light on a trailer.

Four carriers have been doing most of the carriage:

Baja Express has one straight truck and one driver, and has made five crossings into border states and 30 into the "commercial zone"--five miles from the point of entry.

Transportes del Valle runs one truck and one driver, and stays within the border states.

Moises Alvarez Perez has one truck and one driver, and stays in the border states

Transportes Olympic has one truck driven by a two-man team, and runs in the Southeast.

For a variety of reasons Mexican truckers are reticent to participate in this program, key among them that Mexico subsidizes diesel and there's a significant risk of getting to your destination then finding you have to go back to Mexico empty. A Mexican driver can only take freight from Mexico to a US terminal, and from a US terminal back to Mexico.

Mexican truckers have long run in the commercial zone. The government notwithstanding, I think this situation will continue because it works well.