Expert Witness Blog
Emission requirements expert Kevin Dukesherer, owner of Progressive Transportation Services and founding member of The Clean Truck Coalition, said in a July 8 Op-Ed in The Daily Breeze that “Those interested in truly helping truck drivers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach should advocate relatively quick and easy improvements to drayage operations at marine terminals, not an act of Congress.”
Congressional Aides last week visited the Port of Los Angeles as part of a U.S. House of Representatives committee review of the Clean Trucks Program. The two-day tour, however, had little to do with their clean air achievements and instead focused on the thousands of independent owner operators hauling freight from the port, Dukesherer said.
The Clean Trucks Program has been extremely successful, reducing emissions from drayage trucks by 80 percent in just two years. Despite these results, the Teamsters union and their allies at the Port of Los Angeles continue to claim that independent owner operators can not sustain the environmental gains achieved under the program. The Teamsters have pushed for a change in federal transportation law that would give local ports the authority to regulate the trucking industry, with the goal of making it easier to organize the workforce.
Read more: truckline.com.