TORONTO, (June 30, 2005) There’s no summer lull for the Canadian Trucking Alliance, which has put lobbying efforts in high gear these last couple weeks.

Among several other projects and issues the trucking group is taking on, vice-president Stephen Laskowski recently took part in a national Environmental Protection Agency meeting in Chicago on developing a National Idling Guideline.

Although EPA has no legal authority to enforce such a guideline, the active participation of all key stakeholders — including owner-operator and trucking associations, individual trucking companies, drivers, state and municipal governments and environmental groups — will at least provide these guidelines with the high profile that may bring about a broad based consensus on state idling laws.

Many questions were raised, including: When should a vehicle be allowed to idle? Should sleeper cabs be provided with an exemption? Who should receive idling fines — carrier, driver or shipper? Should there be temperature limits, both warm and cold, to allow for 24 idling? And the need for weight exemptions and tax incentives for add on heating and cooling devices.

CTA provided meeting participants with information compiled from Alliance members who participated in a recent national survey on the matter. CTA will be providing more comments on this matter when the EPA post recommended idling enforcement guidelines in the Federal Register this fall.

In a separate issue, Laskowski and OTA’s Geoff Wood recently presented a strategy to track truck border transit times to the working group established by U.S. Homeland Security and Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Ann McLellan to increase commercial traffic throughout into Michigan by 25 percent.

CTA’s proposal to the working group was based on a pilot project already in use at the Peace Bridge connecting Fort Erie and Buffalo, where real time information is collected from trucks using GPS and satellite technology. The Peace Bridge Pilot is the first of its kind along the Northern Border to present real time information on border transit times for commercial vehicles. The pilot, fully supported by Transport Canada’s Ontario Region builds on work started in 2003.

The ultimate goal of this project is to give the trucking industry the ability to make routing decisions based on real time data to add flexibility in routing decisions to Blue Water or Ambassador.