Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/324702
Voices channel 19 10 | Overdrive | June 2014 Visit Senior Editor Todd Dills' ChannEl 19 blog at overdriveonline.com/channel19 Write him at tdills@randallreilly.com. The Obama administra- tion's draft highway bill included language allow- ing a new level of permis- siveness for states looking to toll existing interstate highways to fund ongoing maintenance. As a sort of not-so-fair warning for that point, DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx showed openness to the idea in an interview posted to the StreetsBlog the week prior to the bill's release: We would never tell a state or a local project sponsor to toll, but that optionality is increasingly becoming something that states are interested in, and we'll consider finding ways to help when that's an option that states want to consider. Representatives from the Alliance for Toll-Free Interstates worried the toll industry would jump all over the comments to cast them as showing favor for the tolling option. They also pointed out that the secretary also had noted tolling is far from a "com- plete solution" to highway funding. The alliance wrote me the morning of April 29, and by that afternoon the administra- tion had put forward this description of applicable parts of Section 1405 of its draft highway bill: "This section also would eliminate the prohibition on tolling existing free Interstate highways … for purposes of reconstruc- tion. ... This section would allow any State or public agency to impose variable tolls on existing highways, bridges, or tunnels for purposes of congestion management." I don't know about you, but that sounds like favor for the option to me. Find more on the subject in the April 29 post to the Chan- nel 19 blog. DOT boss changes tune on tolls Last month I wrote about Kenneth Dice, a part-time semi-retired hauler out of West Virginia who erroneous- ly was denied medical certification by a West Virginia examiner for the simple fact that he was being treated for sleep apnea. Dice later wrote me to express further frustration over getting different answers from doctors and federal, state and local authorities to his queries about the legalities involved. "I have called the physician of a local urgent-care facility and asked his views on my issue. He would not say, only referred me to the DOT officials I've already talked to. So it's like a dog chasing his tail and getting nowhere. After much consideration and the understanding that I'm fighting a losing battle for just one year of certification, I have decided to just let my CDL be dropped and forget the whole deal. I have neither the time nor energy to fight those who have no idea what these regula- tions are or how to implement them. Since my issue with this doctor, I have talked with many of my truck driver buddies. They too cannot understand this, because of the fact of people they know that have the same condition and are lots younger than me and are still certified and driving." Readers commenting on our Face- book page similarly were bewildered. "I've had sleep apnea for six years and just was forced to get retested, buy a new [CPAP] machine and spend a month off of work to get my new medical card," wrote Greg Allen. "I paid out over $3,000, plus lost a month's pay, because my old CPAP machine didn't have a memo- ry card – I couldn't prove I use it." More and more, states and some carriers seem to be requiring doctors to audit the treatment of the con- dition. Some older machines don't have the memory card, which makes doing so next to impossible. Read more about the issue in the April 8 and 10 posts on the blog. Apnea dispute claims a CDL Access all of Overdrive's past coverage of sleep apnea, including the February 2012 cover story, and attempts to regulate drivers with the condi- tion via OverdriveOnline.com/tag/sleep-apnea. Voices_0614.indd 10 6/3/14 11:06 AM