TTD in the news

As Reported by Alexander Bolton for The Hill The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and a group of other prominent business groups on Thursday endorsed a $1.2 trillion, eight-year bipartisan infrastructure framework endorsed by President Biden and a group of Senate moderates. The joint endorsement by business and labor groups that are often opponents […]

As Reported by Aaron Gordon for Vice The Government Accountability Office will launch an investigation into precision scheduled railroading, a business philosophy embraced by North American freight rail companies that a Motherboard investigation revealed has radically slashed safety measures in the name of profit. The study was requested in May by the chairs of the […]

As Reported by Chris Teale for Smart Cities Dive Advancing legislation in Congress gives transportation labor leaders hope for creating a national training center for transit workers that could help them prepare for using new technologies and bringing future generations into the sector. The Investing in a New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation […]

Greg Regan took the helm of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department in the worst of circumstances but with the best possible preparation.

The circumstances: In the midst of a global pandemic that threatened his members’ jobs and lives, Regan’s boss and mentor, Larry Willis, died tragically in November after succumbing to injuries from a bike crash.

The preparation: Willis’s leadership and trust, which gave Regan and the team Willis had carefully put together the confidence to step up when the moment demanded it.

Amid skyrocketing road deaths in the United States, members of Congress emphasized at a hearing Tuesday the role autonomous vehicles (AVs) can play in improving safety but called for other technology to be implemented in the short term.

Lawmakers remain determined to encourage faster AV development and deployment and to legislate on the nascent technology. But with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) available to help reduce serious crashes, automakers must offer that technology as standard, some said.

“Heavy-duty truck driving is already a highly surveilled occupation; can you speak to the impact this has on workers, and ways that Congress can create policies that can balance a worker’s right to privacy with the fact that automated vehicle [AV] technology needs large quantities of image data to work effectively?” Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., asked witnesses at the hearing before the Consumer Protection subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO, responded that the aviation industry should serve as a guide “in how they balance worker privacy with the necessary safety constraints that are inherent in some of the monitoring equipment in aircraft. We have struck that balance before so we can certainly do it here.”

Lawmakers are expected to make headway on President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion dollar infrastructure proposal this week, as Arkansas’ aging infrastructure made headlines with the discovery of a large crack in the Interstate 40 Hernando de Soto Bridge across the Mississippi River that led to its indefinite closure last week.

Ed Mortimer, vice president of transportation and infrastructure for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said shipping and supply-chain disruptions will likely become more common if significant spending isn’t directed toward major transportation improvements.

A senior American labor union leader will tell U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday that the government should require human operators in all self-driving passenger services to take over in the event of an emergency.

Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department for the AFL-CIO, will tell a U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce subcommittee that autonomous vehicles place “millions of jobs at risk” and any legislation to speed deployment of self-driving cars should not apply to commercial trucks weighing 10,000 pounds or more, according to his written testimony released by the panel on Monday.

Even as railroads are operating longer and longer freight trains that sometimes stretch for miles, the companies have drastically reduced staffing levels, prompting unions to warn that moves meant to increase profits could endanger safety and even result in disasters.

More than 22% of the jobs at railroads Union Pacific, CSX and Norfolk Southern have been eliminated since 2017, when CSX implemented a cost-cutting system called Precision Scheduled Railroading that most other U.S. railroads later copied. BNSF, the largest U.S. railroad and the only one that hasn’t expressly adopted that model, has still made staff cuts to improve efficiency and remain competitive.

Podcast Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller for Bloomberg. Ed Mortimer, Vice President of Transportation and Infrastructure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Greg Regan, President of the Transportation Trades Department for AFL-CIO, discuss the latest on infrastructure.