Vol. 18 No. 11  December 1988/January 1989 Safety - Priority #1   N.B. Ideal Place to Study Trucks Question Frederiction New Brunswick - New Brunswick is an "ideal laboratory" for governments and transportation carriers to find better ways of measuring highway costs and their impact on rail-truck competition, CP Rail told the provincial government here.   Appearing before a special New Brunswick legislature committee, Canadian Atlantic Railway General Manager F.J. Green said inadequate highway cost recovery policies have a serious effect on both highway systems and freight competition.   IMPACT   Underpayment for commercial use of the highway "skews the economic choice available to shippers, because the trucker's revenue requirement - and the rates required to meet it - will be lower", Mr. Green said.   "In New Brunswick, the most obvious effect on the province is an artificial increase in demand for truck service and higher truck traffic levels than would otherwise occur on its main highways - the Trans-Canada in particular".   For the railway, which must recoup its entire roadway construction and maintenance costs from revenues, the effect is lower traffic levels and less revenue available "to sustain a viable, competitive, and self-regenerating rail system", he said.   ADVANTAGE   Mr. Green said it was important for governments to understand that the more shippers are attracted to trucking, when rail may really be more efficient, the more money governments will need to spend in providing freight transport facilities through highway construction and maintenance.   But, he added, only some of the freight on the highway is getting an artificial cost advantage.   "Trucks have distinct service advantages for many kinds of traffic and, for certain goods and movements, especially short hauls, trucks also have a cost advantage".   The distortion is most apparent, he said, in markets where trucks can undercut the railway on price, although the railway's economies of scale and distance should make it able to compete - but it cannot. Typically, these truck movements are large, heavy loads, on medium to long hauls.   STUDIES   "This situation suggests what a number of U.S. studies confirm:  that long-haul, heavy movements - where trucks are making the deepest inroads into rail traffic - are also the ones bearing the lowest proportion of their highway cost responsibility", he said.   New Brunswick is a logical place to launch a comprehensive study of the true cost of heavy vehicles "using up" the highway system, he added.   "Its size, its role as a through route, the extensive trucking use of the highway system, and the nature of competition between the major rail and truck corridors make it an ideal test laboratory".   Creation of the CAR (Canadian Atlantic Railway) business unit was in much the same spirit, he said - "to be a test-bed for new ideas to assist us in reaching a better definition of the railway's proper role in the highly modal-competitive Atlantic Canada transport market".   CP Rail said any study the government does should include taking a critical look at how highways are paid for and whether fuel tax systems are the best way to allocate highway cost responsibility between commercial users and the general public.   The railway's brief included a summary on weight distance taxes which have been adopted in some U.S. states to spread highway costs more fairly between light and heavy vehicles.   The railway said the government had taken an important step by proposing a different tax rate for highway diesel fuel to recognize the higher demands of truck traffic on the road system - but fuel taxes alone probably won't do the job.   It said that most studies show that the load on the highway is more a result of "weight and distance travelled than of the size of engine under the hood".   This CP Rail News article is copyright 1989 by the Canadian Pacific Railway and is reprinted here with their permission. All photographs, logos, and trademarks are the property of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.