New Global Push Back Against Electric Bus Mandate – NOT WORKING!

By Lauren Fix The federal government has a mandate that requires new school buses purchased to be zero emission by 2027 and all school buses in operation to be electric by 2035. One electric school bus costs upwards of 400,000 dollars, and up to 30,000 dollars more per bus for the needed infrastructure. Not to […]

Pennsylvania Goes Tollistic

Editor’s Note: After we posted this Tolling in America Blog, Car and Driver posted an article with a headline question: Can You Name the World’s Most Expensive Toll Road? and guess what? It is the great state of Pennsylvania!    Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation decided this month to place tolls on nine bridges located on […]

Are State DOT Rockfall Projects Money Pits?: NMA E-Newsletter #630

Have you ever wondered how much it costs to mitigate rockfalls on state highways and interstates? The bigger question, perhaps, is the expense worth it? Late last year, NorthJersey.com posted an interesting article about rockfall project expenses in the state. Even though they did not come out and say it, it seems some rockfall projects […]

E-ZPass is Anything But: NMA E-Newsletter #528

Abuses by tolling authorities continue to mount. The lawsuit filed last year in U.S. District Court by Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and the NMA against the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission for collecting inflated tolls to pay for projects unrelated to the operation and maintenance of the Turnpike continues under the purview of a federal judge. She […]

Bleeding revenue in Pennsylvania

A police lobbyist in Pennsylvania complained recently, “All the work we’d done was eviscerated.” The work he did was gathering support for a bill allowing local police to use radar. The evisceration was an amendment requiring radar to be used for safety rather than revenue. Bills to let local departments use radar are a perennial […]

Road User Fees May Be Necessary (But Reasonable is a Different Matter): NMA E-Newsletter #483

A basic principle held by the National Motorists Association is, “Reasonable highway user fees [are] for maintaining and improving highways, not for financing non-highway projects.” (See the other main NMA tenets here.) The recent class action lawsuit the NMA filed with truckers’ association OOIDA against the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission for many years of excessive tolling […]

Vehicle Emissions Standards—Now What?

The long awaited but not too surprising ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this week on turning back the Obama era CAFÉ Standards seems to have confused the issue even more. At issue: by 2025, automakers who want to sell new cars to American consumers must boost a corporate average fuel economy (CAFÉ) to […]

California says Automakers should not be liable for Autonomous Vehicle Accidents

The NMA Foundation presents The Car of the Future weekly feature: Last week, California regulators embraced a General Motors recommendation that automakers should not be liable for accidents and other trouble autonomous vehicle (AV) owners may face. Basically, the state of California is saying that if you don’t maintain your car to manufacturer specs then you are out […]

Today’s “dumb criminal” award winners

A little advice to people thinking of taking the equipment Pennsylvania police use to measure speed: where there’s a speed trap, there are police. Pennsylvania’s speed trap law requires township police to place equipment by the roadside rather than use radar. Sometimes one of those gadgets is left apparently unattended. But — if you want […]

The rules of the game

A long time ago, hopefully beyond the statute of limitations, I was at a Fourth of July party the BATF would have gone wild for. Drunk people with illegal fireworks and illegal cigars. Sober, I nearly got incinerated by a bonfire. Seems like a miracle nobody got hurt. The only harm was done by traffic […]