Trial Magazine

Congress is continuing its work on a very broad transportation agenda. Congressional committees charged with transportation issues have been busily moving forward on a variety of transportation goals.

Driverless cars. In February, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on challenges related to autonomous vehicles. Driverless car technology shifts liability from the driver to the manufacturer. AAJ’s senior state affairs counsel, Daniel Hinkle, testified on the importance of discovery in driverless car products liability cases. He also emphasized the right to proceed to trial rather than be forced into arbitration, as well as the importance of preserving state law remedies. House and Senate committees are working on bipartisan bicameral legislation on driverless cars, and AAJ is fighting to ensure that any regulation of this new technology does not preempt state statutory and common law remedies.

Trucks. The House and Senate are continuing their work on truck safety issues. The Senate Subcommittee on Transportation and Safety held a hearing in February on stakeholders’ perspectives on trucking issues. Witnesses discussed proposals that would seriously undermine the safety of the traveling public. Dawn King, whose father was killed by a negligent truck driver who fell asleep at the wheel after driving all night, testified on behalf of the Truck Safety Coalition, a truck crash victim advocacy group.

King provided a human perspective in contrast to the industry witnesses. Her testimony outlined the problems with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) proposal to increase the short-haul driving limit from 12 to 14 hours and legislative proposals to reduce the interstate commercial driver minimum age to 18. King also stressed that Congress must raise trucking insurance minimums, an AAJ priority.

In the House, logistics companies continued to push for immunity by advocating for the adoption of a “national hiring standard” for third parties hiring commercial truck drivers. The standard is meaningless—two of the components, registering with the FMCSA and carrying minimum trucking insurance, are already required by law. The third component—that the driver not have an unsatisfactory safety rating with the FMCSA—is unenforceable because the agency lacks the ability to conduct these determinations and is under no directive to perform them, even in a limited capacity, because the relevant regulation has expired.

Congress is supposed to reauthorize legislation that regulates surface transportation programs by Sept. 30. AAJ’s highest priority is to ensure that a broker-shipper immunity provision is not included in the reauthorization bill. AAJ also is continuing to push for inclusion of a provision to raise trucking insurance minimums. Last year, a bill (H.R. 3781) was introduced in the House by Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) to raise the trucking insurance minimum from $750,000 to $4,923,153.29 per incident to reflect increases in medical costs and inflation. AAJ and the Truck Safety Coalition held a press conference for the bill’s introduction and have strongly advocated for the legislation with congressional offices.

Railroad. In January 2019, Amtrak secretly added a forced arbitration clause to its passenger tickets, forcing customers into arbitration even for deaths and the most serious injuries. In March, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Reps. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) and Denny Heck (D-Wash.) introduced identical bills (S. 3400 and H.R. 6101) to address the problem of forced arbitration in the fine print of Amtrak passenger tickets.

These bills would restore passengers’ rights by prohibiting all forced arbitration clauses and joint action waivers with respect to consumer and civil rights cases filed against Amtrak, including negligence, gross negligence, wrongful death, discrimination, and failure to accommodate a disability.

As Congress moves forward with its transportation agenda, AAJ will be both proactive and reactive—pushing for provisions that will make it easier for people to have remedies in court while simultaneously stopping provisions that would harm passengers and drivers.

Susan Steinman is AAJ’s senior director of policy and senior counsel and can be reached at susan.steinman@justice.org. To contact AAJ Public Affairs, email advocacy@justice.org.