You may have read that the American Trucking Associations has urged Transportation Secretary Duffy to focus on enforcement of cabotage regulations. You may also have noted that the American Transportation Research Institute has listed cabotage among its 2025 research topics. Why are ATA and ATRI concerned about “cabotage”?
Cabotage is the operation of a commercial vehicle between points within the same jurisdiction by a motor carrier based elsewhere. Think about the difference between interstate and intrastate commerce. As a trucker, you know that the U.S. Department of Transportation and its agency, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, enforce the rules and regulations pertaining to motor carrier operations across state lines — interstate commerce. You probably also know that hauling locally within a state may require registration with state-level agencies and compliance with differing state-level rules. That’s intrastate commerce.
Now, apply that scenario to international trucking. The U.S. has an agreement with Canada and Mexico (the USMCA, formerly known as NAFTA) that facilitates international trade between the three nations, similar to the interstate commerce example. But once a foreign trucker delivers an international load across borders, the return trip must also transport international cargo. (Commonly, foreign motor carriers are allowed an empty move domestically to reposition equipment for the next international trip.) Cabotage rules, however, apply to any attempt by a foreign motor carrier to haul goods between points within any of the countries. To operate legally on the domestic level within another country, the foreign motor carrier must register and obtain legal permission from that country’s regulatory agencies. Just like intrastate commerce here.
The same cabotage restrictions apply to individual truck drivers. Under the USMCA, the U.S., Canada and Mexico recognize each other’s commercial driver’s licenses. But foreign truck drivers are legally limited to international transportation.
Cabotage rules respect each country’s authority in the areas of safety and fair competition. Safety requires training and familiarity with each jurisdiction’s rules. Even with similar safety goals in mind, countries may go about safety in different manners. Easy examples: the U.S. and Canada each require truck inspections and have adopted electronic logging devices (ELDs). The U.S. and Canadian truck inspections differ, which is why the two countries entered into a treaty reciprocally recognizing the other’s inspections at the border. Similarly, ELDs are self-certified by the manufacturers in the U.S. but require independent certification in Canada (https://prepass.com/blog/revoked-elds-what-truckers-need-to-do/).
Of particular concern on the safety front is the training, licensing and violation history of truck drivers from another country. Until Mexico updated its licensing website to include driver photographs, law enforcement in the U.S. could not verify the identity of truck drivers carrying Mexican Licencia Federal de Conductores or LFCs, the equivalent of CDLs here. In fact, many LFC holders turned out to be persons from Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, some of whom lacked even basic training in the operation of a truck (https://www.prepassalliance.org/fraudulent-mexican-cdls-proliferate/).
Is it fair competition when trucking companies, and truck drivers themselves, engage in the same commercial market under different rules… or in disregard for those rules? We all can opine what the rules should be, but we all would likely say that fair is fair. And that’s why ATA and ATRI are concerned about the state of cabotage in the U.S.