Hearing

• Mr. Walter Waidelich, Jr., Acting Deputy Administrator, Federal Highway Administration | Written Testimony
• Mrs. Daphne Jefferson, Deputy Administrator, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration | Written Testimony
• Mr. Jack Danielson, Acting Deputy Administrator, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration | Written Testimony
• The Honorable T. Bella Dinh-Zarr, Member, National Transportation Safety Board | Written Testimony

Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO)
Subcommittee on Highways and Transit
Hearing on “FAST Act Implementation: Improving the Safety of the Nation’s Roads”

July 18, 2017
(Remarks as Prepared)

We all share the critical goal of reducing the number of fatalities and serious injuries on the Nation’s roads.

Over the years, federal transportation safety programs, along with other factors, have played an important role in reducing these numbers.

When this Committee was developing its surface transportation reauthorization bill a couple years ago, improving safety of our Nation’s roads was one of our key principles.

Today, we are here to examine the implementation of the safety-related provisions in the FAST Act.

The FAST Act is the first long-term surface transportation reauthorization bill in a decade and it improves our Nation’s infrastructure, reforms federal surface transportation programs and refocuses those programs on addressing national priorities, and encourages innovation to make the surface transportation system safer and more efficient.

The FAST Act also provides our non-federal partners with important resources to improve the safety of our Nation’s roads.  Those resources include, but are not limited to increasing funding for federal transportation safety programs across the modal administrations, reforming certain NHTSA safety programs to reduce barriers to state eligibility and improve incentives for states to adopt laws and regulations to improve highway safety, consolidating nine existing FMCSA grant programs into four and streamlining program requirements to reduce administrative costs and improve flexibility for states, and improving safety by incentivizing the adoption of innovative truck and bus safety technologies and accelerating the implementation of safety regulations required by law.

I look forward to hearing from our witnesses on the progress their agencies have made in implementing the safety provisions of the FAST Act and I thank them for appearing before us today.