Truckers See More Traffic Up Ahead

If the job doesn't pay at least $1 a mile, Rodger and Heather Hogeland won't take it.

The way their expenses add up, they have to gross that much to earn a decent profit, which by U.S. truck drivers' standards is 32 to 34 cents a mile. They raised five kids making that kind of money, hauling produce from Salinas, Calif., to Syracuse, N.Y., on a weekly transcontinental loop that since 1999 has put 1.2 million miles on their purple Kenworth W900L tractor-trailer rig.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Hogelands fear, could mean the end of the road for them.

The court last week overturned a ruling that had prevented Mexican trucks and buses from delivering goods and passengers in this country. Once the Department of Transportation sets up an inspection program to ensure that vehicles entering the U.S. meet federal safety standards, as many as 34,000 Mexican trucks could be in business north of the border -- trucks driven by men and women used to netting about 13 cents a mile.

"We have been praying that this wasn't going to happen," said Heather Hogeland, 47, a second-generation trucker whose father taught her how to drive big rigs when she was 20.

In Mexico, "the cost of living is so low that you can afford to earn pennies per mile and still feel like you are making money."

At the Flying J truck stop outside Temple, Ga., a few days after the decision came down, she and her husband considered the dinner menu and the nightmare of tens of thousands of new competitors, all of them willing to drive for less than the Hogelands can afford.

What they found particularly galling was President Bush's backing of the provision in the North American Free Trade Agreement that, with the high court having cleared the way, gives licensed Mexican truckers permission to transport international goods in the U.S.

"We were big Bush supporters," Heather Hogeland said, "but on this, he has no clue."

For 22 years, Mexican trucks have been allowed to operate only in narrow commercial border zones, where goods are transferred to U.S. trucks for delivery around the nation.

The lifting of that moratorium is widely supported by businesses on both sides of the border and especially north of it, where the hope is that shipping costs will be substantially reduced.