Another program for federal surface transportation programs for highways, this act also provided additional programs to control competing trucking companies under the auspices of enacting highway safety.
No longer needed to regulate the industry, this act abolished the Interstate Commerce Commission and replaced it with the Surface Transportation Board, in favor of continued deregulation and market saturation to the point that the trucking industry remained untenable.
Flooding the trucking market to ensure only the top companies, owned by former railroad capitalists, could maintain profitability, this eliminated all restrictions to entry allowing massive waves of new companies, and allowed each to set rates, creating a chaotic and unprofitability level of perfect competition. Where the ICC formerly regulated the routes that motor carriers could use and the geographic regions that they could serve to stunt their growth, now truckers could go anywhere and price freely within a “zone of reasonableness”.
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