Heavy Traffic: Deregulation, Trade, and Transformation in North American Trucking

Canada and the United States exchange the world’s highest level of bilateral trade. Trucking, their key transport sector, carries two-thirds of the goods. In Heavy Traffic, Daniel Madar examines the way in which the regulatory reform of American and Canadian trucking, coupled with free trade and integrated industrial logistics, have radically changed the industry.
Before deregulation, restrictive entry rules had fostered two separate national highway transport markets, and most international traffic changed carriers at the border. Madar shows that deregulation created a de facto regime of free trade in trucking services, enabling Canadian and American carriers to follow the expansion of transborder traffic that began with the Canada- U.S. Free Trade Agreement and continues with NAFTA. As commerce diffuses across the continent, trucking’s adaptiveness and flexibility make it the pivotal medium.

As a study in policy formation and in the international consequences of domestic reform, Heavy Traffic will be of interest to students and scholars of political economy, international relations, and transportation.