Transportation deregulation has gotten more attention in the past month than it had in the previous 28 years, but it isn't the sort of attention that anyone interested in the movement of goods should want.

That's because despite the finger pointing over the meltdown in the financial markets over the past month, the closest thing to a true consensus is that an era of unbridled deregulation is to blame. The country jumped into that era, of course, with the rapid deregulation of transportation industries between 1978 and 1980.

It's as if the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 made repeal of banking industry restrictions in 1999 inevitable, sending the entire economic system on a path toward collapse. 

Now we're on the cusp of an era that could see the important gains of deregulation whittled down in response to an era of lax enforcement, slack oversight and uncomfortably cozy relationships between regulators and businesses.

The signs are already there.

The clean-air plans that were to take effect last week at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles had at their heart provisions that look to us like clear examples of economic regulation. That's because the local plans regulate the drivers and their employment status, not the trucks.

A provision approved in Congress requires fuel surcharges be passed through to commercial drivers hauling goods for the Defense Department. Some hope that is a foot in the door toward similar requirements in the purely commercial world.

That would be a shame in a trucking industry that has built on deregulation even in recent years, as the classification system and rate bureaus have moved into a new era in which anti-competitive structures have been taken down.

The rail safety bill that got on a fast track in Congress last month was not, as some railroads might argue and some shippers might wish, a step toward re-regulation.

From the provisions on hazardous materials transport to those on positive train control, the measure is built on the sort of safety requirements that are supposed to remain under tight regulatory oversight while economic regulation is pulled back.

The debates over remaining railroad regulation aren't about whether deregulation has helped shippers and railroads but whether the remaining oversight has been used properly and in a way that benefits shippers and carriers alike. And although many shippers are critical of Surface Transportation Board actions over the years, the board has taken the warnings signs of problems in rail networks and acted.

By contrast, financial industry regulators seem to have been sleeping at the switch while an economic train wreck was coming their way. 

Still, the transportation world does have one example at hand for a government rushing to bail out financial institutions.
The Air Transportation Stabilization Board was authorized in 2001 to offer $10 billion in federal loan guarantees in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. The ATSB only used a fraction of that money, however, and a board member says the warrants it received in return left the ATSB with a profit.