New Mexico Truck Facts
Trucking Drives the Economy
• Employment: The trucking industry in New Mexico provides 46,313 jobs, or one out of 17 in the state. Total trucking industry wages paid in New Mexico are $1.6 billion, with an average annual trucking industry salary of $35,114. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that truck drivers, heavy, tractor-trailer and light, delivery drivers, hold 15,340 jobs with a mean annual salary of $29,535.
• Small Business Emphasis: There are 5,287 trucking companies located in New Mexico, most of them small, locally owned businesses. These companies are served by a wide range of supporting businesses both large and small.
• Transportation of Essential Products: Trucks transport 94 percent of total manufactured tonnage in the state or 202,016 tons per day. 88 percent of communities depend exclusively on trucks to move their goods.
Trucking Pays the Freight
• As an Industry: The trucking industry in New Mexico pays approximately $488.2 million in federal and state roadway taxes and fees. The industry pays 57 percent of all taxes and fees owed by New Mexico motorists, despite trucks representing only 17.2 percent of vehicle miles traveled in the state.
• Individual Companies: A typical five-axle tractor-semitrailer combination pays $8,466 in state highway user fees and taxes in addition to $8,959 in federal user fees and taxes. These taxes are over and above the typical taxes paid by businesses in New Mexico.
• Roadway Use: New Mexico has 63,796 miles of public roads over which all motorists traveled 24 billion miles. Trucking’s use of New Mexico public roads was 4.1 billion miles.
Safety Matters
• Continually Improving: At the national level, the truck-involved fatal crash rate for 2006 was 1.93 fatal crashes per 100 million vehicle miles of travel (VMT). This rate is at its lowest point since the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) began keeping these records in 1975. The injury crash rate for 2006 was 34.4 injury crashes per 100 million vehicle miles of travel (VMT), also at its lowest point since DOT recordkeeping began.
• Sharing the Road: The trucking industry is committed to sharing the road safely with all vehicles. The Share the Road program sends a team of professional truck drivers to communities around the country to teach car drivers about truck blind spots, stopping distances and safe merging around large trucks, all designed to reduce the number of car-truck accidents.
• Safety First: New Mexico Trucking Association members put safety first through improved driver training, investment in advanced safety technologies.
Last Updated August 2008
American Transportation Research Institute