Increasing Truck Sizes and Weights Threatens Safety and U.S. Highways and Bridges

Excerpts from a statement of Gerald A. Donaldson, Ph.D., Senior Research Director, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Oversight Hearing on Truck Weights and Lengths: Assessing the Impacts of Existing Laws and Regulations, Before the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, July 9, 2008

Page 24 - Conclusion excerpt:

Public policy leaders at the state and federal level must come to grips with these facts and the information that has been provided in numerous credible and compelling studies. Public safety, U.S. highway infrastructure, and the budgets of federal and state highway and bridge programs cannot bear the burden of yet another round of increases in truck size and weights. While Advocates understands how integral the trucking industry and truck transportation is to national and local economies, the optimal balance between the special interests that want a never-ending cycle of increased truck size and weight and the public interest in safety and infrastructure protection and restoration has already been reached and, indeed, surpassed. Further increases will only make the situation on our roads more unsafe with greater economic burdens and lethal consequences for road users and taxpayers.

Page 25 - Recommendations excerpt:

Congress should adopt the recommendation of the National Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission’s report, Transportation for Tomorrow, stressing the need to restore user fee equity by ensuring that heavy trucks, for the first time, actually pay their fair share for the use and destruction of U.S. highways and bridges. It is time to stop allowing 100,000-pound overweight trucks from paying only 40 percent of their cost responsibility and transferring the balance of the costs to ordinary taxpayers and light vehicle owners.

Page 26 - Appendix excerpt:

Legislative History of Truck Size and Weight Laws
Over the past half-century since the inception of the U.S. Interstate highway system, trucking and shipping interests have routinely sought increases in truck sizes and weights.

Truck Size and Weight Increases Are a Never-Ending, Upward Spiral
The history of truck size and weight increases consists of continual efforts by the trucking industry to put ever-increasing numbers of bigger, longer, heavier trucks on our nation’s highways and bridges despite both public and state opposition. As we have discussed in this testimony, the current, heightened concern among the states is their inability to guarantee highway safety and to protect highway infrastructure that has reached a crisis stage in serviceability and funding, as recently described in great detail by the Congressionally-directed Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission in its comprehensive December 2007 report, Transportation for Tomorrow. Bigger, heavier combination trucks on more surface miles of highways and bridges, including an unknown, but growing number of these extra-heavy, extra-long large trucks on more miles of lower-class roads, are dealing a double blow to the states by increasing large truck crash risk while also accelerating the destruction of their highways and bridges.

The unfortunate truth is that these increases in truck sizes and weights have been facilitated by Congressional legislation that has either pre-empted the states, compelling them to accept bigger, heavier trucks on more miles of state highways and bridges, or has resulted in special exemptions for specific states. Those exemptions have often raised truck size and weight in one state after another, and successful legislative efforts have encouraged the trucking industry to seek longer, wider, and heavier trucks in state after state. The plan is that when enough states have accepted the bigger, heavier rigs, the trucking industry will approach Congress with a request for federal preemption through provisions that will force the states to accept bigger, heavier combination trucks.

The story of federal legislative large truck size and weight increases over the years is an important cautionary tale. It shows that this approach to size and weight policy, as U.S. DOT pointed out in its concluding section of its 2004 Western Uniformity Scenario Analysis study, undermines any rational, long-range Congressional management of surface transportation logistics, infrastructure, and safety needs.

Download full report: http://www.saferoads.org/files/file/trucksizeweight.pdf (459 kb)