Bigger, Heavier Trucks
For decades, the trucking industry has attempted to secure permission to allow even bigger and heavier trucks to operate on our nation’s highways. These trucks are tremendously damaging to the highway surface, causing the need for more frequent resurfacing. Heavier trucks will often look the same as currently allowable 80,000 pound trucks, so even though a heavier truck will not be able to brake as quickly, a passing vehicle would not be able to tell by sight that the vehicle was carrying 97,000 pounds.
Public Citizen strongly supports maintaining the current limits on larger, heavier trucks, which have been in effect since 1991. Allowing a larger number of longer, heavier trucks to operate would further degrade our highway infrastructure, while putting motorists at an increased risk of a fatal crash with these vehicles. The fatal crash rate for truck-involved crashes is already twice as high as the passenger vehicle crash rate