Pounding the Pavement Concerns About Safety, Cost Fuel Debate Over Heavy Trucks
By GEORGE CHAPPELL; OF THE NEWS STAFF
AUGUSTA – From his home and boat-building shop on Routes 9 and 202 in Troy, Greg Rossel witnesses a daily run of tractor-trailers racing over the narrow state road to and from Bangor.
“They seem to run in pods at different times of day,” he said recently.
“Right by us, you can often have the thrill of seeing one semi passing the other, right in front of the house. A real crowd- pleaser,” he added.
The debate over heavy tractor-trailers on Maine’s 8,684 miles of state roads is not new, but it has taken on new urgency since Gov. John Baldacci signed an emergency bill Jan. 23 to increase gross weights of logging trucks from 100,000 pounds to 105,000 pounds.
The temporary increase, which is intended to help ease truckers’ rising costs of operation, concerns a coalition of highway safety advocates including Joan Claybrook, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Public Citizen.
“Maine’s highways and bridges are already crumbling,” Claybrook said. She and others are urging federal transportation officials to intervene.
Although Baldacci’s bill sunsets on April 1, Claybrook’s coalition said the extra weight on the state’s bridges increases the likelihood of another catastrophe similar to the unexpected collapse of the bridge carrying Interstate 35 through Minneapolis in August 2007. That collapse resulted in 13 deaths and 100 injuries.
“Allowing even heavier trucks on the road just puts more stress on these structures,” Claybrook said. “The Federal Highway Administration should take whatever action is necessary to keep Maine from putting heavier, more dangerous and destructive trucks on its highways and bridges.”
A statement on the Maine Department of Transportation’s Web site would seem to agree in principle: “Heavy loads can cause significant damage to our state highway and bridge infrastructure.”
State and federal
The state is restricted by federal highway rules to make any changes in truck weights on interstate highways, said one transportation official.
Tim Bolton, policy development specialist with the Maine DOT, said the problem is that only Congress can change weight limits on federal roads.
“We have a 100,000-pound limit for the Maine Turnpike,” he said. “We can’t change anything on the Maine Turnpike that took effect after October 1, 1995, when Congress gave the turnpike an exemption from the 80,000-pound rule on the interstate highway system.”
He called Claybrook’s statement that the DOT was “hiding” the condition of the roads and bridges in Maine an inaccuracy.
“Bridges are on a two-year monitoring schedule. We continue to rehabilitate and repair our bridges,” he said, adding that it will take a lot more money in the future to keep up with maintenance as Maine’s bridges age.
The state is faced with finding long-range funding for its roads and bridges at an estimated cost of $2 billion in inflation- adjusted dollars over the next 20 years, according to DOT Deputy Commissioner Greg Nadeau.
The DOT report, “Keeping Our Bridges Safe,” issued Nov. 28, identifies 386 deficient bridges and cites an annual increase of investment of $50 million in addition to the $70 million already budgeted just for bridges.
One driver is outspoken about the federal road rules.
“You can drive up the Maine Turnpike with a 100,000-pound load to Augusta, but you can’t stay on Interstate 95 with that load from Augusta to Houlton,” said Larry Sidelinger of Yankee Pride Transport Inc. in Nobleboro and the Coalition to Lower Fuel Prices in Maine.
“Instead, you have to use secondary roads,” he said.
Emphasizing the dangers, Sidelinger cited a May 2006 accident in which a tractor-trailer hauling a fuel tank struck and killed Lena Gray, an 80-year-old resident of Bangor, while she was crossing a downtown street.
“That truck should never have been in the city but out on the interstate highway, which runs through Bangor,” he said.
The highway system
The Maine Turnpike was built in 1947 with local toll money before the 1956 Federal Highway Act that created the nation’s highway system. It is not under the same restriction as other parts of the interstate system in Maine, said Conrad W. Wetzel, government relations manager for the Maine Turnpike Authority.
“The turnpike was not paid for by federal dollars,” he said. “We are part of the state system.”
In 1995, Maine’s congressional delegation did succeed in getting an exemption for the 6-mile stretch of highway between the bridge at the Maine-New Hampshire border and the beginning of the turnpike at York, Wetzel explained.
U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe in May 2007 introduced legislation to allow trucks carrying up to 100,000 pounds to travel on Maine’s interstate highways. That bill is still in committee, according to Kevin Kelley of Collins’ Washington office.
Kelley said that all four members of Maine’s congressional delegation have tried for years to get the limits changed but have faced opposition from other states with their own transportation agendas.
The effect of truck weights
Wilbur Smith Associates, a Columbia, S.C.-based engineering firm, in a safety analysis for a 2004 DOT study, indicated that if Congress were to extend the current weight exemptions on the Maine Turnpike to all currently nonexempt interstate highways in Maine, the net impact to the state would be a decrease of 2.3 truck crashes annually.
The Federal Highway Administration determined that the economic impact of those crashes would result in a savings of $356,000 a year, according to the Smith study.
The same study also showed that the economic benefit to Maine resulting from exempting currently nonexempt highways from federal truck weight limits would be an estimated $1.7 million to $2.3 million in 2004 because of the cost of maintaining roads that are subjected to heavy loads.
In a similar vein, a DOT report to the Legislature in 2003, issued as part of a proposal to increase the overweight truck fine structure, stated that overweight trucks generated $8 million in damage to the roads.
David T. Hartgen, professor emeritus of transportation at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte and president of The Hartgen Group Inc., compared the effect of wear and tear on a road to the bending of an empty beer can.
“In the first 15 years of a 20-year life span of a road, the condition remains more or less constant,” he said. “But in the last five years of that 20-year period, the road starts to break down.
“If you bend an empty beer can, the first time it’s fairly difficult. But as you bend it more and more, it becomes easier and easier until it breaks up,” he said. “That same principle applies to a highway.”
The ratio of weight to pavement is an exercise in physics, he said. Referring to Maine’s temporary truck weight increase, Hartgen said a 5 percent increase has an exponential damage impact.
In simple terms, a 5 percent increase of weight on the axle translates to a 35 percent to 40 percent increase in damage to the road.
“The tire produces a rolling wave of pressure on the pavement,” he said. “The heavier the weight, the heavier the pressure.”
The effect on bridges is different from the effect on roads because bridges have a bending factor when traffic goes over them, he said.
“They will carry much, much more,” he said.
Inspections
Keeping track of truck overloads requires inspections, which are done on all commercial vehicles by the Maine Department of Public Safety, said public information officer Stephen McCausland.
“Inspections are done every day, either at a weighing station or with a trooper’s mobile scale,” he said.
Lt. Thomas Kelly of the Maine State Police is in charge of Troop K, the Commercial Vehicle Enforcement unit, which has 25 troopers and four sergeants to cover Maine’s roads. Overweight trucks are subject to a fine, which usually is a percentage of the overload.
“If the overweight is in the aggravated, or very excessive, category, we make them off-load the vehicle. Drivers are given a 21/ 2 percent tolerance for overloading,” he said. Thus a 105,000-pound logging truck and load may go up to 107,625 pounds with impunity.
“Overloading trucks is happening every day,” Kelly said. “We don’t always catch them, but we try like heck.”
A role for railroads
Meanwhile, Rossel, a writer and boat builder who has been writing to governors, state and federal legislators and transportation officials for years about trucks, wonders why more logging shipments don’t go by rail rather than by truck to save fuel and wear and tear on the roads.
Nate Moulton, director of the rail program for the Maine DOT, said a lot of trucking locations in the state are near where the wood is cut, whereas rail is more suitable for heavier, long- distance loads.
“There are no rail lines near logging operations in places like Rangeley,” he said.
Moulton predicted that the state would see a lot more consolidation yards where trucks take the wood and wood chips from different logging operations to be shipped by rail in large loads.
“Rail will have a larger role to play as the prices of fuel continue to rise,” he said.
gchappell@bangordailynews.net
236-4598
BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY GABOR DEGRE
Reflected in the puddles of a potholed section of Route 2 in Hermon, a log truck hauls its load east toward Bangor on Monday. Safety groups are saying that increased log truck weights allowed by an emergency bill enacted last month will likely increase infrastructure problems on Maine highways.
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