EXPAND YOUR APPEAL.

The motor carriers are back before Congress, asking for permission to run heavier trucks.  Railway Age editor William C. Vantuono offers the predictable special pleading.

Yes, the ages-old truck size and weight battle has resurfaced, and this industry needs to practice vigilance and make sure that these potential mayhem machines—which could weight roughly 42 tons heavier than the average family-hauling SUV—don’t start navigating our crumbling road infrastructure. It’s time to pull out our spike mauls and try to beat such legislation back into the ground, where it will lie dormant until, like 17-year cicadas, will re-hatch, emerging with earsplitting noise—and the battle begins anew.

It's the same old fight, with the same special pleading.  "Fine, let's make sure the heavier trucks bear the full cost of the road-strengthening programs, as well as the increased congestion costs those elephants will impose on everyone behind them.  We don't want to become China, with days-long traffic jams."

The railroads' commercial interest in this fight are clear and predictable.

Bigger trucks tearing up highways and bridges? We all know who’s going to pay for that: us, the taxpayers.

“The fundamental argument bigger-truck supporters make that I think the rail industry is in a really good place to refute is, ‘If you let us have heavier trucks, we can move fewer trucks,’” Baker points out. “Well, that would be true—in a vacuum. If you can move 800,000 pounds of cargo in 10 trucks right now, and you allow the trucks be 91,000 pounds instead of 80,000 pounds, then you can move that same stuff in nine trucks. That’s obviously true—in a vacuum. In the real world, it shifts the economics of truck vs. rail. Now you have all this marginal freight that is going to choose truck over rail, so you actually end up with probably 11 trucks, not 10, and they’re heavier. The public, the taxpayers, lose, with more trucks on the highway, not to mention more highway deaths. There were 5,800 deaths related to large trucks on the highways last year. If trucks are heavier and longer, it’s obvious that there will be more.”

Isn't it time for the railroads to consider coalition building with other constituencies that don't like the effects of those mayhem machines.  Consider a recent bill making its way through the Illinois Legislature.

Currently, local communities are required to build intersections that will accommodate the turning of a 65-foot truck, which means there’s no space left for design features that will make an intersection safer for people walking and biking.

SB2278 will address this shortcoming in Illinois law by allowing cities and towns to protect their residents by building safer intersections.

It's not quite my preferred policy, which is special movement permits for any trailer longer than thirty feet.  It's a step in that direction, though, and it's one that even the Teamsters might go along with.  A shortage of truck drivers is a statement about prevailing levels of pay and working conditions.  I can't help but suspect that having to thread one of those 53 foot trailers through a city, where "accommodate the turning" often means "complying with the minimum standard" and the driver has to take risks (appealing to the law of gross tonnage?) to shoulder out into traffic and execute a turn, often occupying the entire intersection in the maneuver, and even then running up on the curb, is nerve wracking even to the most experienced, or jaded, over the road trucker.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for the railroads to appeal to the Teamsters, who have to jockey those ever heavier rigs, and the municipalities, who in the absence of another porkulus, will be on the hook for fixing those battered roads, to participate in opposing those increased weight limits.

That heavily-freighted interstate highways, such as 41 in paper mill country in Wisconsin or any interstate in the Indianapolis area, feature billboards with come-ons from attorneys referring to "hurt in a truck accident" suggests that a broadened appeal will work.