The Sun Journal editorial “Heavier trucks should be allowed north of Augusta” (Sept. 15), advocating 100,000-pound trucks from Augusta to the Canadian border on I-95 is based on wishful thinking, suppositions that have been repeatedly disproved, and misinformation supplied by our own Maine Department of Transportation and the Maine trucking industry.
There is no plan, either in regulation or legislation, to remove extra-heavy, tractor-trailers from local roads and streets. The trucking industry is on record as opposed to removing those big rigs from the roads off the Interstate highway system.
The joke is on Maine’s citizens who have been openly misled to believe that if these enormous rigs travel the full length of I-95, they will disappear from our county and township roads. This is absolutely not true.
We are paying a high price for 100,000-pound trucks. The legislature, in a 2002 special report, found that trucks even at 80,000 pounds were underpaying their highway cost responsibilities by 28 percent, while car owners were overpaying their fair share of highway fees by 36 percent. Maine’s passenger vehicle owners are subsidizing the trucking industry.
Finally, the claim in the editorial that the weight of a large truck is immaterial to safety and that big truck safety depends solely on the skills of the truck driver behind the wheel has no support in truck safety research findings. Large trucks suffer higher crash rates the heavier they become.
You need to know getting 100,000-pound tractor trailers throughout Maine is a gigantic gift for the trucking industry, compliments of the taxpayers. The American Trucking Associations wants to use Maine as a steppingstone to ram through 100,000 pounds as the new, higher truck weight limit throughout the United States.
To that end, it has wined and dined Maine public officials, including the commissioner of MDOT and brought them to Washington, D.C., to be a mouthpiece of the trucking industry and lobby Congress for special-interest legislation allowing 100,000-pound giant trucks on I-95 to Canada.
You will pay with your lives and your wallets if MDOT and the trucking industry get their way. More roads will be open to these giant trucks and not less.
It’s time for the MDOT and the trucking industry to be honest with us; 100,000-pound trucks will not disappear from our local roads and streets. This simply will not happen, and the trucking industry won’t let that happen. 80,000 pounds should be the maximum limit everywhere.
Daphne Izer, Lisbon, co-founder and co-chairman of Parents Against Tired Truckers
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