Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

July 1st. New regulations day. And usually, they’re nothing to perk up your day. But, this time, we  got a good one. Today’s the day the law raising the truck speed limit in Ohio goes into effect. Starting today, you can actually drive a truck sixty-five miles per hour on rural and suburban interstates. I was going to say you could drive as fast as everybody else but that wouldn’t be true. . . cars will still be going fifteen over the speed limit and I wouldn’t try that if I were you. Because you know ‘they’ will be watching.

When the Ohio Turnpike raised the truck speed limit, the Ohio State Police went on a propaganda campaign to say that it would surely increase the accident rate. Sure enough, after the first year, they declared there had been more accidents caused by  65mph trucks than under the 55mph limit. I have no way to find out if that is really true, they have the statistics, not me. But I’m old enough to know a skilled interpretation can make statistics say anything they want them to say and they wanted to prove the 65mph truck speed was dangerous.

Anybody with a lick of common sense and a little road experience quickly realizes that traffic flows better at a uniform speed. And, with good traffic flow, drivers are less likely to attempt stupid stunts to get ahead of someone else, causing accidents. Still, traffic incident statistics are like ballots: it matters more who counts the vote. And, truckers wont be the ones counting, so I think we’re going to hear, once again, that accidents have gone up simply because we’re no longer rolling roadblocks. You don’t need a crystal ball to figure out that we can expect some very heavy enforcement of the new speed limit and every thing else truck related.

We’ve been seeing a lot of enforcement of all truck related regulations for some time now. I have friends who are complaining bitterly about being subjected to one inspection after another in certain states.  As Everett said in his post the other day in “Its a jungle out there. . “ motor carrier and police are finding the pickings quite a bit slimmer as there are so many fewer trucks on the road. That’s one reason. But, a friend of mine who runs through North Dakota regularly was sick of getting DOT inspections up to twice a day there for awhile. He finally asked the officer why he was being targeted so often and the guy confided that, with fewer trucks, they were doing fewer inspections and were hearing scuttlebutt that they might be laid off. So they unofficially upped their inspections to make it look like they weren’t under-worked in hopes of keeping their jobs. Instead of every tenth truck, they brought it down to every third or fourth truck being pulled in for inspection.

As states suffer budget cuts, more of them are looking at layoffs in law enforcement. My guess is that Ohio’s finest are seeing the higher speed limits as lost revenue and will be out to make that revenue up. In a way you cant blame them, we all want to keep our jobs,  but it’ll be uncomfortable in Ohio for awhile. . .

And north of the border. .

Today’s the day the Ontario starts enforcing it’s speed limiter law in earnest. The last six months have been a so-called grace period. As of today, trucks without a functioning speed limiter set at 105km or less will be paying a  $390 fine. For anybody that thought they could just drive slow and slide by, the OPP now has readers that plug into the truck’s engine stats and will tell them if there’s a speed limiter installed and what speed it’s set at. Fines for ‘tampering’ with an installed speed limiter can go as high as $20,000. And there’s some pretty good indications they intend to be checking EVERY truck that crosses their scales.

The speed limiter law is going to be very expensive fuel-wise to trucks with drive-axle ratios that are optimized for a higher speed. The newer the truck, the more sensitive to rpms they are. If you cant get up to the sweet spot, both performance and fuel mileage are going to suffer. Ontario hasn’t been at all sympathetic to these arguments.  Personally, I’d avoid Ontario like the plague over this one. I wonder too if this isn’t some violation of the free trade agreements since US truckers are being forced to accommodate a rule that will negatively impact on their ability to make a living in their own country. After all, in a 70 mph state or higher that truck is still going to be limited to a hair over 65.

So, kind of like the Mad Hatters Tea party in Alice in Wonderland, all the rules are now turned upside down and we all move to a different chair. Stop hating Ohio. Start hating Ontario.