White House Backs Bigger Trucks in Maine, Vermont

The White House is drawing fire from highway safety advocates for its support of pilot projects permitting heavier trucks on interstate highways in two states.

In its latest spending bill, the Obama administration proposed that one-year test programs for overweight trucks in Maine and Vermont be made permanent.

The tests, launched this year, allow 100,000-pound rigs on interstates in Maine and Vermont, which both have logging industries that use heavy haul equipment.

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The White House included the heavy-truck language in its continuing resolution for fiscal 2011, which would fund the federal government beyond Oct. 1.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., back the programs, in part as a means of getting heavier trucks off the New England states' secondary roads.

"It simply makes no sense to force heavy trucks off the federal highway and onto our smaller roads in Maine," Collins said, who won approval of the tests last year.

Federal law prohibits tractor-trailers weighing more than 80,000 pounds from traveling interstate highways without oversize, overweight permits from states.

The problem is, that shifts heavy trucks to secondary state roads that often are narrower, more winding and take trucks through towns and urban areas.

"The impact of heavy trucks running through our downtowns is felt in communities all across Vermont," Leahy said last year in support of the pilot projects.

But 100,000-pound trucks would have an outsized impact on Interstate highways, damaging roads and bridges, the Coalition Against Bigger Trucks said.

Extending the pilot projects in Maine and Vermont would undermine proposed investment in roads and rails, said Curtis Sloan, policy director for CABT.

"If the administration is serious about addressing the nation's infrastructure problems, it cannot support allowing bigger trucks on federal highways," he said.

-- Contact William B. Cassidy at wcassidy@joc.com.