Thursday, May 20, 2010


Most states are pretty good about providing detour signage if there is significant road closures or construction. This sign is on the northbound side of CO59 headed over I70. All trucks over seven feet wide are to use this detour. Since Class 8 trucks are 96 to 102" wide, that sort of rules out any truck traffic on US385.

However, this is the official online posting for the width limitation on US385 - twelve feet. If you were at Burlington and wanted to go north in a big truck, according to the signage at Siebert you would have to travel west to Siebert, get on CO59, go to US36, then travel back east to US385. Seventy miles out of the way.

I had no occasion to go that way, but I've been noticing the seven foot limitation sign. I've mentioned before how we are usually loaded oversized, and how that requires special permits (that are not free, btw). Some states offer annual permits - they have limitations as well, but the average load we haul won't require additional permitting. One of the requirements is that we check out our route before we go - either by calling the state's 511 or similar line, or checking online. If we are caught trying to access a road that has been deemed to narrow for our load, our annual permit can be pulled. Not a good thing.

Plus, with all the latest emphasis on weather restrictions, we also have to monitor that as well - both on the phone and online.

But what to do with conflicting information? I'd go ahead and drive through that construction at twelve feet wide - I met the research requirement and I can call it up on my Blackberry to back myself up if there is a signal at all. However, it's crap like this that makes our days less than enjoyable at times. None of us have gotten into any conflicts over this, but dollars to donuts someone has or will.

This last winter a colleague and I were headed east out of Kansas (we have annual oversize permits here, too) into Missouri, and had taken I35 to Kansas City. On the south side are both northbound and southbound ports. There was some construction there, but there had been no limits thrown up. Until the day we went through. According to the staff at the port, the limit was eleven feet northbound and southbound, and we were actually close to thirteen feet wide. Their supervisor was gonna be cracking down. We got tickets. Whoops....

We sat there. Their supervisor recommended hiring some escorts, but we still could not go through the construction. Mind you, this was the same construction we'd been going through several times a week for the past couple months and nothing had changed, other than the stated width limitation. We couldn't jump the median as it was too muddy. We couldn't back down the interstate several miles to the last exit. They didn't know what to do with us.

So we sat there.

Until the end of their shift. They told us we'd have to leave their office as they were locking up. What were we to do? They didn't care - they were going home.

We drove on.

That night, I looked up the restrictions on that area of construction. Southbound was eleven feet. Northbound was unrestricted. I called our dispatcher, and she saved a screen capture of the online version of events. She had to wait until the county DA got their copy of the tickets, but an email with the screen cap and the fact that the website still had no restrictions kinda got the whole thing dismissed. I suspect there was some egg cleaned from faces, because right after that the width restriction was set at twelve feet for northbound, and still eleven for southbound.

That port (and that road construction) is easily bypassed - but why would we want to go out of our way if there was no need? Oh wait - we'd be putting our destiny in the hands of career state office drones.

Call me a reluctant outlaw driven to avoid this crap.

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