We should all look carefully and with deep concern into studies concerning the allowable length and weight of commercial trucks.
These studies should be used to make highways safer, not to justify or rationalize longer, heavier vehicles that improve trucking industry profits at the expense of innocent lives.
We’ve all seen too many jackknifed and overturned semis. Any rational person knows that trucks are already too long and too heavy to stop safely or control in emergencies. Yet the trucking industry wants to legalize 130-foot monsters with three trailers that are guaranteed to increase our disgraceful highway carnage.
Legislators who allow such vehicles on our highways will be sending us a message: Increased highway casualties are an acceptable trade-off for higher trucking profits.
Airlines, which fly billions of passenger miles a year with very few fatalities, are under continual government and public pressure to make flying safer.
We should make sure the current truck “studies” are not used to make our highways, which already claim over 50,000 lives a year, even more lethal.
