I was driving today and I encountered a truck carrying an oversized load. It was some kind of big storage tank. This was on a standard two lane road and the load was a little wider than the lane. This wasn’t a problem for me; as I approached the vehicle I pulled a little over on to the shoulder and was able to drive by with no problem.
But it occurred to me that if the truck were to coincidentally encounter another truck hauling the same-sized load, there would not be enough width in the road for the two vehicles to get past each other.
Is such a coincidence possible? Or do trucks carrying oversized loads have to submit pre-planned driving schedules to ensure there won’t be any problems like this during their travels?
You do occasionally see news reports or vids of truly huge very-oversized loads where the whole road is closed to other traffic in both directions by a rolling police blockade, etc.
So at least in those circumstances a bunch of advance coordination with local agencies is definitely required. Which would preclude (one fervently hopes) a head-to-head meet out in the country someplace, or right in the middle of some quaint village.
My bro was a long-haul trucker for a couple of years. Not a good job, not at all. As applied to this thread … This was before the widespread availability of smartphone navigation. They all carried a special trucker’s version of a paper road atlas which marked off issues like low bridges, no-hazmat tunnels, low-gross weight limited roads, etc.
I don’t know that it included things like wide load limits, since he wasn’t in that specialty. But I would not be surprised t find there were rad atlases just for that then, and apps for that now.
I question that a bit.
Farm equipment is designed to operate on soft and unlevel surfaces, at least up to a point. Pulling your combine partly off a blacktop road onto a sloping dirt shoulder is unlikely to result in disaster. And a farm equipment head to head meeting is common enough on the roads where farm equipment moves that the respective drivers would be used to dealing with this.
Conversely a long haul Peterbilt pulling a flatbed carrying a gigantic storage tank or a 50 foot yacht would be far more likely to tip over or get stuck if moved onto on anything except flat full-strength pavement. There are legions of fail videos on YouTube of oversized loads doing just that to great expense. And I don’t mean the vids of comically overloaded raggedy-ass trucks on a dirt road in some 3rd world country.
Here (NSW, Australia) you are required to prepare a traffic management plan and get relevant approvals from the different road and rail authorities whose infrastructure you are using or coming threateningly close to BEFORE you head off.
Part of the regulator’s role is to identify whether movements may clash. They also prohibit movement in certain peak times (first and last day of school holidays are typically already traffic jam nightmares, for example).
Most trucks with oversized loads that I’ve seen have a support vehicle some distance ahead and another trailing behind. I would expect if two wide loads were approaching each other (or one was overtaking another) that the support vehicles would be communicating and coordinating with each other to avoid any problems.
Because people are idiots, and litigious? “How was I to know it was oversized!?!”. Also, Oversize includes everything from WAG 10’1" to a wind turbine blade…