I drove from Delaware to Georgia a few months ago, and noticed that almost every weigh station I passed was closed. If trucks are carrying illegal weight and it’s a safety hazard, why aren’t these spots open? If it’s no big deal, then why make truckers pull over to be weighed on occasion?
My WAG on the subect is that:
[ol]
[li]It would take too much money to keep all the stations open 24/7.[/li][li]If the truckers don’t know when a specific station will be open, a random check may be just as much a deterrent as checking every truck.[/li][/ol]
And, if every truck had to stop at every weigh station, they’d never get to where they were going.
The weigh stations are used to spot check. There might be one or two crews in a state who travel from one to another during the week, so that you just happen to be missing them.
A spot check works by keeping the truckers honest. The idea is that they don’t know when they might run into a check*, so they avoid being overweight.
*Though since they have CB radios, I imagine they can get a warning and turn off the road.
The intent of weigh stations is to keep trucks within the legal limits, for a variety of safety and road-maintenance reasons.
Keeping every weigh station open at all times is a waste of state law enforcement manpower and resources. Having them situated where it is difficult to legally run a truck through a state in reasonable time without passing one, and opening it at random unannounced times, as a spot-check on trucks on that road at that time, serves the same purpose – that of ensuring that truckers keep their vehicles within the legal limits – at far lower cost.
There is probably declining funding priority.
In some areas, there are portable weighing units and even “weigh in motion” devices that fill some of the need. And as already been noted, the fixed sites aren’t as useful as before because overweight trucker may be able dial up a buddy in front of him to see if a station is open.
If I am not mistaken, the inclusion of weigh stations was necessary for the procurement of Federal funding.
However, the maintenance of same was not.
I’m having trouble getting through funding statutes to find out. Anyone have backup/refutation for this?
You know, this is funny, but there’s a spot on I-77 in Ohio between Akron and Uniontown Ohio that has more consistent weight enforcement by the State Highway Patrol than most weight stations. I’ll drive by and see not one but two Ohio “Motor Carrier Enforcement” Police Interceptors with two semis pulled over.
The Master’s minions speak. Maybe budget cutbacks but not conclusive.
Darn it, now I’ve got Weird Al Yankovic’s “Truck Driver Song” in my head.
Incidentally, I once drove my little 1981 Toyota Corolla wagon onto one of those truck scales. The station was closed, but the scale still registered my car’s weight. With me and a slight-of-build passenger in the car, the scale waffled between displaying 2400 and 2600 pounds. This means that (A) my car only weighed slightly over a ton, and (B) the scale in question could only read weights in 200-pound increments, so it wouldn’t be very useful at seeing how well I’ve stuck to my diet.
I’ll have to try weighing my car some time.
And, actually, if you were really, really fat, you might be able to use that to track weight loss.
Are you talking about going around a weigh station? You do not want to get caught doing that in the state of Indiana. It can seriously [del]fuck up[/del] ruin your day. A ticket that will cost you hundred$ of dollar$, and if you are overweight they will have you call your company and make you wait on another truck to take the excess off (as has happened to a friend of mine, 14 hours in a weigh station before he finally got back on the road). While they’re waiting one trooper will go over your truck with a fine tooth comb while the other trooper will make sure you’re not pencil-whippin’ your logbook. Everything had better be right.
*I am not a truck driver, but I used to ride with one all the time for something to do.
See the famous thread about weigh stations.
I remember driving along a major freeway a few weeks back and seeing dozens of trucks in every possible rest stop and petrol station for a hundred km or so. Turns out there was a weigh station operating just ahead, and presumably everyone had got on the CB and got the word out.
That is very strange. In 15 years or so of writing software to read electronic scale heads on truck scales I don’t recall that I’ve ever seen one that didn’t read increments of .01 percent of range. For 200,000 lb scales (which is pretty much standard for truck scales) that gives you 20 pound increments.
That scale must have had some serious problems. I wouldn’t trust the weight displayed on that scale.
I’ve been working in and around the trucking industry for ten years. A twenty pound error on a truck scale is total fantasy.
I didnt see it in the OP, but dont most Truckers drive at night and Early morning? Could it be that if the stations do indeed open, that they do so at these off times?
You misread, I didn’t say a 20 pound error, I said 20 pound increments on the readout.
Although many people get them confused, readability is different from accuracy. And repeatability (the third important measure of instrument “accuracy”) is different from both of those.
I’m fairly certain 20 pound increments are the most common most truck scales, at least scales with electronic readouts manufactured in the last 10 years or so. As I said, I’ve been writing software for over 15 years that interfaces with truck scales, and off the top of my head, virtually all of the electronic heads I’ve seen in that time have used 20 pound increments (or the equivalent in tons or kilos).
I think plus or minus 20 pound accuracy is possible on a truck scale, but would be extremely difficult to maintain, and would take a very heavily built platform, more expensive than normal load cells, better summing cards, etc.
I’d have to check with my brother (who has been installing and calibrating truck scales for years) but I believe the standard accuracy on a properly calibrated scale is two or three divisions, which would give you plus or minus 40 to 60 pounds.
This implies that an actual weight of 15000 pounds could be indicated as anywhere from 14,940 to 15,060, a 120 pound spread. Depending on the repeatability, you would typically get a little better than that, as any one scale will usually repeat at a little better than the accuracy.