Thursday, March 30, 2006

Truckers beware! If you're illegal...EPD and ODOT are looking for you

KVAL--

Eugene police teamed up with the Oregon Department of Transportation and the Lane County Sheriff's weighmasters at a site in West Eugene.

" patrol cars stopped truckers within a five-mile radius of the operation. David Gaffney, with ODOT's motor carrier enforcement said, "Eugene police department in the Lane County Sheriff's weighmasters are actively patrolling this area. When they see a truck that might have a safety war overweight problem. They bring them over here to do an inspection and weighing of the truck."

Officials issued plenty of citations and fines.


3 comments:

jeff said...

Well, if they are illegal, they ought to be stopped.

Too bad they won't take the same attitude on illegal immigrants.

Anonymous said...

I dated a guy years ago that got a job driving a semi with no experience. He lied on his application and no one checked it out. They simply gave him an 18 wheeler and sent him on a run. If we consider a car a weapon, what the heck is a semi? WMD. If they are illegal - get them off the road.

Scottiebill said...

As a retired trucker, 23 years in oil field trucking in Montana and Alberta down to Texas and Oklahoma, and 22 more years in local and long-haul out here, with more than 3,500,000 miles with two chargeable accidents, I have to agree that we must get the unsafe drivers off the road using just about any means available to us. But, getting the unsafe drivers off the road should not limit the police to targeting only truckers. They have to go after those younger drivers with their hopped up, loud cars that try to get from one end of I-205 to the other, about 35 miles, in 20 minutes. And, of course, there are numerous other violators out there also.

The only way that can be done is to get more State Police on the road, something the Oregon legislature is very reluctant to do, given their lack of response in supplying the necessary funding to do so.

One of my sons is a State Patrolman in Montana with 17 years in the Patrol. Montana has the same problem as Oregon: Too many people on the road and way too few policemen to work the roads. Montana has over 7,000 miles of highways and about 130 State Patrolmen. My son tells me that at any given moment, they have only an average of 17 men on patrol, with the others having scheduled times off, vacations, illness, etc.

Oregon and Washington have the same problem as Montana, as, I'm sure, many other states do -- no funding to put more people out there to try to control things. The states have legislatures that either cannot or will not provide the money for new policemen and their needed training and equipment, including fully equipped cars, uniforms, firearms, and all the other necessary items too numerous to mention.

Until the legislatures get off their collective butts and provide the states with the necessary law enforcement tools, things will remain at the unacceptable levels they are now.

Another thing: Don't blame only the truckers for the myriad of violations and accidents out there. It is true that some of them are in violation of the the DOT Safety Regulations, but better than 95% of the truckers are good, law-abiding drivers who do not deserve to be tared with the same brush as their violating colleagues. Get the bad ones off the road and leave the good ones alone to provide us all with the things we use every day. For without them, we would have nothing.