Overweight

[Don Bradner]

The problem is that they want to avoid huge amounts of verbiage. Three or four
lines of large letters, Max.

The Federal DOT recommendation is for 3 signs:

Weigh Station 1 mile.
Weigh Station next exit.
Weigh Station ->.

A fourth sign, specified "if required by law" says

All Trucks
Commercial Vehicles
Next Right

or

All Trucks
Commercial Vehicles
must exit
Next Right

In Maryland's case, they don't require all trucks to stop. Just those over
10,000 lbs GVW. So the important thing to them is to get the "over 5T GVW" into
the sign, and they do it at the expense of the Trucks Commercial part. They
don't want the lighter delivery trucks, which have to stop in many states, from
cluttering things up. The non-standard wording, rather than trying to increase
the number of exiting vehicles, is actually designed to decrease them.

Here's a typical from Colorado, just to show that Maryland is not alone in using
wordage that could possibly be construed to include RVs:

All Trucks
Commercial and
Towed Vehicles
Must Exit
Next Right

But guess what? They don't mean me with my Jeep Liberty toad. I refuse to spend
my time, while traveling down the road, trying to figure out what law a
disgruntled new police officer might mis-apply to me - there's got to be
thousands of such very unlikely possibilities. There's enough real laws I have
to concern myself with!

On 4/6/2007 at 12:47 PM Larry wrote:

>Tom,
>For the most part they are all correct... Now what happens when you get a
>disgruntled police officer that is new to the job and takes the signage
>litterally and then stops you because he thinks you avoided going over the
>scales and issues you a ticket, which you apparently can get squashed,
>then you have to take the time to do this... As I see it, it is easier to
>go over the scales then to take chances that you may be stopped... If
>enough people do this then they will have to change the signage to the
>appropriate wording...

Don Bradner
90 PT40 "Blue Thunder"
Eureka, CA