“Heavy commercial trucks, in spite of their positive purpose in moving freight, do great damage to our roadways. It takes almost 10,000 cars to do the damage a single 80,000-pound truck can do. Berks County has had an explosion of warehouses along the Interstate 78 corridor, and even though that’s a positive sign of commerce, it comes with some serious negatives — including quicker deterioration of our roads along with some horrifying accidents involving big trucks. Recently there was a fiery chain-reaction crash that left two people dead, and accidents seem to be occurring with more frequency.
In fact, the most recent study completed in 2016 by the U.S. Department of Transportation, or USDOT, found, unsurprisingly, that the crash rates associated with heavier trucks in states where enough data was available were significantly higher than trucks at or below 80,000 pounds.”