“Increasing truck weights is simply a bad idea, according to the executive director of the National Association of County Engineers.

“If you want to put heavier trucks on the roads and the bridges, you’re asking for some sort of catastrophe at some point,” Kevan Stone told Land Line Now in a recent interview.

Stone said that proposals such as increasing the maximum truck weight to 91,000 pounds raise safety concerns. In addition, he said that heavier trucks essentially create an unfunded federal mandate for local and state governments, which will need to repair roads and bridges sooner.

“If you increase the weight of trucks on that bridge, you are in theory shortening the lifespan of that bridge, and there is no funding available to address that sped-up timeline,” Stone said. “It just creates a very large burden on local governments … that are in charge of maintaining that infrastructure.”

The National Association of County Engineers is one of the 26 organizations that make up the Coalition Against Bigger Trucks.”

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