ac Governor Foster announced Thursday the speed limit for big rigs will drop from 60 to 55 mph on the 17.7 mile Atchafalaya Basin Bridge between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Foster’s directive, which will be implemented as soon as signs can be made and installed, also restricts trucks to the right lane.
The decision comes at the heels of a July wreck on the bridge when an Allied Moving Co. tractor-trailer, never slowing dow acn, plowed into stopped traffic, killing five people, including the driver of truck, a 9-year-old, and a pregnant woman.
In April 1999, Foster dropped the speed limit over the bridge for all vehicles from 70 mph to 60 mph following an accident that killed four people and injured 32.
The new changes are based on the recommendation from an interagency task force formed after the August 1998 wreck. The task force, which consists of representatives from the Louisiana State Police, the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission, the Federal Highway Administration, and acthe Louisiana Motor Transport Association, reconvened in Jun ace of this year and were reviewing recommendations and crash statistics when the fatal 11-vehicle wreck occurred.
Many people in the trucking industry feel the move is wrong and possibly unsafe.
“I don’t think it’s fair,” said South Carolina truck driver Timothy Calicutt, in an interview with the “Lafayette Daily Advertiser.” “The problem is cars cutting us off, causing us to slam on our brakes.”
Also speaking with the “Advertiser,” the President of America’s Independent Truckers Association Larry Daniel said, “Changing the speed limit is the dumbest answer that could be employed.”
Cathy Gautreaux, director of the Louisiana Motor Transportation Association, a commercial trucking association with representation in the task force but does not support the restrictions, told the “Advocate” the directive was hastily conceived and could place motorists at risk.
She said keeping trucks to the right could bottleneck the interstate and prevent trucks from passing much slower vehicles, which could create disastrous results on the very narrow road.
“This is not an attempt to do anything to truckers,” Foster said when making the announcement. “It is an attempt to slow the whole thing down. We have to do better than we have done.”
I agree with Foster. It’s not a vendetta against truck drivers so much as it’s an application of basic physics. Well, because Smokey and the Bandit is the worst movie ever made, maybe I do take a little joy from the restrictions.
I’ve spent a lot of time driving back and forth over the Basin Bridge in my short driving career. I know there aren’t many motorists who strictly adhere to the lower 60 mph speed limit, myself included at one time. I also know the sheer volume of traffic often makes it impossible to maintain anywhere near the safe distances from one car to the next. If I try to leave acroom for the length of six cars, it’s likely six cars will move over into that empty space, regardless if I am in the right or left lane. It’s not uncommon for vehicles driving 70 mph or more to be inches from the next automobile’s bumper and that motorist doing the same thing, and so on, creating a disaster that’s just waiting to happen.
But truckers often make the situation worse. Their height gives them a unique advantage in breaking the law. Because the road is straight and cops have no where to go to catch speeders except for the shoulders, truck drivers can spot police cars for miles from a high rise, making them almost impossible to catch. A common habit is significantly slowing down when approaching a high rise. I’m sure this is partly because of the weight of the load the big-rig is pulling, but it also helps truckers avoid cops and creates traffic flow problems.
Trucks account for 30 percent of the Atchafalaya Basin corridor’s traffic, so if big-rigs are required to stay in the right lane at a slower speed that other traffic, it’s likely trucks will file one after another in the right lane when the roads are busy. The result is truckers’ fields of vision will be significantly reduced, making it much harder for them to spot white Impalas. Viola! Big-rigs are forced into a Catch-22 making it much harder for them to speed without getting caught.
Another thing to take into account when considering Foster’s new restrictions is an 18-wheeler’s weight. Theoretically, a moving vehicle has kinetic energy equal to half the mass times the velocity squared. If I get hit by a big rig, thousands of pounds heavier than most automobiles, the force is much greater than if I were hit by a Ford Taurus, so the severity of a crash, as well as the likeliness of my survival, largely depends on how much the vehicles weigh and how fast they were going. Obviously, dropping the speed limit for trucks doesn’t do much to the overall force of the crash, but it does separate trucks, to some extent, from smaller cars.
According to a Transportation Research Board study, trucks hit more cars and cause more injuries on roads with uniform speed limits. In an eight-month test that split speeds in a Houston corridor by 10 mph, accidents were reduced by 68 percent.
Driving on the road, it’s hard to deny the bridge is unsafe.
I saw the aftermath of that July wreck that killed five people. There was a vehicle so badly burnt only the chassis remained. Another was so smashed it couldn’t have been much more than a yard long. With that tragedy in mind, truckers complain about driving five miles slower, after one of their own killed himself, four other people, and an unborn child?
It seems like such a small price to pay.