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Believing the nonsense spouted by the press and disinformation from the Highway Patrol concerning why a tractor-trailer rig carrying hazardous material overturned north of Seneca Missouri means the roads will become more dangerous while the real causes behind the accident intensify.
Every trucker knows full well why the truck simply didn't go directly down I-44. It was to avoid bureaucratic harassment from room-temperature-IQ governmentgungoons collecting revenue under color of safety regulation. Weigh stations are state customs posts where badged fascist nitwits who wouldn't last a week on the road paw through all the papers, looking for an excuse to write a ticket for something or another. Once the ticket has been written it is usually an afterthought to correct the alleged weight or safety infraction. Small companies, which cannot afford to retain lawyers or a permits staff, are especially targeted by these state revenue road agents. If you are carrying hazmat, then along with the usual placards you might as well put one up saying "Kick Me, Please."
Some states, like Tennessee, California, and Mississippi put their scales at natural choke points like mountain passes and rivers. These scales cannot be avoided. So the strategy used by truckers is the same survival strategy used by herd animals avoiding predators: Since every truck must pass by that scale, there are so many that it will only be three or four trucks an hour which get "the treatment." The remaining tens of thousands will pass on through. It is the noticeably weak truck which gets pulled over.
The scales on Mile Marker 3 are political, not geographical scales. Having fewer trucks pass through, they have more time to harass truckers under color of law. They are easily avoided by the local trucking companies which have unwritten policies of avoidance. The driver who made the mistake should have gone through Seneca to U.S. 60 then joined up at I-44 in Oklahoma, Truckerese for "Land of Very Few Scales."
It is in trying to avoid these non-geographic political customs houses that a large percentage of accidents occur. Sleepy, dangerous, outlaw truckers and unsafe trucks dodge these scales. Not a single trucker alive hasn't broken a few rules to avoid harassment. If the scale on I-44 had the reputation of merely weighing the trucks and having the shipper pay the overweight fine instead of the driver, or of selling trip permits instead of fining the driver for ten times what the permit costs, then the driver probably would have taken the straight shot to Oklahoma.
Instead, these unConstitutional customhouses continue preying on interstate commercial traffic under color of safety regulation. They will blame the body count and property loss on some trucker who took shortcuts to save money to feed his family. The trucker will be fired, maybe spend a few years in jail, and the carnage will continue. And most of you reading this will continue to back the authorities playing their little power/revenue/regulation games all the way to the morgue.
Martin Lindstedt
Granby
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