California, why, why, why????

So I recently had my own California horror story and I knew it was only a matter of time because who ever said anything good about driving a truck in California? It involves the rotten stinking Port of Long Beach. You know that port right? Sure you do. It is the largest port in the USA and it has NO truck parking. Why of course! What moron figured this out?
Apparently, Californians who live in this area thoroughly enjoy all of the money that the port brings in, but they want to choke anyone who tries to get to that port with exhaust fumes. So someone from CARB did a study of the 710 corridor and found toxic exhaust fumes wafting up from the port. That is not good at all! It was supposedly causing Asthmatic children to pop up everywhere along the highway.

Ok, so now our trucks are actually making cleaner air than they take in, but you still can't park a truck anywhere near the port and you can't open a parking lot to park the truck in either, because the insurance, taxes and locals will put you out of business. Apparently, it is ok to walk around California as a homeless person begging for money (this is my future if I keep driving a truck to California so I always give em a couple of bucks - for when I am shacking up in an alleyway one day).

It is ok to open a strip club that sells alcohol and its ok to park a 40 year old rusty rotting 40 foot RV on any street in Long Beach, just so long as it doesn't say "Trucking" on it. It is ok to cover yourself in tattoo's and body piercings and play earbusting car boomboxes at all hours of the day and night. In some places it is ok to grow marijuana and smoke it so long as your back is in pain.

It is ok to have an engine running on your $1 million yacht or your oil tanker off the coast of Catalina Island for hours on end polluting the precious air. It is ok to have hundreds of oil pump jacks littering the landscape emitting noxious crude oil fumes. It is even ok to drive a semi truck to the port to pick up a container, BUT:

You better not park a semi truck anywhere for any reason in Long Beach, or Palmdale, or any beach for that matter and even though a new truck can go into the port to get a container and then drive 1/2 a mile to just give the 1960 Kenworth the trailer that the container is on to make the trek to Massachusetts. Ok so now that the trucks have been mandated to be cleaner, the air must be like a Summer breeze in a field of lilies right? Ummmm. Well only if that field of lilies is under a cloud of Smog. Yeah I know that us nasty no good trucker (Californian lingo, not mine) morons have been forced to do the unthinkable and that is to clean up our exhaust more than we clean our shorts, but what is everyone else doing?

What about the companies that went right out and bought new equipment to comply with all the regulations and then went bankrupt because the freight fell off? I have been watching the Panama Canal's progress and the progress of the new port in Baja Mexico. These two options should drastically reduce income to California. I agree with what California is trying to do, but not how they are doing it. Why not provide all of the people along 710 with air filter masks or simply tell them to move somewhere that the air is better until the newer trucks are all retrofitted. That is another thing. Even if I were to have all of the latest clean air technology, the port still wouldn't let me in because the model year of the engine isn't new enough. Really? I am not going to go run my business into the ground to clean up the air around the port of Long Beach. I say it should be illegal for people to live around the port. How about that?

Hey California! Open some truck stops for all of the new clean trucks down by the port with rental cars, plenty of parking (because there are acres and acres of vacant land there) with restrooms and a restaurant with a shop. Then you can bring in MONEY to pay your bills! No more IOU's to the tax payers. You can make MONEY off of us truckers. We make money and we spend it on fuel and in truck stops. Yeah instead of writing parking tickets to truckers, you could develop tax revenue for sales of things instead of ripping off truckers for parking. Oh and wait until we have to take a mandatory break after 8 hours On duty. Oh yeah. Maybe we will see the No Truck Parking signs in Long Beach and all over the USA disappearing finally. We can't be restricted from parking for a mandated Hours of Service break after all.