Truck Drivers Are Not The Enemy

Bob Lonsberry



[SIZE=-1]TRUCK DRIVERS ARE NOT THE ENEMY[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]They never stop. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]In New York, the politicians never stop trying to crush the economy and smother people's livelihoods. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]The latest example is the trucks. Earlier this week, without making a ripple, Senator Chuck Schumer and Governor David Patterson announced that they were going to find new ways to get 18-wheelers off local roads. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]The governor has given his Department of Transportation about two weeks to come up with new rules that will force commercial vehicles to the Interstates. The senator said that state troopers and local police would be all over trucks, fining them back onto the superhighways. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]And, as is typical for this species of tyrant, the governor and the senator presented themselves as the people's saviors. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]But they are actually nothing of the sort. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Their move this week will make doing business in New York more expensive, make products bought or manufactured in New York more expensive, and directly put out of business truck drivers who are performing an essential service to society. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Here's the background. New York doesn't have very many Interstates. And the ones it does have are typically at odd right angles which ignore the realities of where people want to go. Also, the state's longest Interstate -- cutting across the most populated cities in upstate New York -- is a substandard toll road whose rates have just gone up. It's a bad and expensive drive that wastes time and fuel by taking people out of their way. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]So truckers leave the Interstate. At a variety of well-established places, drivers will leave the Interstate and take shorter routes across surface roads. Some of these are state roads, some are federal highways -- like the nation-crossing U.S. 20. These routes save fuel, tolls and time. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]And the government wants to stamp them out. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Some people in small towns complain about the trucks that pass through. They say they are dangerous and loud. Objectively, they aren't really either. And when semis are involved in wrecks on these surface roads, most often the accident was the result of driver error on the part of the non-truck. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]But there are not-in-my-backyard complaints about trucks. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]And the governor and the senator have decided to exploit them in order to stick it to truckers. If they are as good as their threats, they will soon make it illegal for the through truckers to leave the Interstates. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]That will increase the amount of money the state makes on tolls. It will increase the amount of money the state and federal governments make on fuel tax. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]It will increase the cost of trucking in New York. It will make the cost of trucked items -- going in or coming out -- more expensive in New York. That will make New York products -- from factories or farms -- more expensive and less competitive, and it will make the things sold in New York stores more expensive. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]And it will put some New York truckers and trucking companies out of business. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]At a time when the expense of being a trucker makes a profit margin almost non-existant, this added expense will be the final straw. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]It will also do harm to the environment and waste fuel by requiring trucks to drive longer distances and release more exhaust than they otherwise would have done. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]The premise of this ridiculous idea is twofold -- that government is intended to be interventionist and dominating, and that somehow truck drivers are a lesser grade of people. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]And that's just flatout wrong. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Truckers are Americans like the rest of us and are as entitled to use a public road as anyone else -- particularly given the fact that they pay more tax to provide that road than do the rest of us. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]For example, in New York, the tax on diesel fuel is 28.9 cents per gallon. Add to that another 3 to 5 percent county sales tax. And don't forget the more than 24 cents per gallon in federal diesel tax. That works out, with today's prices, to about 72 cents per gallon of diesel paid in taxes. That might help us understand why the governor and the senator want to increase the number of gallons of fuel truckers will have to use. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]At any rate, paying that kind of tax ought to earn a trucker the right to use the road that tax built. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Instead, New York wants to gouge some more by pushing trucks to its Thruway, with its newly increased tolls. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]This in bankrupting. It is ridiculous. It is uncalled for and immoral. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]It takes humble transportation companies -- and owner-operators -- and it torpedoes them. Ditto for New York factories and farms that need to truck their goods to market. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Out of one side of their mouthes, the politicians say they want to help the upstate economy. But at the same time they are doing more of the shenanigans that are exactly the sort of tyrannical stupidity that put New York in the toilet in the first place. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Truck drivers are not the enemy. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]The politicans are the enemy. [/SIZE]



[SIZE=-1]And these two are just the latest example.

Bob Lonsberry © 2008​

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