Overweight tickets

I don't know the OP's situation but there are other situations to consider.

In some circles, it's just part of the job/business. Consider cattle, grain, equipment, etc. May not be a permanent scale anywhere between the shipper and the receiver, let alone a certified scale close to the loading point.

Load of cows ... Grossed ok. Axled ok. However some of the cows decided to move around over that last 400 miles, now you're over axle at the scale house. How was the driver supposed to deal with that situation and expected to be held responsible for the fine? And let's be honest, many of the overweight citations written are more for revenue than "safety".

 

They are all about revenue. If the weren't they would not issue a permit for it.

 

When you run over weight, you're actually being paid less.

If they pay you $100 bucks a load and they say pull 5 loads today at 20% overweight, you really hauled 6 loads for 5 loads pay and you gave away $100 bucks of your own money back to the carrier.

 

I'm paid by the ton, and my company will pay for any gross or axle overweight ticket as long as we only gross 82000 on the quarry ticket.

When I ran brine tankers they paid overweight tickets also, but again this is DFW metro and not crossing state lines.

I'll agree with the posts above about triggering a level 4 from being overweight, even just a few hundred over will often get you called back to the inspection area. I think everyone puckers a bit when they see DOT pull out the creeper and flashlights.

 

The nice thing is that overweight tickets aren't moving violations so don't show up on your MVR. They aren't criminal offenses so no criminal record. And they won't show up on an inspection so no CSA worries.

I've only ever had two. The first one was pulling cans out of Harrisburg, PA. Got caught over axle on I83 in MD. Apparently the can was loaded weird as I had the tandems all the way forward and was still over on drivers, nothing I could do about it since it was sealed and I had no bills stating weight. The company I was with paid that one. The 2nd one was about 2 years ago, load of paper rolls coming out of Carthage, NY. Trusted the guy loading me to get it legal as he sounded like knew what he was doing. Nope. Was 1.4k over on my trailer. Got popped just inside OH on I90. Ticket wasn't bad so I paid it myself on the spot and didn't even report it to my company. Actually, Ohio makes you pay before you leave anyway, whether by credit card, check, etc.

This last company I was with ran a lot of grain containers that were almost always overweight. We only had permits for one single customer. So most of the time we were running fairly over gross and axle. When I brought that fact up to the ops manager he said that they'd pay any overweight tickets but that it hadn't happened in years since we never went through scales. *shrug* Good enough for me. As long as I knew I was heavy I could drive properly for the weight and the equipment could handle it.

 

I would find another company to drive for.You can bet you'll haul many over weight loads and many inspections to boot.You don't wanna give the DOT reason to inspect you which will cause you delays fines all bad stuff.

 

You can purchase a permit for a million pounds and haul God's stuff. The secret is having the equiptment that spreads the weights to 34K or less per tandem set of wheels. You will see that you can put down 150 ton transformers onto a road when you have something like 10 axles and spread over the pavement. The last one that passed our two lane road (64) had about 30 sets of duals. There is a bridge they must challenge to cross to get on the freeway north for St Louis and beyond. It's a nice bridge, deliberately overbuilt by the state to accept such loading.

Overweight permits, overlength etc you can get into some big time trucking. There is a lot of engineering that goes into heavy haul. When I had container work in my time we had two states worth of overweight permits, MD and VA for 100K so that we can grab any old box and take it to the port without getting a stack of tickets. Some boxes though came in heavier than that. It seemed I was always heavy. I remember a 20 foot shipping container on a triple axle chassis that scaled at 60000 back there. The cat scale took the weight without too much problem thankfully. But it was overweight. VA did not contest this one likely because of that 100K permit in my truck.

 

I'm overweight all the time but then have permits to back it up

 

You can go well over 34k on a tandem with a permit. NC will allow 50 or 25k per axle. Heck they even allow certain segments 90k or better without permits. I think Ga allows log trucks 90 or 95k

 

I'm not arguing that there has to be a limit. Or that there shouldn't be penalties for exceeding it. Just that it is NOT unsafe to have 81,000 on a 5 axle combo