Colorado to Crack down on Truckers

More like reason #421 amirite? Lol

 

Colorado has always been one of the toughest western states on truckers. This isn't surprising.

 

Just my 2 cents, I'm sure the "crash" has a lot to do with it, but Colorado has unique driving for trucks and should step up enforcement. It's not the flatlands of Illinois. I'm not sure what the troopers expect to find, generally, the days of rag tag trucks are pretty much past, and HOS violations too, a thing of the past. I believe, like someone else said, probably more just a show of concern for the public than anything. This state attracts all the tree-huggers and cry babies from other states that want to get high. What's the big mystery? It's not the truck drivers, it's the people that run INTO the semi's. Hy. 285 runs N/S and a 2 lane. Every week, there's a big black blotch, and someone crossed center into a truck. Some say suicide. I don't think weed makes you want to kill yourself, but the trucker gets the heat for just being there.
Better get used to it, I hear Illinois is planning on being the 11th state to legalize it. I'm indifferent about it, mostly because I'm retired, but Colorado took in $288 MILLION DOLLARS last year in taxes on the stuff. They are putting an addition on our hospital, paving our streets, built a new elementary school, ironically, new cruisers to bust the people, and quite frankly, it's very subdued. I don't see people with pipes in their mouths, bumping into things. Those millions are just too hard to ignore. Colorado is still a neat place, maybe not to truck in, but that's always been the case.
Crackdown? What's to crack down on? I still think truck drivers are the best drivers in the world. We've always had a tough ride.

 

I just skip colorado all together... it's only a 50 mile difference to go up to salt lake and take the 80. Or I take the 40 to tucumcari NM and go from there. Don't need the annoying drive on the 70.

 

Yeah, they're stopping everybody. Straight trucks, local dump trucks that never leave town, haven't seen any pickup trucks stopped yet, or these 35 ft. gooseneck living rooms/pickup trucks, but it's a shame it takes an incident like that to step up enforcement, and, I feel it's strictly for show. And again, what do they expect to find? A light out, a brake out of adjustment, maybe, and with automatic slack adjusters, even that is rare nowadays. The days of the beater trucks, and the shmoes that drove them are pretty much over. Years ago, I drove trucks that would curl a troopers hair, if any.

 

All those pills keep big pharma pockets lined.

 

Guess we as drivers got to start heading into these meetings ourselves and throwing up our own opinions to shout down those of the opposition. Of course if a gaggle of drivers show up getting ready for a shouting match, it may or may not turn into one of those recent, crazy instances of a political meeting getting shut down and dispersed after the speaking got too heated.

 

I still think the CA, OR, and WA take the cake for that. But then again, I've only been doing local/regional, NM, OK and TX runs for several years now. I drive up to Boulder from eastern NM quite often in personal or rental cars and haven't really noticed much of an uptick in local or state cops crawling all over the place.

 

Today there were 3 of them working the scales going west. They had one driver park to get a level 3, and a pickup with an empty trailer rolls up to the scale and one of the guys got kind of excited. So they said just make sure the first guy has his CDL and let him go, then pull the hotshot in. It's good that they're targeting all different trucks, but in this instance, the first guy didn't even speak English. He didn't understand that they were asking him when his last inspection was. I'm pretty sure they got kind of tired with the language barrier, but he sure understood when they said to have a nice day and he bolted for the door.