You can't park here!

Yeah I remember that brain drain lol.

 

I must be the 1 jerkwad truck driver that tells people to shove it. When I pull the brakes I'm going to bed knocking on my door telling me to move isn't going to get me to. Call the law down there I don't really care if it doesn't say "NO TRUCK PARKING" "NO PARKING" OR "NO OVERNIGHT PARKING" (which I don't park in those places to begin with" the brakes are staying set and I'm not moving. I'm on paper...I can make it look like I have more hours and I can make it look like I'm out of hours.

 

I once parked at a heb grocery store in texas in an area i thought was out of the way. woke up surrounded by cars.. no way out

 

The company i work for primarily does parking lot repair. I've been here 4 years. Usually retail lots and most open lots are 2-4 inches of asphalt which is not enough to maintain repetitive truck traffic. Rarely will we remove failing asphalt and have a true 4-6". The part of an asphalt lot that fails quickest is many times the area by the loading dock. The asphalt simply cannot support the weight without excessive compression which will lead to failure of the asphalt. These repairs are expensive. Depending on the scope of the project figure 5-10 people, billing at $50-75 a manhour, on a 10 hour day, then add the price of materials, fuel etc. I could see business owners wanting to preserve a parking area which doesn't tear up their customers vehicles with damage caused by heavy vehicles.

Remember many of these places only get 1 truck every week or 2 so they don't plan for heavier traffic.

 

I trip plan as much as possible, but sometimes things don't work out the way we want. For instance...last week I was on a run to Albany out of PA. I delivered in the morning (after a split break to be on time), then deadheaded to Mehoopany, picked my load, and then went to the customer to deliver, which was an 11:00pm appointment. When I was empty, I had all of 15 minutes left on my 14. I made it to the Pilot and it was full (12:30am). By the grace of God, a driver was leaving and set me up to get his spot.

Thing is, the customer, who had acres of areas to park, did not allow overnight parking.

As an experienced driver, you should be well aware that as a regional driver (like myself), we sometimes fly "by the seat of our pants", which means no real opportunity to trip plan. In the northeast, where parking is limited, this can be a real problem.

Yes the ultimate resonsibility falls on the driver, but sometimes things don't work out the way they should or we had hoped they would.

 

"20,000 pounds sitting across roughly 1.5 parking spots if you're bobtail. The steers alone weigh roughly the same as 12 cars, and that's just 2 tires so I don't see why you object to my common sense statement."
I think you need to re figure your math. Steer weight can not be the same a 12 cars. (unless your talking about a bumper car) assume a car weigh 4 ,000lbs ea X 12 is not how much weight is on a steer. That amounts to having about 50,000 lbs on a steer. average weight on a steer is 10,500 to 12,000 give or take 1000 lbs depending on wheel base and brand.

 

When on someone else's property and Refusing to move the truck after being asked or refusing to acknowledge the person at the door can lead to at least two things. A ticket for trespassing and having the truck towed. Both are very expensive in the long run. To say nothing of being an idiot that is being part of the problem we all face. One is an ### and we all are tossed into that same bag with them.

 

[QUOTE="semi" retired;4109146]Hi Colorado, wait a sec, the problem isn't so much weight on a particular tire, it's the fact of dragging tandem axles (especially spread axles) that do the most damage.[/QUOTE]

This, I can agree with. Tire scrub and the wear from the way multiple axles want to turn can be hard on pavement.

But, apparently no on else understood what I was getting at. If you have a given amount of weight, it can only go to so many spots on the ground. Steer, drives, trailer axles. Granted, the trailer axles will likely be the lightest when empty, drivers in the middle, steer the heaviest, as regards the weight-per-tire. Even so, when compared against large pickups and SUVs, which are only riding on 4, or maybe six tires, the weight displaced through each tire is not going to be significantly higher.

But, the beautiful thing is, I don't mess with this crap anymore. Running locally has it's advantages, I rarely need to park in a shopping area, and typically, when I am, I'm picking up a machine from a project.

I always preferred turn-outs anyway, and rarely stopped at the mega-truck stops. They're always going to be full, because it's the only name the mega-fleet drivers recognize and the only places the mega-fleets will let them fuel at.

Helps to find some parking when you get off of running just the interstates, too.

20-miles outside of Moses Lake, Washington, which is a reasonably sized place for freight leaving Washington between System Freight taking over the outbound on the man-lifts and the amount of produce (sweet onions) coming out of there.

Coming in on a little Podunk highway, pull into a nice truck stop, huge parking lot, with two other trucks parked at it. Both are actually shut off, rather than idling, or running an APU (it was 50-degrees out, perfect weather to sleep with the truck shut off). Wheeled it, shut down, turned the lights off, not a sound.

Try and find that on any truck stop that sits next to a road that begins with "I"...

 

I would just call and have the truck toured with you in it.

It's private property, they don't need a sign. Actually, give me your address so I can go park my truck in your front yard. It's ok, there's no signs there

 

BS. Give me a break.

My '95 Suburban weighs over 6,000 lbs on 245/75r16 rubber with a contact patch of 7" x 7" = 31 psi
My T800 with its' M11 weighs 10,500 on the 11R22.5 steers with a contact patch of 9" x 9" = 65 psi.

And that's the steers.....the drives don't have but a small fraction of that pressure.

Just throw your made up BS out there like it's a fact though.