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Truck Drivers Falter Under the Weight of High Fuel Prices

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The driver before Bazzoon had to leave his trailer because of a cracked leaf spring on the rear suspension. The Peterbilt had made it to the front of the line, and Bazzoon paced nervously as an officer crawled along the asphalt under his trailer.

"They're hungry. They're running me over pretty good," Bazzoon says.

The officer under the trailer called another inspector to the rear of the trailer.

"Damn," Bazzoon says, "this is a bad place."

Despite a close call with a thin crack on his trailer, Bazzoon passed through the inspection without violation.

The battle between truckers and highway cops has been immortalized in song and movie. One anthem among truckers, "Convoy" by C.W. McCall, is about a group of truckers trying to avoid police while making a cross-country haul.

By the time we got into Tulsa town, we had 85 trucks in all.

But theys a roadblock up on the cloverleaf, and them bears was wall-to-wall.

Yeah, them smokies is thick as bugs on a bumper, they even had a bear in the air.

I says, callin' all trucks, this here's the duck. We about to go a-huntin' bear.

The song is one of Travers's favorites, and he calls police "bears" and weigh stations, where police often wait to inspect trucks, "chicken coops."

Travers says there are three bad chicken coops between Houston and San Antonio, and a notorious coop on the Louisiana/Mississippi state line. The scales place the truck in both states, and Travers says it's not unusual for officers from both sides to write tickets while the truck is on the scales.

When the police are camped out in one spot, truckers are quick to alert one another over the radio. The overpass near Exit 815 on Interstate 10, west of Houston, has become a well-known spot for police to nab speeding truckers.

Police have the authority to pull over truckers anytime, without probable cause, for a safety inspection. And according to Travers, a ticket is almost guaranteed.

"You're hauling lumber and it's been raining all day, of course your load is overweight," Travers says. "[The police] don't take that into consideration. You could take a brand-new truck two miles down the road and they'll find something wrong with it."

If the trucker is lucky, Travers says, he'll encounter an officer on a good day, and despite the number of violations, the cop will simply write a seatbelt ticket, whether the driver was wearing a seatbelt or not.

The number of government regulations is also growing, and new idling laws have angered truckers. California was the first state to pass such a law, which makes it illegal for a trucker to park with his truck running for longer than five minutes. Texas has not passed similar state legislation, but Dallas recently passed a five-­minute idling ordinance.

The law is environmentally based, to cut emissions, but without idling, the trucker has no air conditioning or heat, which makes it nearly impossible to sleep in the truck. Some larger truck stops have installed equipment that provides air and heat from an outside source, but charge $10 to $15 an hour for truckers to connect.

Truckers have tried to beat the idling laws by traveling with a dog. According to Travers, few police will make a trucker turn off the air or heat with a dog in the truck. Poodles and Chihuahuas are ­favorites.

Parking is another growing problem. Many cities have outlawed truck parking on the shoulders of exit ramps, and businesses have stopped allowing trucks to stay in their lots overnight.

Wal-Mart, which was a longtime haven for truckers looking for parking, no longer allows it. (Williams says that truckers may have burned bridges with Wal-Mart by constantly leaving jugs full of urine in parking lots).

Cary Courtier, a driver out of Lufkin, idled in the Hollywood parking lot, waiting to be inspected. He had driven a refrigerated load of produce from Kentucky to Houston.

In Arkansas, he had planned to stop at a favorite truck stop overnight. The lot was full, and he had to continue another 60 miles before reaching another stop. When Courtier stopped for fuel in Dallas, several truckers were standing on the scales, blocking the drivers in a protest of diesel prices.

Courtier had waited for the inspection for nearly two hours. He figured he had burned about five gallons of fuel, and lost a good portion of his driving time.

"One guy came up and talked to me, that's about it," Courtier says. "With all this going on, you kind of like to get on and drive."

The government program that perhaps has angered truckers the most is opening the border to allow Mexican trucks to drive in the United States. Current laws set a 25-mile boundary north of the border.

The U.S. Department of Transportation launched a one-year pilot program, which allows a limited number of Mexican trucks in the country, in September 2007. After heavy opposition, Congress passed a bill to cut funding of the program.

The Bush administration ruled that the bill was worded in a way that applied only to future Mexican truck programs, and the pilot program ­continues.

Norita Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, says that Mexican trucks are a bigger threat to independent drivers than rising fuel costs.

"The assumption is that diesel prices won't just keep going up and up and up. They'll eventually level off," Taylor says. "Mexican trucks, once you open that, it's like putting toothpaste back into a tube. And we feel like we can do something about the Mexican trucks. We can't control fuel prices."

The Mexican truck program is a main issue on which the OOIDA differs from the American Trucking Association, the nation's largest trucking organization, which represents big trucking companies.

Clayton Boyce, a spokesman for the ATA, says much of the fear among American drivers about Mexican trucks taking their business is unwarranted. It's more efficient for truckers to haul freight through open borders, Boyce says, and drivers and shipping companies should be able to make money in that system.

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