The Scourge of the Too-Big Rigs

The word is spreading at the truck stops of Kern County: CHP Officer Bill Martin has an eagle eye for big rigs.

Martin can tell a 53-foot trailer from a 48-footer from 100 yards away while traveling at 55 mph.

He can tell you the dimensions of cabs and hitches, the dates of obscure amendments to county codes, and, just in case you ask, the quantity of vegetables a trailer can legally hold.

Most of all, Martin knows when a truck is too long for the road, and has no compunction about pulling out his citation book.

Since last September, when he returned to highway duty from his previous post at the Grapevine truck scales on Interstate 5, Martin has written more than 400 tickets for such “over-length” trucks--something no one else thought to do before.

In so doing, this lone, by-the-book patrolman has sent tremors up and down the long straight highways around Bakersfield. Truckers are irate, farmers riled, and county officials are calling for public meetings.

Even newcomers to Kern County, such as New York trucker Ray Boskat, have heard the rumblings. “I have to just risk it,” said a gloomy Boskat, who heard of Martin’s doings at Bruce’s Truck Stop, a local stopover.

The problem is partly administrative: Kern County has not designated certain local roads as safe for trucks, an oversight that the county says it will swiftly address now that Martin has made it an issue.

The 28-year California Highway Patrol veteran says he can’t help it that his trained eyes--honed by years of weighing trucks--instantly perceive the size of a passing trailer.

He didn’t mean to make such trucks his specialty, he said. But they just kept appearing. “They are all over the place,” said Martin, 49. “I am out in flat farmland and I can just look over the grapes and see ‘em right away.”

Nor, Martin said, did he mean to become the No. 1 ticketer in his area office, something he admits only reluctantly.

Many of today’s larger trucks are built to federal standards that allow single trailers of up to 53 feet in California. With a cab, the overall length of the vehicles often exceed the state limit of 65 feet, said Warren Hoemann, vice president of the California Trucking Assn.

The trucks are free to use state or interstate highways, but county roads are off limits unless they are approved access routes. Violators are subject to a $76 ticket.

The problem in Kern County is that access routes were never designated on roads frequently used by trucks, a process designed to ensure that turns can be made safely. According to Gus Pivetti, a county traffic engineer, a process was set up once, but never completed. No one paid much attention, since no one was enforcing the rules.

Until now. Martin makes no apologies. The truckers “have kind of been ignored and they are just kind of running amok,” he said, speaking in a clipped, businesslike staccato--the same voice he says he uses with miscreant drivers.

Martin said big trucks on old farm roads pose a safety hazard when turning, and residents of roadside farmhouses had complained. “No one had addressed it,” he said. “So I started addressing it.”

But what to Martin was strictly business “hit like bomb” one day recently at Kirschenman Enterprises, a produce warehouse east of Bakersfield, five miles from the highway ramp, said Wayne Kirschenman.

When Kirschenman heard that every one of the trucks rolling into his warehouse for loads of watermelons had been ticketed, “I was almost hysterical,” he said. “My father was in this business since ’37. We never had this problem before.”

Kirschenman appealed to CHP dispatchers, but was told that Martin would hold firm. “He said ‘the law is the law,’ ” Kirschenman said, wonder still in his voice.

City and county officials have responded. They have gotten about a dozen applications from industries seeking to have the roads they use designated as truck access routes. Public hearings are planned. Martin has agreed to a truce on the pending routes.

But that still leaves miles of other open farm roads in Kern County for him to ticket at will. Not too long ago, he said he came across an 85-foot car carrier, zooming merrily along a little two-lane country road.

It turned out the trucker, was “just sightseeing,” Martin recalled.

And for just a second, Martin’s official monotone betrays a hint of emotion--a faint trace of contempt for what to his eyes is a flouting of the law.