Hearing Set on Truck Routing

State Sen. Joe Dunn has called a legislative hearing to clarify whether Caltrans plans to proceed with an automated permit system for oversized trucks to prevent accidents such as one that killed an Orange County motorist 3 1/2 years ago.

Dunn, a member of the Senate Transportation Committee, has scheduled a hearing for Thursday to determine if Caltrans still plans to buy the $13-million computer system designed to streamline the permit process for oversized trucks.

Dunn wants to know about potential cuts in staffing.

“They are now studying the issue after spending $2 million, and they are proposing the layoff of 15 people in the permit office as an interim measure,” the Democrat from Garden Grove said. “As an outsider looking in, it looks like we are going back to where we were before.”

Caltrans officials said they are independently evaluating whether the fully automated system is safer and more cost-effective than improvements already in place. It is premature to say whether the office’s 54-member staff will be reduced, they said.

Over the last three years, legislators, truckers and a variety of agencies, including Caltrans, have called for a fully automated system in the wake of government hearings and a May 2000 audit that found that Caltrans had misrouted more than 30 oversized trucks on state highways between 1996 and 1999.

Some errors resulted in serious accidents, including the death of Tam Trong Tran in July 1999 and a bridge collapse in Lompoc three months later. The 36-year-old Westminster man was killed after a tanker truck struck an overpass on the Riverside Freeway near Anaheim. The 15-foot-high truck had been granted a permit for the route, despite the fact that the overpass was 2 inches too short -- 14 feet, 10 inches high.

The audit concluded that the permit office was understaffed and the system of hand-processing permits raised the risk of human error. It recommended that Caltrans improve training and devise a computer system to effectively block permits for vehicles too big for local conditions.

Before a permit is granted, Caltrans reviews highway construction projects, bridges and road characteristics along proposed routes to ensure they are safe for oversized trucks.

Caltrans officials say that for the last three years they have partly automated the permit office, added 15 employees and two supervisors, improved training and overhauled policy to make sure highway information is up-to-date and permits are double-checked before they are issued.

Consequently, Caltrans officials said, they have not misrouted a single oversized truck out of almost 370,000 permits issued in 2001 and the first nine months of 2002, the latest figures available.

As a result, Caltrans began evaluating whether the automated system called for in mid-2000 would improve on the current system. If so, they said, the agency would be prepared to invest the required $13 million.

“Safety is our primary concern, and we want to make the best decision for the users of the system as well as taxpayers,” Caltrans spokesman Dennis Trujillo said. “We don’t have a bias toward any one solution.”

Representatives of the truck industry say there may be room for improvements in service and efficiency, but they said they haven’t received any recent reports of permit errors involving oversized trucks.

“We support whatever technology helps us and Caltrans conduct business in a safe and timely manner,” said Beau Biller, director of legislative affairs for the California Trucking Assn., which represents about 2,500 companies. “Some form of automation makes sense, but we don’t care what the brand is.”