The checks are part of a stepped-up effort to keep oversized, overweight trucks off small roads.
View full sizeState police pull over a truck on state Route 90 just west of King Ferry about 2:50 p.m. Tuesday. They were ticketing tractor-trailer trucks that were too long. Aurora, NY -- State police are continuing a crackdown on tractor-trailers that state law says are too long to travel state Route 90 along Cayuga Lake. On Tuesday, troopers stopped trucks at two sites along the roadway and ticketed drivers of any that were longer than 65 feet.
Wayne Stuart, a trucker from the Saratoga Springs area, was one of them. He said he was issued a ticked as he drove south on Route 90 heading to Lansing in Tompkins County. He was going to the Cargill plant there to pick up a load of salt.
“I was told I had to go to take Routes 5 and 20 to Auburn and then south from there ... adding about 15 to 20 miles onto my trip,” he said. “ I told the trooper ‘You don’t realize what you’re doing to truckers. You’re taking $200 out of my pocket. You’re taking food out of my children’s mouths.’”
The traffic stops and tickets are part of a stepped up enforcement effort by state police of regulations that have been on the books for years, said Sgt. Jeffrey Stahl of the Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Unit at the Canandaigua barracks.
Troopers were checking trucks Tuesday in Aurora and near King Ferry in southern Cayuga County. Stahl said this was the second or third time state police have been out inspecting trucks.
The state Department of Transportation website lists the roads where it is legal for the larger trucks to drive, calling them “designated qualifying and access highways.” State Route 90 north of Gully Road in the town of Ledyard can accept the larger trucks, according to the list. But trucks more than 65 feet long or with trailers more than 48 feet long are banned from the road beyond that point, just north of the village of Aurora.
Transportation officials recently said the state would double inspections of trucks and ban overweight, oversized through-trucks from several roads in the area.
Even truckers like Stuart, making local pickups or dropoffs, must stay off the road if their trucks are too long. To get to the Cargill plant in Lansing, Stuart would have to take Route 34 south out of Auburn.
People in the Finger Lakes area from Skaneateles to Ithaca have been fighting to keep the long-haul big rigs off the small roads winding through their region. At one time, new DOT regulations were being drafted to keep the tractor-trailers off the roadways that cut through the Finger Lakes — especially those that border Cayuga, Owasco and Skaneateles lakes — before settling on more stringent enforcement of existing laws.
The primary routes being targeted by residents in the area were 41-A, 41, 38, 90, 89, 96 and 79, which are in the Skaneateles area, in Cayuga County and through Ithaca.
Some tickets issued earlier this season to Route 90 truckers in Springport were dismissed, because troopers mistakenly set up their inspection station too far north on the roadway where the trucks actually are allowed to travel, Stahl said.
Contact Debra J. Groom at dgroom@syracuse.com, 470-3254 or 251-5586.