Canadian Truck Size and Weight Policy Development: Are There Lessons for the U.S.?
Canada has ten provinces and three territories, each with responsibility for truck size and weight regulations. These regulations became increasingly diverse by the mid 1970’s, and resulted in many vehicles with undesirable dynamic performance and/or excessive impact on infrastructure. The provinces determined that the diversity in regulations was a barrier to internal trade, and collectively, created a process that has now effectively harmonized them. This paper documents the history of changes made by the provinces through the 1970’s and 1980’s, the process used to harmonize them, and describes how the process continues to be used today to maintain the regulations. The paper identifies steps taken in the 1970’s and 1980’s that resulted in unexpected and undesirable outcomes, and steps taken during the harmonization process that resulted in the intended outcomes. These provide useful technical lessons, which may be of use to the U.S. federal government, a state, or a group of states, if any should choose to make changes to their truck size and weight regulations. The process used in Canada was administrative and non-political, and it had a well focused purpose of achieving size and weight harmonization to increased transport efficiency and national competitiveness. The subject matter contained was complied for a research project titled “Review of Canadian Experience with Large Commercial Motor Vehicles” sponsored by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP).
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Supplemental Notes:
- The DVD lists the title of this paper as: Canadian Truck Size and Weight Policy Development: Are There Lessons for the United States?.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Woodrooffe, John
- Billing, John R
- Middleton, Dan
- Sweatman, Peter F
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2011-1-23 to 2011-1-27
- Date: 2011
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: DVD
- Features: References;
- Pagination: 16p
- Monograph Title: TRB 90th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Commercial vehicle operations; Oversize loads; Overweight loads; Policy making; Size and weight regulations; Standardization; Trucking
- Geographic Terms: Canada; United States
- Subject Areas: Highways; Motor Carriers; Policy; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01340449
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 11-3866
- Files: TRIS, TRB
- Created Date: May 18 2011 1:23PM