Increasing truck weights is simply a bad idea, according to the executive director of the National Association of County Engineers.
“If you want to put heavier trucks on the roads and the bridges, you’re asking for some sort of catastrophe at some point,” Kevan Stone told Land Line Now in a recent interview.
Stone said that proposals such as increasing the maximum truck weight to 91,000 pounds raise safety concerns. In addition, he said that heavier trucks essentially create an unfunded federal mandate for local and state governments, which will need to repair roads and bridges sooner.
“If you increase the weight of trucks on that bridge, you are in theory shortening the lifespan of that bridge, and there is no funding available to address that sped-up timeline,” Stone said. “It just creates a very large burden on local governments … that are in charge of maintaining that infrastructure.”
The National Association of County Engineers is one of the 26 organizations that make up the Coalition Against Bigger Trucks.
In March, the coalition released a study indicating that increasing the maximum truck weight from 80,000 to 91,000 pounds would place between 65,157 and 82,457 local bridges at risk. Even more, the study found that replacing those bridges would come with a price tag between $70.6 and $98.6 billion.
“These at-risk bridges represent a sizable portion of the nation’s bridge infrastructure, located on local roads and highways that are critical for everyday transportation and commerce,” the study stated.
The American Society of Civil Engineers 2025 Report Card gave America’s Roads a D+ and its bridges a C.
Highway bill
Recent efforts to increase truck size and weight limits have fallen short as standalone bills. However, Congress will soon be working on the next highway bill, and proponents of heavier trucks will likely attempt to attach the provision to a larger package.
Ryan Lindsey, who was representing the Shippers Coalition, told lawmakers at a recent House hearing that an 11,000-pound increase would be “modest.”
“One such proposal is a pilot program to modestly increase the gross-vehicle-weight limit on the interstate system from the current limit of 80,000 pounds to 91,000 pounds or the bridge formula limit, whichever is lower, for vehicles while operating in the program,” Lindsey said. “This proposal would impose important conditions on participation that protect the public interest, including the addition of the extra axle, weight distribution requirements of the bridge formula and per-axle limits.”
At the same hearing, representatives of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Truckload Carriers Association all spoke in opposition of heavier trucks. OOIDA and the Teamsters also are part of the Coalition Against Bigger Trucks.
“Some shippers, large carriers and specific industries continue to claim increasing truck size and weight is good for trucking,” OOIDA Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh said in his testimony. “Make no mistake, these are losing propositions for truckers and highway safety. I want to especially caution new members of the committee about supporting these controversial proposals – one vote to increase today’s limits will have every group that wants special treatment expecting you to support their specific carve-out for the rest of your tenure.”
Stone said that the motivation for heavier trucks comes from corporate interests and not the general public.
“All the data shows that you’re asking for real problems with our infrastructure if you want to raise the truck size and weight,” Stone said. “I don’t know of anybody that has said, ‘Oh, I wish we had bigger or heavier trucks on the road.’ That could be a citizen driver. That could be an elected official or a county engineer … It just doesn’t make sense to increase the size and weight in terms of motorists on the road and the infrastructure that they drive on.” LL
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