Drivers risk $1,000 fines as cops launch crackdown on 'stuckages' – a second violation will cost you $4,000 | 1ES3N93 | 2024-05-07 12:08:01
DRIVERS face several new thousand-dollar fines on a stretch of highway as emergency services attempt to clear the roadway of stuck vehicles.
Vermont's Agency of Transportation is reconstructing a portion of the highway to warn drivers about the "stuckage" road laws.
Route 108, which traverses the tree-lined mountainside of Smugglers' Notch, is a winding, two-lane road.
Tourists come to the community year-round to hike, camp, visit breweries, and take in natural granite quarries, according to Visit The USA.
However, the roadway's construction proved difficult for tractor-trailer drivers and trucks with long trailers.
"It's notoriously tricky, it's very, very tight," Todd Sears, a VAT spokesperson, told Burlington's NBC affiliate WPTZ.
"It's got sharp, sharp angles. And consequently, we have tractor-trailers that get stuck."
The agency is building "chicanes" along the highway to stop drivers from getting stuck.
Temporary orange warning barrels and curbs are set to be placed along the entry points to the highway.
The chicanes will mimic the angular curves in the middle of the highway.
Drivers who cannot weave through the entrance obstacles will be able to back up and find another route.
"It essentially mimics the geometry that you would find up top down lower on the mountain so that the tractor-trailer, when it's coming up, has to negotiate a particularly tight turn," Sears added.
<!-- End of Brightcove Player --> "It should not be able to make it through that turn and it's able to just back out and turn around."
In the past three years, five truck drivers have been unable to negotiate curves in the swerving highway, creating "stuckages."
The stopped trucks have complicated emergency services on the highway.
Truckers are susceptible to $1,000 fines the first time their truck is stopped on the highway's curves.
If drivers are stopped a second time on the winding road, police will give them a $4,000 fine.
Other vehicles, particularly RVs and trucks towing long trailers, are also susceptible to stoppages.
Sears said that the VAT will continue to enforce the fines after the chicane construction.
<p class="article__content--intro"> Whether in a big or small rig, there are a few things every traveler should know before hitting the road </p> </div> </div> If the VAT determines the temporary measures prevented truck stoppages, more permanent measures will be built into the highway.
VAT wrote in a memo that it hopes to build permanent structures to "stop trucks and also look attractive."
The agency plans to study the temporary warnings for one to two years.
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