If they're looking to improve tire energy efficiency with regulation, shouldn't they also make it a citable offense to drive with tires inflated below 30psi? You could probably even train a ML algorithm to recognize images of vehicles with underinflated tires, and send the driver a reminder!
That’s probably sooner than you think.
DOTs are intercepting trucks with drones and measuring wheel temperatures and other metrics to do targeted enforcement rather than pulling over every truck. There’s also pilots of road sensors that can weigh trucks and perhaps other metrics.
Which really is just a revenue game but one with a good eough pretext you can sell it to average dumbass voter. All the "serious" overloading is non-CDL box trucks anyway and has been forever. The road scales are easily gamed, or just avoided.
> The road scales are easily gamed, or just avoided.
How are they easily gamed, without being able to shift the load as you roll over the scale?
And, at least in California, the scales are placed so that, to avoid them, you have to add a bunch of time to most routes.
You shift your route. Not the load
> The road scales are easily gamed, or just avoided.
Yes, they stated that in the second half, and I addressed it. What's the first half?
Most scales don't even log/alert/flag weights below the maximum legal axle weight or axle group weight. So a 2-axle truck can weigh 40k and nobody will hear about it. In the event that they're fancy and integrated with an ALPR (assuming your plate is readable, lots of ways to game that on a box truck) the scales don't typically extend onto the paved shoulder. Even if they do you slow down and drop a tire off the pavement. And if all that fails, if you have air suspension you can dump the axle as the truck is going over the scale.
Ah thanks! So a design/operation flaw of the scales! I didn't realize they were run/monitored so incompetently, where concepts like "make sure the truck is actually on the scale" were ignored. But, I'm in no way surprised! That's governing bodies for ya!
Overloading is for trucks what speeding is for cars. They don't really "care" beyond revenue as long as you're not absurd about it. The rules were never written to be fully enforced.
Once you understand this the whole system makes sense.
We are part way there, gas stations are required to provide free air and a gauge to customers buying gas.
As a Scandinavian that sounds normal, and has been my entire life. In fact you don't need to buy gas to use the free air or water, it is just out in the open in a service cabinet or on the side of the building. (There is sometimes a sign that the water is only for cleaning your windows / mixing windshield fluid from concentrate, not for filling up RVs, and the flow is very slow.)
I'm curious, do they actually check that you buy gas in the US before letting you get those services?
Free air is very common these days. I don't think a purchase has ever been required for free air anywhere I've been. Occasionally you need to go in and get a free token since the air machine is still coin operated, but I've never been asked to prove a purchase.
The one near my house has a card reader :(
Doesn't TPMS take care of that? Though, it seems like it's being done in software now to save costs...
Then people will drive around with them at 60psi (i.e. doable but not great for a car tire) and wonder why they keep breaking belts.
Because that could not also be a citable offense?
We could also make cooking up hair brained schemes to regulate minutia a citable offense.
I would argue that someone driving around with 60 psi in tires that are supposed to be 33 is a smidgeon more than minutiae, since there is a real risk.