DOT says trucks to stay on Highway 35 for now

After months of studies and deliberation, the Montana Department of Transportation has decided not to enact any sort of truck ban on Highway 35, according to DOT Director Jim Lynch.

The lone exception is a ban on oversize loads, except those with a local delivery on the East Shore.

Lynch said that studies on speed, pavement quality, weight and the Bigfork Bridge’s carrying capability, along with a series of staged and non-staged filming studies, showed the two-lane highway is capable of safely carrying truck traffic.

DOT crews followed both volunteer drivers and random trucks with video equipment to determine whether the trucks could safely navigate the road without crossing the center line. The department also monitored the speed of truckers and motorists on the highway and stepped up the Highway Patrol’s presence.

“Cars and trucks were all in that margin that people drive in Montana — eight to 10 miles per hour over the limit,” Lynch said. “We didn’t see a lot of things that were really alarming to us.”

The renewed push to ban big rigs on the East Shore route came as a result of an accident last spring in which a tanker truck’s “pup” — a smaller trailer towed behind — flipped over and spilled about 5,000 gallons of gasoline into a barrow ditch along the road. None of the fuel made it into Flathead Lake thanks to the low lake level at the time, but five families were forced from their homes because of fuel contamination.

While that was the catalyst for the outcry, it wasn’t just concern for Flathead Lake that the DOT found.

“There are two issues we see here,” Lynch said. “One is that trucks scare people when they’re sharing a narrow roadway and the other is the environmental concerns.”

But, Lynch said, it’s difficult to weigh one side of the lake against the other.

“The problem for us is that it’s environmentally sensitive on the other side too,” he said.

But for some residents of the East Shore, that contention is a stretch.

Woods Bay resident Edd Blackler called the decision a “serious injustice” in a letter to the Eagle.

“The fact that Highway 93 is far better suited to safely accommodate longer, heavier, truck traffic is as plain as the nose on your face,” he wrote.

Following a pair of very well-attended meetings in Somers and Polson last summer, Lynch said the DOT gathered a small “focus group” of “eight or nine” people from both sides of the lake and the trucking industry to talk about potential options. Those included the idea to make the length of Highway 35 from Polson to Bigfork a no-passing zone and holding an educational symposium with the trucking industry in Bigfork to help educate truckers and motorists about what the other side sees.

Lynch said the no-passing zone would not be instituted without meetings to gather input from the motoring public, but said that truckers expressed a willingness to employ the regulation. Lynch said he was surprised to learn that a number of hauling companies already have internal policies restricting passing on two-lane highways.

He also said a symposium would likely be scheduled for sometime this spring after the weather improves and that at some point in the relatively near future, the DOT would host another public meeting similar to the ones last summer to go over the department’s findings and explain its rationale.

“We’ll give a more detailed presentation with more refined data and talk about what we could expect to see in the future on Highway 35,” he said.