With Route 108 through Smugglers Notch shuttered for the season, the perennial issue of trucks getting lodged there — what some call a “stuckage” — is less of a concern for state officials right now than, say, plowing and salting the roads.
Trucks getting stuck in the Notch were top of mind in the Senate Committee on Transportation on Tuesday morning, and specifically, a question that has vexed lawmakers and state transportation officials for years: how to stop GPS systems from routing too-big rigs through the tortuous mountain pass.
A bill introduced by Sen. Thomas Chittenden, D-Chittenden-Southeast, proposes a solution. S.77 states that if a driver whose vehicle is too big for the Notch is using a navigation system — and that system does not “provide explicit notice” of the maximum vehicle dimensions allowed on the road — the GPS provider would face a $2,000 civil fine.
Vermont law already imposes civil fines that can total thousands of dollars on the drivers, or their employers, whose trucks get stuck in the Notch.
“I think VTrans has done excellent work on getting every possible sign alongside the roads,” Chittenden said, as he and other committee members talked about the bill. “I just think we now need to get the signs on the phones.”
The bill does not dictate how the state would enforce penalties on GPS providers, and Chittenden acknowledged that the legislation is not yet “ready for primetime.”
VTrans also doesn’t know exactly how the fines would be carried out, the state transportation agency’s operations and safety bureau director told senators.
Part of the issue, Josh Schultz continued, is that VTrans has had little success engaging the makers of the navigation services many truckers use — think Google and Apple — in conversations about displaying such warnings in the first place. There isn’t much incentive for these companies to do so. Apps such as Google Maps don’t know what kind of vehicle you’re driving, and of the thousands of vehicles that drive through the Notch daily, most can make it out just fine.
Five trucks got stuck in the Notch last year, Schultz said, and the number of stuck trucks has actually decreased by about 40 percent over the past five years. That doesn’t account for the many close calls, though, and he referenced multiple instances in which police or even state employees spotted trucks and flagged them down before it was too late.
Schultz noted that the Vermont Agency of Digital Services has been talking with Google in recent months about ways to improve the state’s technology, and once he and his team heard about that, they reached out to raise their navigation frustrations.
“We were like, ‘oh heck yea, we would really like to engage in this conversation,’” he said.
VTrans is worried, Schultz said, that S.77 would essentially create bad vibes between Google and the state. “From the agency’s perspective, we would like to continue with the measures that we're implementing — we’ve had success, and we have some on the horizon — before we go to punitive measures,” he said.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Chittenden said he did not want the bill to be seen as combative. “I just thought there was more that we could do,” the senator said, recalling a recent summer trip through the Notch when he, too, witnessed a truck stuck in the Notch for himself.
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