States Restrict Truck Traffic
By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
A move is on across the USA to unsnarl interstate highways where escalating truck traffic is adding to congestion and rattling drivers of passenger cars.

Truck-only lanes and a plan to divert some truck cargo to ships along the Atlantic Coast are among the initiatives getting scrutiny from state and federal agencies. About 75,000 more big rigs cruise onto already crowded highways every year.
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The issue is largely one of congestion rather than safety. The percentage of U.S. highway deaths occurring in crashes involving large trucks is down slightly since 1998.
The American Trucking Associations, which represents about 40,000 trucking companies, generally does not oppose free truck-only lanes, senior vice president Tim Lynch says.

Inching Up an Ice Highway in a 70-Ton Truck
Remote Sites in Subarctic Canada Depend on Rigs Plying Hazardous, Heavily Traveled Winter Road

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 27, 2007; Page A10

ON THE ICE ROAD, Northwest Territories -- Elden Pashovitz eased his big truck and 28 tons of aviation fuel onto the ice of Tibbitt Lake and set out in low gear for his destination, dozens of ponds and lakes away.

Ahead, the scene was bleak, white and flat. The temperature was minus 10. The ice crackled under the 30 tires of his tandem rig.

Pashovitz moved his vehicle to its place in a caravan of heavy trucks, one of many processions now crawling across frozen tundra and iced-over lakes in the grip of the Canadian winter. Their mission is to deliver a year's worth of supplies to remote sites -- mines and drilling rigs and small native villages -- that depend on the ice road for all their needs.