An attempt by a special interest group in West Virginia to ban trucks from U.S. 522 could mean truckers would have to buy and burn almost 1.5 million additional gallons of fuel a year.

The group, called the Crooked Run Valley Association, has already succeeded in getting the state to ban big rigs from Route 17. The group’s efforts are supported by a state report that shows five of the nine fatalities on U.S. 522 in the past three years involved big trucks.

A public meeting to discuss the future of trucks on U.S. 522 is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 15, at the Morgan County Courthouse. OOIDA member John Taylor of Cross Junction, VA, would be going to the meeting, but he was already committed to go to an EPA idling meeting in Atlanta when he heard about the U.S. 255 situation.

Taylor, a member of the OOIDA Board of Directors, said he thought it was particularly ironic that he was going to be hearing government folks in Atlanta talk about how to get trucks to run – or idle – less while other officials in West Virginia are talking about making trucks run more. He said that the stretch of U.S. 522 in question is a 25-mile shortcut for truckers running Interstates 70 and 81.

West Virginia officials have been reported by regional media as having said that about 10 percent to 20 percent of the vehicles on U.S. 255 are big trucks. Taylor estimates that at least 800 trucks a day run the shortcut.

Rick Craig, OOIDA’s director of regulatory affairs, put pen to paper and figured what rerouting that amount of truck traffic would mean in terms of fuel. Based on Taylor’s 800-a-day estimate, Craig figures that an additional 7.3 million miles a year will have to be driven if trucks are banned from U.S. 522. Using an average of 5 mpg, that amounts to 1.46 million additional gallons of fuel that will be burned if trucks are banned from the shortcut.