The trucking industry wants more room on Oregon roads and they’ve taken an unprecedented step to get it. Instead of working through traditional project development channels where engineers, planners and advocates work together to solve design issues based on compromise and context on a project-by-project basis, trucking advocates are pushing a mandatory 12-foot minimum lane width on freight routes statewide.
On the last page of the 102-page House Bill 2025 (the transportation bill) being debated in Salem this week are three lines that could have major implications on projects across the state. Section 160 of the bill states: “the commission may not reduce the width of an existing motor vehicle travel lane on an identified freight route to less than 12 feet.” (The “commission” refers to the Oregon Transportation Commission, a governor-appointed body that oversees the Oregon Department of Transportation.)
Trucking advocates are making a rare and bold attempt to circumvent process and enshrine what should be a transportation engineering decision into state law. Beyond that, the vague language of “identified freight route” could leave the question of which roads this applies to open to discretion. For those reasons and others, the trucking industry’s latest gambit to make headway on this issue faces strong opposition from road safety advocates. It’s also not supported by state and national design guidelines or best practices, and even Oregon’s chief traffic engineer seems to prefer a different approach.
The provision is backed by trucking advocates like Jana Jarvis, president of the Oregon Trucking Association (OTA). In testimony at the public hearing on HB 2025 Tuesday, Jarvis said the lane width language is an, “important piece of the legislation.” “Freight routes need to be built and maintained to support large trucks by requiring 12-foot lanes to safely accommodate those vehicles,” she testified.
Pushing for wider lanes has been a major focus of trucking advocates for years. In 2022 BikePortland detailed growing tensions between trucking companies and ODOT staff over lane widths. The issue became such a common debate among trucking representatives and ODOT project staff at freight project advisory committee meetings that the agency formed the Travel Lane Widths Work Group in March 2023.
In January 2024, OTA Government Relations Policy Advisor Mark Gibson said truck drivers need a minimum of 12 feet because “there’s a great deal of stress being a truck driver in an urban environment.” In a presentation to the ODOT Mobility Advisory Committee (the MAC, where decisions about freight route lane widths are made) Gibson said, “We’re all suffering from the road diet era.”
Contrast that perspective of a truck driver with the people outside the truck. Walkers, bicycle riders, motorcycle users — even smaller car drivers who use roads alongside truckers feel the impacts of wider lanes. Wider lanes lead to higher speeds, longer crossing distances, and more risk for road users overall. And road widths are finite: When you add a foot to one lane, it means another lane must become narrower. When that lane is a bike lane or shoulder, other road users suffers.
That’s one reason the 12-foot lane provision has drawn opposition from transportation advocates like David Binnig with BikeLoud PDX. In a letter submitted to the Joint Committee on Transportation Reinvestment, Binnig requested that the language be removed from the bill. He wrote, “While 12-foot lanes may be appropriate on high-speed freeways, they are not suitable on streets where people live and work.”
Binning pointed out that the provision works against the legislature’s intention to boost funding in HB 2025 for ODOT’s Great Streets program — a program that seeks to update urban highways and transform them from traffic and freight thoroughfares into more humane and livable streets where commerce and community can thrive.
If the lane width provision remains in the bill, Binnig wrote, “Oregon would be dedicating funding to safer streets while at the same time outlawing the changes on the ground that are needed to make those streets safe.”
Trucking advocates point to the fact that a typical freight truck is 10 and-a-half feet wide (including side-mirrors) and 12-foot lanes are necessary so drivers don’t have to encroach into adjacent lanes (or bike lane buffers). But best practices in the planning and engineering field say 11-foot lanes are preferable because 12-foot lanes are not worth the safety tradeoffs.
ODOT’s own Highway Design Manual extols the safety virtues of narrow lane widths and clearly states that 11-foot lanes are preferred. In fact, ODOT Chief Engineer Mike Kimlinger doesn’t even appear to support such a rigid adherence to 12-foot lanes for freight.
In a December 2024 meeting of the Mobility Advisory Committee, ODOT staff presented on a project on Highway 26 through downtown Madras where they wanted to increase the width of the bike lane. Trucking advocates aired concerns and a spirited debate ensued.
Gibson from the OTA and another MAC committee member, Highway Heavy Hauling President Kristine Kennedy, wanted to narrow the bike lane in order to give truck drivers more room.
But ODOT’s Kimlinger pushed back. According to MAC meeting minutes, he opposed the OTA’s insistence on 12-foot lanes. “The desire in narrowing the lanes is truly to focus everybody, slow them all down, and make them be very attentive,” reads a paraphrased version of Kimlinger’s response captured by the committee secretary. Kimlinger then went on to point out how five-foot bike lanes would be too narrow and wouldn’t be used because riders wouldn’t feel comfortable in them. Here’s another excerpt from the minutes:
“[Kimlinger] ended by saying, yes, 11 [feet] is narrow and is going to be a bit uncomfortable for the 12-foot loads of equipment that come through, but when we are the main street of a community like this, we are put in a position to help balance that in a way we have never done before in our past.”
With negative safety implications, a divergence from best practices, opposition from transportation safety advocates, and a lack of support from ODOT’s own chief engineer, the chances of Section 160 staying in the bill appear to be getting narrower by the day.
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If the trucking people managed to squeeze their text into the bill, they can manage to squeeze their trucks into lanes less than 12′ wide.
Perhaps maximum truck widths should be reduced?
I mean, yes, but they’re built around container dimensions, so that would require global action=very high bar. I’ll settle for getting them to slow down anytime they’re somewhere where the lane is narrower than they’d like.
Those containers are 8 feet wide. Not sure why they would require a 12 foot wide lane to accommodate them on a truck bed
RIGHT ON that ODOT’s chief engineer has a wholistic views of the state highway system that considers safety. Of course the position of chief engineer is earned by knowledge, training and experience. It is not an elected position where the generous contributions by lobbyists would influence the hiring. On the other hand, the state legislature…….
My primary concern with this issue is how it impacts cyclists, so I hope that new facilities provide plenty of buffer between cyclists and trucks. A narrower travel lane for trucks might cause them to crowd the bike lane, especially when there is a truck or bus in an adjacent or oncoming lane. That is not something I would welcome.
You always always remind me of that line from The Grateful Dead:
“Every silver lining has a touch of gray.”
Do you actually disagree with what I posted?
“there’s a great deal of stress being a truck driver in an urban environment.”
That sentence equally true when inverted: a great deal of stress is caused when an urban environment used as a freight route. What if urban environments were treated as the last mile of a delivery instead of as shortcuts for full loads on the way to some other destination?
Can you give any specific examples of what you are thinking with this? Here’s one example: a lot of tuck traffic is generated by the RR yards at Brooklyn and Albina. What should PBOT/ODOT do differently regarding truck traffic generated by these hubs?
I-5, I-205, and I-405 go through urban environments but are used as pass-thru routes by shippers traveling between California and Washington, same with rural highways like US 97 passing thru small towns and Bend. It has been suggested that certain routes could have wider freight express lanes for pass-thru traffic with less access to off-ramps, and narrower frontage lanes and more traffic control devices such as roundabouts and signals for local traffic, rather than mixing the traffic as we do now. Something like the toll-turnpikes you see between Chicago and NYC.
I don’t understand how this relates to 12ft lanes on freight routes that might be targets for narrowing. I can’t imagine any scenario where ODOT would want to narrow lanes on I-5, I-205, or I-405.
The plans for the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening do narrow lanes below 12 feet. It’s ironic as the proposed legislation would make the plans illegal. Kudos to Ms. Jarvis for pointing out the plans are unsafe and unsuitable!
Where did you get that information? The drawings Jonathan published recently show 12 ft lanes.
If ODOT was required to reduce crash rates and traffic speeds on I-5, I-205, or I-405, the quickest and most effective method is to narrow the travel lanes, which they often do for freeway construction projects or to add HOV lanes and repair shoulders. Technically the feds allow lanes to be as narrow as 9 feet, but as you can imagine it makes emergency vehicle, bus, and freight drivers very uncomfortable (and slows them down drastically), so 10.5 to 11 feet is much more common.
I’d prefer to think of freight routes as those owned by Union Pacific and BNSF
Union Pacific is not interested in the kind of cargo typically sent by truck. They like volume, and lots of it, all going to one place. If you’re moving a literal trainload of crushed rock, call UP. If you’ve got a truckload of cantaloupes you need to distribute to Wamarts along I5, use a truck.
Who do we reach out to right now to voice opposition to this that might help right now?
The only ones who will actually decide on this are the state representatives. Contact your representative and let them know you don’t like them supporting the trucking industry at the expense of vulnerable users.
I’d say threaten them that you’ll vote for their opponent next election if they don’t work to remove Section 160 from the bill, but I know that’s a bridge too far here.
submit written testimony until it closes at 4PM Friday June 13th: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2025R1/Testimony/JTR/HB/2025/0000-00-00-00-00?area=Measures
Tell your state legislator, the one you keep voting for and keep expecting different results, that President Trump supports wider freeway lanes and thank your legislator for doing their small part in Making Oregon Great Again and supporting the Oregon Republican Party.
The Oregon Trucking Association: Working to Establish Common Ground Between Oregon’s Bicycle Community and the Oregon Department of Transportation
Who do we contact right now to try and address this insanity?
My Dad was a trucker, long haul, log trucks, asphalt and plenty else.
As a professional, the stress is a given, yes big part of the job that they are being paid to do.
How do other states handles this? Can we learn from other states that function better than Oregon?
My state DOT (NCDOT) regards ODOT as a left-wing liberal DOT that can never come up with the necessary funds to build anything significant, with the same contempt as they have for the other liberal left-wing DOTs of Minnesota, Virginia, Colorado, and New York.
13 feet is the norm out here in NC for state highways, so 12 feet would be regarded as a bit narrow (I’ve seen state lanes as wide as 17 feet). Non-state DOTs for cities and counties aim for 11 feet, but my (somewhat progressive) city aims for 10-foot lanes to slow traffic to 30 mph and times the signals for 25 mph on our standard 35 mph stroads.
Question: How wide are standard freight lanes on the freeways and tollways in the Netherlands? From what I saw, their trucks are the same size as ours, same width, same wide lanes.
This reminds me of the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer adopted a highway and painted over half of the lane lines to create “Luxury Lanes”
Great work in calling out OTA’s end-around run of many YEARS of work on safe streets.
Legislators need to cull this language from the bill!
Legislators are the ones that put it in.
Or perhaps singular “legislator” put it in. Often these one off lines are the work of horse trading to buy support.
Given that most lane striping is 6″ wide, a ’12-foot’ lane will most often be 11-feet to 11.5 feet wide anyway, and this only on ODOT-maintained stroads that are designated truck routes such as Powell, Lombard, Barbur, the interstates, and so on. It wouldn’t apply to Division, 122nd, 82nd, and most downtown streets even if they are designated freight routes, and all other streets would be exempt as well.
Every move by Jana Jarvis and the OTA has the sole purpose of increase the profits of those companies. The negative effects on the places that trucks pass through are completely ignored as if all roads are highways through a barren desert. Safety, price reduction for consumers and delivery efficiency are all speculative rationalizations.
Is it possible to find out who actually inserted the text into the bill?
Definitely possible. Would take some work tho.
You up for it?
; }
Maybe. I’ll consider it.
We can probably narrow it to four people:
1. Shelly Boshart-Davis, truck company owner and on the committee, advocator of Department of Highways
2. Susan McLain, co-chair of the committee, wanted to show good faith and get R’s to the table by giving something Boshart-Davis wanted
3. Rob Wagner and/or Julie Fahey, same rationale as McLain
Good faith? R’s aren’t needed at the table. Dems have a super majority in the house and senate and there’s no reason to think they’ll lose it any time soon. Trying to blame Section 160 on political affiliation doesn’t make sense.
I find it interesting that ODOT is saying narrowing truck lanes is okay (12ft to 11ft when a truck is 10.5ft) but a 5ft bike lane is too narrow when a bike is about 2.5ft wide…. Giving a truck only 6 inches of variance but a bike over 2.5ft of variance seems a little ridiculous.
Put a curb on the right side of the truck’s lane, and another curb or bollards/wands/etc. on the right, so that the truck can’t move into another lane to pass someone going slower, or go around trucks parked in the lane or debris that will pop the truck’s tires.
Or, instead of the curb on the right side, put a row of vehicles whose doors may open without warning directly in front of the truck and block half the truck lane, and are heavy enough to destroy the truck and injure the driver.
Until truck lanes are built like that, don’t compare an 11′ truck lane to a 5′ bike lane.
Its probably also because truck drivers are ever increasingly incompetent. The trucking industry knows their drivers are getting worse by the day and wants the public infrastructure to be reconfigured to accommodate them.
Perhaps we need language that says no road with lanes less than 12 feet may be employed as a freight route or no road with more than two (single or multifamily) residences per block may be employed as a freight route.
I’d love to get truck traffic off of Lombard in St. Johns. We built these massive freight routes on Columbia and Marine, but truckers (and others) want the St. Johns Bridge as a cut through. Sigh.