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Friday, March 29, 2024

New Missouri Law Curtails Roadside Inspections On Most Highway Shoulders

 

State Sen. Dave Schatz says the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department’s commercial vehicle enforcement unit is unsafe and unconstitutional.

For that reason, Schatz added a section to his proposed bill specifying “roadside safety inspections shall not be performed on the shoulder of any highway with a posted speed limit in excess of 40 miles per hour.”

On June 1, Missouri governor Mike Parson signed SB-881 into law. The bill states “No safety inspection shall be performed on the shoulder of any highway with a posted speed limit in excess of forty miles per hour, except that safety inspections may be performed on the shoulder at any entrance or exit of such highway where there is adequate space on the shoulder to safely perform such inspection.”

The new roadside inspection provision will go into effect on August 28, 2018.

“I’ve talked with the highway patrol and these roadside inspections are unsafe for the driving public,” Schatz said earlier this year. “Vehicles are being pulled over just for the purposes of these random safety checks and that’s not right. If the driving public was pulled over for these random things they wouldn’t stand for it.”

“Just last Friday I was leaving the radio station and a concrete truck was pulled over by the CVEU on a road with no shoulder right there in Sullivan,” he said. “And that brings another aspect into this. These stops are impeding commerce. Concrete is a perishable commodity and if I was the guy at the other end of a project waiting for it I would be infuriated by the unnecessary delay.”

Schatz says he has no problem with laws being enforced and the inspections performed if another infraction has occurred, but would like to see them done in a safe place instead of on the side of the road.