Parking ban could force truckers out

‘‘Basically what it does is says where [trucks] can’t be,” he said. ‘‘It basically prohibits close proximity to any homes, and doesn’t allow RV’s to stay indefinitely.”

The focus on truck parking comes amid complaints about clogged streets, obstructed sight lines and vehicles parked in the same spot for days, even weeks.

‘‘It’s everywhere. Go to any HOA meeting anywhere in my district, and it’s an issue in some way,” said Knapp, who has held a pair of town hall forums on the subject, one in Germantown, the other in Montgomery Village.

Though conceding at the Montgomery Village forum that the law will inevitably miss aspects of the problem, he believes it will avoid ‘‘creating too many exceptions or too many loopholes.”

High costs

Knapp acknowledges that any relief for homeowners complicates things for truck owners.

‘‘We can’t just say we don’t want tractor trailers and we don’t want dump trucks. We need them,” Knapp said. ‘‘We don’t necessarily want them parked next to our houses, for legitimate reasons, but that doesn’t mean that they just go away.”

There are no truck stops in Montgomery County; the nearest one along the Interstate 270 corridor is in Frederick. Parking spaces in industrial areas — such as around the Montgomery County Airpark — can be hard to come by, and it can be cheaper for truckers to incur $40 fines for parking in residential neighborhoods rather than drive to Frederick and pay to park their trucks there.

The measure also comes as the trucking industry is being squeezed like never before by falling wages and increasing fuel prices, said Todd Spencer, executive director of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which has 162,000 members — 1,500 of them in Maryland.

And with 70 percent of all goods arriving by truck, anything that causes more costs for drivers will spill over to the consumer, he said.

‘‘To the extent that you’ve rendered your neighborhoods, your county, your state one that’s not amenable to truckers, it winds up raising freight costs,” Spencer said.

Possible solutions

Part of a solution could come in looking at ‘‘underutilized” commuter lots, Knapp said, such as a state-owned lot at the Interstate 270 exit for Clopper Road.

‘‘It’s worth talking about,” Knapp said in a June 6 interview. ‘‘You’ve got a wide-open, empty parking lot: re-stripe it in a way that makes it potentially viable for large trucks.”

Much of the problem stems from inconsistent enforcement that varies among police districts. That system dates back to a 1995 letter to a resident from then-County Executive Douglas M. Duncan. In the letter, Duncan cites county and state laws that vehicle owners can park in ‘‘close proximity” to their home so long as the vehicles ‘‘are not violating any parking or traffic laws, are properly registered, are not being stored at the site, and do not present a hazard to the community.”

Knapp wants to empower police to give them more leeway so that ‘‘police will be perhaps more liberal in their enforcement.”

The truck uproar in the upcounty comes about two years after a concerted police effort in Montgomery Village to ticket large trucks, shifting more vehicles into Germantown, Clarksburg and surrounding communities.

In the Village, commercial vehicles and large trucks are already banned by HOAs from parking in neighborhoods and along more than 40 miles of privately owned roads. County police are responsible for about 30 miles of roadway in the Village.

Along the traditionally problem areas such as Cinnabar and Lewisberry drives and Watkins Mill and Apple Ridge roads, 6th District community services officer Diane Tillery said she has a good measure of success in working with truck owners.

‘‘Most people have been very cooperative and have moved them to a different storage facility,” Tillery said.