Move over.   Big changes are coming on Missouri Highways, which will have you either cheering or screaming depending upon where you sit. You see, over the road truckers are about to be banned from the left lanes of most major highways, a ban that goes into effect Thursday. The ban forbids drivers of trucks weighing more than 24 tons from using the left lanes of highways with three lanes or more in the same direction.   If the weight limit for the ban sounds high, consider this: the typical tractor-trailer weighs 40 tons, and vehicles like dump trucks and car carriers often eclipse 24 tons easily.  

Troopers have already been enforcing similar "left lane laws" that went into effect in January on stretches of I-70 and I-55 in St. Charles and Jefferson Counties for trucks weighing more than 12 tons. Julie Scerine of the Missouri Highway Patrol says "We continuously get phone calls, complaints, from the motoring public to enforce the laws against tractor trailers; complaints that tractor-trailers drive too fast, they drive in the passing lane holding up the rest of the traffic."

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents more than 8,000 truckers in Missouri;  more than 160,000 nationwide,  claims things will actually get worse;   with car drivers flooding the left lanes to stay away from the truckers now forced to clog the right lanes. And when that happens, Todd Spencer of the OOIDA predicts, "What you'll have is automobiles tail gating each other in the left lane."