They may not have much in common, but there is a wealth of information on the Internet that can help you get where you need to be in a truck.

This has been the winter of today a road and tomorrow a mud slide or snow bank. If you know where to look on the Net there is help out there in the way of some very good road reports.

Before I get too deep into this I want to explain a few things for those reading this that think you have to be a computer nerd to use the net. If you have a computer in your office you can be tied into the net. You don't need to get into all the fancy programs. For finding information and getting road reports all you need to do is hook-up with America Online or one of the other online services. If you have a modem all you need is the software and that is free! They also give you free time in their intro packages to learn your way around. You will have full Internet access and the World Wide Web on the 'Net is where you will find most of what you want to know.

As I am in Oregon and work with West Coast carriers I know my way around the Western reports better than those from the rest of the county. The best collection of sites I have found is at the Truckers Transportation Homepage. The address for it is "http://www.truckers.com/". As far as the Western States here are the ones I use the most.

For California ...

"http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/roadinfo/Hourly/" is the hourly report put out by Caltrans. It is up dated at 45 minutes past the hour, seven days a week. It covers all State highways and Interstates in California and also carries reports for Nevada if there are problems over there. Not only do they post weather related problems but they also have construction updates with lane and on-ramp and off-ramp closures. They also post restrictions for permit oversize loads and such. There is also a realtime traffic flow map for Orange, L.A. , and San Diego Counties at "http://www.scubed.com/caltrans/". These maps show current traffic speed and accident locations.

Oregon ...

"gopher://gopher.odot.state.or.us/00/police" is where you want to go to for the Oregon State Patrol road report. They update the report two or three times a day and it is a pretty complete report.

Washington ...

Washington has two reports. They can both be accessed from "http://www.wsdot.wa.gov". The pass report is updated about every four hours daily. The Washington Highways Report is updated twice daily during the week. No weekend updates on this one. Another Washington State page that is interesting is at "http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/regions/northwest/nwflow/". It is the Seattle Traffic Conditions page. The cameras are great! There are about twenty of them in the Seattle area. Go to the page and click on a camera. You get an up to the minute picture from a video camera sitting out on the freeway. The pictures update every minute and a half. Watch them while it is snowing up there some time. Real interesting!!

I'm not suggesting that you sit around all day and read road reports. On the other hand, if you were to have a dispatcher check the reports in the morning when he got to work, he would have an idea where things were bad and be able to tell the drivers about it when they made their check calls in the morning. It could be the difference in a load being late or on time.

Thanks Grumpy