There are thousands of items tucked in the massive spending bill recently passed by Congress. One of them puts Maine, already isolated, at a real disadvantage. Without committee deliberation, New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, a member of the Appropriations Committee, slipped a provision in the bill to raise the truck weight limit on Interstates 93 and 89. This leaves Maine as the only state in the Northeast stuck with an 80,000-pound weight limit on its interstate highways.

That means that tractor-trailer rigs will continue to wend their way through small towns and cities and along two-lane roads rather than whizzing along on the four-lane interstate north of Augusta. It also means that Maine’s congressional delegation must redouble its efforts to raise the weight limits here.

Unfortunately, with no Maine member of the Appropriations Committee, their job will be harder than that of their colleague to the west who had the limit raised to 99,000 pounds.

In some ways, New Hampshire’s success could be helpful to Maine. While it puts Maine at a further transportation disadvantage because it is now surrounded by states and Canadian provinces that allow heavier trucks on major highways, this strengthens Maine’s case that it needs higher limits too. This was highlighted in a recent letter from Canadian officials to the House and Senate transportation committees when they were considering the now stalled transportation bill. The transportation ministers of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador warned U.S. lawmakers that the weight restrictions affect international trade.

“The federal weight limit of 80,000 lbs. as it is applied in Maine represents a gap in standards with the rest of the region that creates serious transportation inefficiencies and fails to meet the vision and objectives for the ‘upward harmonization of standards’ under NAFTA,” they wrote.

It would help if major businesses were united in saying the same thing.

Safety advocates called New Hampshire’s move dangerous and warned that more accidents and deaths would occur. Recent studies don’t bear this out, however.

The most recent, conducted by Wilbur Smith Associates, an international infrastructure consulting firm with an office in Portland, found that the accident rate, per hundred million vehicle miles traveled, was more than four times higher on two-lane roads than on the Maine Turnpike between 2000 and 2003.

The fatal crash rate on “diversion routes,” the largely two-lane undivided highways heavy trucks are now forced to travel, was 10 times higher than the Maine Turnpike and interstate routes, based on miles traveled. Accidents involving serious injuries were also less frequent on the turnpike and interstate than on diversion routes. New Hampshire’s experience with the new higher limits could help bear this out.

They also found that road maintenance costs would be lowered if the heaviest trucks traveled on interstates, which are built to accommodate such vehicles, rather than on two-lane roads.

These are persuasive arguments, but it will likely also take some deal making on the part of Maine’s senators to encourage their colleagues to support raising the weight limit on Maine’s highways. Unfortunately, Maine has to try to raise its limit the hard way – through committee hearings and votes – rather than slipping language into a large spending bill.