See photos from the Carolina Trucking School in Raleigh. Staff photos by Shawn Rocco.

Legislation to allow longer trucks on state highways will boost the risk of truck crashes, deaths and injuries and cause more damage to North Carolina’s roads and bridges, a national safety advocate says.

The warning comes in testimony prepared for delivery today in Washington at a congressional hearing on the effects of laws that regulate truck lengths and weights.

The state House is considering a bill that won unanimous Senate approval to allow trucks with 53-foot-long semi-trailers on about 90 percent of the state’s highways. The state now limits trailer lengths to 48 feet except on interstates and other major multi-lane highways.

Mountain roads will become dangerous and tourism will suffer if the General Assembly allows 53-foot-long tractor-trailers to use narrow, hairpin roads where they've been ruled unsafe in the past, a Rutherford County mayor said Monday.

"My dad was a long-time truck driver, and he was one of the people that pushed for the ordinance that banned 53-foot trailers back in 1990" on several highways in Rutherford and Henderson counties, said Jim Proctor, mayor of Lake Lure.

The state House is about to take up Senate legislation to allow 53-foot-long tractor-trailers on all U.S., N.C. and interstate routes in North Carolina, and to give legislators a say in marking certain dangerous roads off-limits.

But who would actually decide whether to ban long trucks from, say, the hair-raising hairpins of U.S. 64 from Highlands to Cashiers?

The politicians? Or the state DOT experts?

Without debate today, the Senate quickly passed and sent the House a far-reaching measure to put longer trucks, wider boats and some heavier farm commodity trucks on the state’s highways.

Sen. Clark Jenkins, the Edgecombe County Democrat who sponsored SB 1695, called in sick — but his proposal rolled ahead without him ("State Senate votes to allow bigger trucks").