Curfews and Escorts — The Two Questions That Delay Every Heavy Haul

Ask any oversize dispatcher what drivers call about, and you'll hear the same two things: "Can I move right now?" and "Do I need a pilot car through here?" Both answers live in the permit — usually on page four, in language written for the DOT, not for a driver doing 60 on the interstate.

Curfews: when the load must sit

A curfew is a time-and-place ban on oversize movement. They come in layers:

• Statewide travel windows — e.g. half-hour before sunrise to half-hour after sunset.
• Metro curfews — no movement through a city during weekday rush hours.
• Weekend and holiday bans — some states park oversize loads entirely on certain days.

The expensive mistake is planning a day by miles instead of windows. A load that legally leaves Dallas at 6 a.m. can still be illegal entering Houston at 4:30 p.m. Good dispatchers plan backwards from the curfews; great tools surface them before anyone asks.

Escorts: when the load needs company

Escort (pilot car) requirements scale with dimensions, and every state draws the lines differently. The same 14-foot-wide load might need:

State situation	Typical requirement
Under the state's width threshold	No escort
Over width threshold, divided highway	One rear escort
Over width threshold, two-lane road	Front and rear escorts
Over height threshold	Height-pole car ahead of the load
Extreme dimensions	Police escort, route survey, or both

Escorts have to be booked before the trip, and a state line can change the requirement mid-journey. Discovering a front-escort rule at the border means the truck waits until a pilot car arrives — on your clock.

Making both visible

The fix isn't more phone calls; it's putting the answers where the whole trip can see them. In HeavyHaul Agent, every permit's curfews and escort requirements are extracted onto the trip's warning board, and the driver can ask "can I run tonight through Ohio?" and get an answer sourced from that trip's actual permits — visible to the dispatcher and broker too, so everyone hears the same answer.

The permit and its provisions always control. But the two questions that park trucks shouldn't take four phone calls to answer.