We buy trucks in San Rafael

The node here is the San Rafael Rock Quarry, worked by Dutra Materials, with 25 people on the MSHA roll — and unlike most rows in this survey it is genuinely close to the place it is filed under, 2.92 miles from the city centroid. Within ten miles of it the National Bridge Inventory records 222 structures, of which two are posted for load and two coded below legal loads.

Those two are the interesting part. Neither is county-maintained: the nearest, 5.70 miles out, is NBI record 27C0150 carrying Alexander Ave, and item 21 codes its maintenance to a city or municipal highway agency. The commercial floor is 18.5 metric tonnes, about 20.4 US tons, which over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump admits roughly 7.5 tonnes of stone.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Novato, Larkspur and Mill Valley carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix here is the ordinary near-city one: box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, flatbeds and day cabs between the yards, dump trucks on the rock side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

That municipal coding is not a detail here, because it is the whole picture. Marin County posts none of the 54 bridges it maintains, so the only restrictions a truck meets near this quarry are set by cities rather than by the county.

Which makes the state pattern legible from one node. California’s cities hold 5,081 of the state’s 25,975 structures — 19.6 percent, the largest municipal tier in the sixteen states this survey has entered — against 47.9 percent held at state level and 28.3 percent by counties, with 517 more held by the United States Forest Service. Elsewhere the municipal tier is a footnote. Here it is the tier that binds.

That is state law rather than anything local, and it is the rule truck sellers misquote most often. CVC sections 35550 to 35558 set a statutory range of 34,000 to 80,000 lb by axle count and spacing, and § 35551(a) is a table rather than the federal Bridge Formula — no formula is declared in the statute at all.

The California table does not exactly match the Federal Bridge Table, including at three and four axles. So a configuration that is legal under one can be over under the other, and “it makes bridge formula” is a claim about which table you mean. If someone has told you your truck makes it, that is worth knowing before you repeat it.

That same code book handles what damage does to a title, and California is unusual in how it does it. CVC § 544 defines a total loss salvage vehicle as one that the owner, a leasing company, a financial institution or an insurer considers uneconomical to repair, and which is consequently not repaired. There is no number in the law.

Most California insurers work to internal thresholds of somewhere around 70 to 75 percent of actual cash value. Those are company policies, not statute, and they must not be read as a legal threshold — the same damaged truck can brand in Kentucky, run a formula in Georgia, and be a judgement call here.

Does it have to run? No. But we buy complete trucks — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing bumper is nothing.

Do I need the title? We need a title, unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If it is lost, that is a replacement through the DMV and we will walk you through it. If there is a lien on it, say so on the form — that is why the question asks whether the title is in hand rather than whether you own the truck, because those are different situations and they go different ways.

What if it has been in a wreck? Tell us what happened and we will look at it as it is. California sets no percentage: CVC § 544 makes it a judgement about whether repair is economical, so nothing is decided by a formula before we have seen the truck.

How does it get collected, and how am I paid? However it goes, there is no clock on it: we come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.