We buy trucks in Santa Barbara

Bee Rock Quarry, worked by Granite Construction Company, carries seven people on the MSHA roll and works crushed and broken limestone. It is filed under this city, and it sits 18.20 miles from the city centroid — which is far enough that the distance is the fact rather than a footnote to it.

That placement comes from the city written on the mine registration, which is an address rather than a geography, and forty-two of the forty-three rows in this survey that lie more than fifteen miles from their named place are assigned the same way. So the row is reported with its distance attached rather than quietly moved, because the underlying node list is read-only to the session that found it.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Goleta, Carpinteria and Lompoc carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix along this coast is light industrial and agricultural: box trucks and straight trucks on delivery, flatbeds and day cabs between the yards, dump trucks on the construction side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Those eighteen miles do not change what the road survey found, which is nothing at all. Within ten miles of the node the National Bridge Inventory records 49 structures, and not one is coded posted for load on item 41 or below legal loads on item 70.

Which is the county pattern rather than an accident of the circle. This county posts none of the 106 bridges it maintains, and it is one of three in the same survey batch that post nothing at all — Ventura County posts none of 84 and Inyo County none of 33. Thirteen California counties holding twenty or more bridges post none of them.

Read that as an absence of postings and not as an assurance about any particular crossing. The survey reports what the National Bridge Inventory file codes, and a structure can be in poor repair without being posted. The circle is ten miles wide, too, and at 64.1 percent of the nodes in this survey a tighter crossing lies between ten miles and twenty.

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.