We buy trucks in Santee

Santee Aggregates, worked by Martin Marietta San Diego Aggregates, LLC, carries ten people on the MSHA roll and sits 2.54 miles from the city centroid — close enough that the row and the city genuinely describe the same place. Within ten miles of it the National Bridge Inventory records 437 structures, and not one is coded posted for load on item 41 or below legal loads on item 70.

That is the largest clean result this survey has found anywhere: more than double the previous record, a plant in Riverside County at 203, and ahead of a quarry in Miami-Dade at 202. A working aggregate operation inside a metropolitan area with four hundred bridges around it and not one of them restricted.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. El Cajon, La Mesa and Lakeside carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix out this way is the ordinary east-county one: box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, flatbeds and day cabs between the yards, dump trucks on the aggregate side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Both halves of that need saying, because a clean count is easy to over-read. San Diego County posts one of the 206 bridges it maintains, so the low figure is partly a fact about that county’s posting practice and not only about the structures themselves. Two of the three San Diego rows in this survey meet nothing at all.

So read it as an upper bound rather than a guarantee. The circle is ten miles wide, and at 64.1 percent of the nodes in this survey a tighter crossing lies between ten miles and twenty. If a route out of here crosses something you are unsure of, the posting on the structure is what settles it, not a count taken from a file.

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.