Louisiana Has No Studded-Tire Season Because It Never Permits Studs

The operative text has stood unchanged since 1964. La. R.S. 32:362 was enacted by Acts 1962, No. 310, and amended once, by Acts 1964, No. 512. Subsection B states the rule in equipment terms rather than winter terms: no tire moved on a Louisiana highway may carry on its periphery "any protuberances of any material, other than rubber, which projects beyond the thread of the traction surface of the tire." The printed Louisiana text says "thread" where the equivalent provisions elsewhere say tread, and that wording has never been corrected by amendment.

The exceptions are closed and short. Paragraph (B)(1) permits farm machinery fitted with protuberances "which will not injure the highways." Paragraph (B)(2) permits tire chains, but only "of reasonable proportions" and only "when required for safety because of conditions tending to cause a vehicle to slide or skid." That is a conditional allowance, not a blanket one: chains bolted on in August during dry weather are outside the exception, because the safety condition that triggers it is absent. Subsection C hands the department a narrow emergency valve, and it reaches only agricultural and track-laying equipment, letting it issue emergency permission for traction engines or tractors with movable tracks bearing transverse corrugations, farm tractors, and other instruments of husbandry. Nothing in subsection C reaches a passenger car.

Subsection D goes further and forbids operating any motor vehicle, trailer, or semitrailer "having any metal tire in contact with the highway." Subsection A sets the floor for solid rubber tires at one inch of rubber over the entire traction surface, measured above the edge of the rim flange.

Louisiana does police the used-tire trade in the same section, and there the legislature wrote its own penalties rather than relying on the Title 32 default. Subsection E makes it unlawful to sell, offer to sell or trade, or knowingly use a tire that fails subsection A, and equally unlawful to deal in a worn tire that has been regrooved "so as to give the appearance of a new tire or a tire which has been recapped." The graduated penalty runs fifty dollars or thirty days in jail for a first offense, two hundred fifty dollars or three months or both for a second, and five hundred dollars plus six months for a third or subsequent offense.

Enforcement is not purely roadside. La. R.S. 32:1304(A)(1) requires the secretary to have every motor vehicle, low-speed vehicle, trailer, semitrailer, and pole trailer registered in Louisiana inspected at least once every other year and no more often than twice a year, and paragraph (A)(2) sets the scope of that inspection as "the mechanism, brakes, and equipment of every vehicle as shall be designated by the secretary." The statute leaves the specific reject items to rules the secretary promulgates rather than listing tire conditions itself, so what a Louisiana inspection station actually measures comes from the department's rules, not from R.S. 32:362. Separately, R.S. 32:1304(D)(1) lets the secretary suspend the registration of a vehicle that is in an unsafe condition or that, after notice and demand, is not equipped as the chapter requires.

S. 32:362(B), (C) or (D) carries no penalty of its own, so it falls to the chapter default in La. S. 32:57(A)(1): a first violation is punishable by a fine of not more than one hundred seventy-five dollars or imprisonment for not more than thirty days, or both, and a subsequent violation by not more than five hundred dollars or ninety days, or both. S. S. 32:267 carries a fine of not less than seven hundred fifty dollars and not more than one thousand dollars, or up to thirty days, or both.

S. 32:362(E) are punished on their own escalating scale instead, ending at five hundred dollars and six months for a third or subsequent offense. S. 32:1304(D)(1) allows the secretary to suspend the registration of a vehicle he determines is in such unsafe condition as to constitute a menace to safety or that is not equipped as required.