A critical question facing trucking and law enforcement today is how can highway safety be improved in a manner efficient for motor carriers and law enforcement alike?
Safety and efficiency were the principles shared by trucking and law enforcement when they met forty years ago in the “Crescent Project,” so named for the curve of participating jurisdictions extending from British Columbia through Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
State and provincial law enforcement officials and trucking industry representatives at the Crescent Project meetings had a common concern – roadside truck inspection facilities and weigh stations were inefficient and overwhelmed. The facilities were inefficient because inspectors had to sort out trucks that needed scrutiny from those which could safely be waived through and back on the road. The weigh stations were overwhelmed by the long lines of trucks extending out onto the highway, hindering and even endangering traffic. The same inefficiencies were felt in the pocketbooks of trucking companies whose demonstrably safe operations were continually interrupted.
In the early 1980’s we saw a crucial moment in the effort to improve safety and efficiency on the roadways. Government and industry officials decided that these issues could be addressed by technology. Some of the technologies demonstrated in the Crescent Project included: (1) automatic vehicle identification (AVI); (2) weigh-in-motion (WlM); (3) automatic vehicle classification (AVC); and (4) data communications networks and systems integration.
But first, trucking and law enforcement had to reach an agreement that trucks from demonstrably safe motor carriers, as judged by official government records, did not need to be inspected at every turn and could bypass weigh stations. Thus, The Crescent Project gave birth to a weigh station bypass program, then known as the Heavy-vehicle Electronic License Plate program, or HELP, which became today’s PrePass.
Today, the PrePass Safety Alliance maintains the same balance between trucking and law enforcement in its governance structure and continued emphasis on highway safety and efficiency as its guiding principles. And while other weigh station bypass providers came later, PrePass remains the largest, most reliable, and widespread truck safety e-clearance system in the nation, with 559 bypass sites, operating in 44 states with over 680,000 trucks participating.
Today, trucking and law enforcement face a similar question: how can we increase the percentage of trucks inspected beyond today’s 1% without disrupting the operations of safe motor carriers or affecting legitimate privacy concerns? Are the solutions once again advanced technologies – such as Level VIII electronic inspections and UIDs, Unique Identification Devices that relay truck data to roadside enforcement? How would these solutions work and what would be the cost? We will explore that in Part 2 of The Past and Future of Truck Inspections.