In Part 1 of The Past and Future of Truck Inspections we saw how trucking and commercial vehicle law enforcement grappled with the need to address highway safety while preserving the efficiency of motor carrier operations. The focus forty years ago was the wasted time and effort, for both parties, of funneling all trucks through weigh stations.
How to separate the wheat from the chaff – the safe carriers from those demanding enhanced scrutiny – was tested and approved in the Crescent Project. The Crescent Project demonstrated the viability of a weigh station bypass program, then called the Heavy-vehicle Electronic License Plate program, or HELP. HELP later became today’s PrePass. As with the Crescent Project and HELP, PrePass preserves the balance between industry and law enforcement in its non-profit governance body and its twin goals of highway safety and efficiency.
Highway safety and efficiency are once again under discussion. Only 1% of trucks are physically inspected at weigh stations. Commercial vehicle law enforcement proposes to increase that percentage by equipping all trucks with UIDs, Unique Identification Devices, to transmit truck and driver data to roadside enforcement. There, it is understood, Level VIII inspection criteria would parse the transmitted data and pinpoint which trucks require physical inspection. Those trucks would be directed into a weigh station or roadside inspection site.
What are the differences between the Crescent Project weigh station bypass agreement and the proposed UID/Level VIII inspection system? The use of technology in and of itself is not a difference – the Crescent Project incorporated automatic vehicle identification (AVI); weigh-in-motion (WlM); automatic vehicle classification (AVC); and data communications networks and systems integration.
Nor is there any disagreement that government entities have a legitimate interest in the safe condition of trucks and drivers — the Crescent Project agreement said that official government safety data should be utilized to determine which motor carriers qualify for weigh station bypass. Even after carrier qualification, HELP and now PrePass provide law enforcement a cross-check on the continued safe operations of participating motor carriers through random weigh station pull-ins and through the inspections conducted on all trucks during major annual safety events.
The differences between the Crescent Project weigh station bypass agreement and the proposed UID/Level VIII inspection system center on Privacy, Cost, and Safety. Here in Part 2, we will look at Privacy. Part 3 will focus on Cost and Safety.
Privacy
Which data is transmitted from a truck on the highway to commercial vehicle law enforcement at roadside? The Crescent Project determined that carrier identification – encoded, of course – was sufficient, as the program was built on safety data the government already had, as used in the FMCSA Inspection Selection System (ISS) calculations. Plus, a weigh station bypass program used on-road transmissions voluntarily made by participants.
Initially, the concept of UIDs was similar; only the truck’s VIN (vehicle identification number) would be transmitted. From the VIN, the truck’s ownership and registration could be determined by law enforcement from government records.
But support for Level VIII inspections (also known as “wireless roadside inspections” or WRI) could require the transmission of significantly more data by UIDs. During a physical truck inspection at a weigh station, law enforcement looks at the mechanical condition and functioning of vehicle components – for example, whether or not the brakes are properly adjusted. Modern trucks have sensors which may allow the transmission of that information.
A weigh station inspection goes beyond mechanical data to motor carrier legal requirements – has the carrier paid its Unified Carrier Registration fees? What about its International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA) status? To support a Level VIII inspection, that data would be transmitted by a UID, as well.
More problematic from a privacy standpoint are the transmission of a truck driver’s name, address, contact information, hours of service (HOS) record, (as drawn from the electronic logging device, ELD), medical certification, and whether the commercial driver’s license (CDL) is current and endorsed for the class of vehicle being operated. Many truck drivers consider that data private and its transmission as government intrusion. When the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on UIDs, it at least asked whether driver Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as the above should be transmitted. A Level VIII inspection, however, would require it.
An FMCSA rule requiring UIDs and the transmission of critical data to support Level VIII inspections would need to pass scrutiny under various federal and state laws intended to protect PII. At the federal level is The Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. § 552a)(https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974), which requires agencies to comply with statutory norms for collection, maintenance, access, use and dissemination of records through a code of “fair information practices.” The Privacy Act does have exceptions allowing the government to gather PII for civil and criminal law enforcement purposes. UIDs and Level VIII inspections would need to jump through that Privacy Act hoop.
Almost every state has adopted some form of statutory PII protection. Most are patterned after HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/health-insurance-portability-accountability-act-1996), which guards personal medical records and health information. The broader state PII laws on their face cover all state government information collection and sharing. To date, none have been specifically applied to the public, over-the-air transmission of PII, as UIDs would do in support of Level VIII inspections. No doubt, litigation would test whether state PII protection laws apply.
What the FMCSA ANPRM did not suggest protecting is data that a trucking company may regard as proprietary. The ANPRM asks whether the UID transmissions would carry a truck’s pre-trip inspection date and time and whether GPS coordinates should be included. From that data, a truck’s last stop and its route of travel, possibly indicating the location of customers served, could be determined.
One state, however, has determined that similar “proprietary” data is, in fact, PII and merits intense protection. The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) is designing a system to aid handicapped persons, often in wheelchairs, to travel on city streets and transit buses to their destinations (https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/74299). The names, addresses, cell phone numbers, and online passwords of the clients are, of course, regarded as PII – but so too, GDOT has determined, are the routes chosen, the stops made, and the final destinations. GDOT has assigned that travel data its highest level of confidentiality, to be literally kept under “lock and key” in a secure server and used for no other purpose. Similar to the concerns motor carriers have expressed about the on-road UID transmission of truck routes and stops, the GDOT has also evaluated the handicap data as being most vulnerable during actual travel.
By contrast to the ANPRM’s failure to inquire about the need to transmit and collect motor carrier proprietary information, the Crescent Project agreement specifically forbid bypass date and time stamps, much less the last time and place a truck stopped for a pre-trip inspection. Motor carriers know that competitors would relish access to that information and that bad actors could use it for cargo theft purposes. More pointedly, industry participants in the Crescent Project saw that date and time data would allow governments to estimate carrier mileage and adopt truck ton-mile taxation. Once officially transmitted, motor carrier and truck driver data are no longer “private” and can be used for other government intentions.
In Part 3 we will examine Cost and Safety differences between the Crescent Project weigh station bypass program and the proposed UID/Level VIII inspection system and offer a PrePass path forward.