Technology Improving for Wireless Inspections

By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter

This story appears in the Jan. 31 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

WASHINGTON — Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials said they were making progress toward a broader test of wireless inspections as part of a effort to use electronic technologies to improve carrier safety and efficiency.

Jeff Loftus, chief of FMCSA’s technology division, speaking here Jan. 25 at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting, said that a recently concluded pilot test in Tennessee indicated there could be a number of potential benefits — for both enforcement and carriers — to deploying the wireless roadside inspection program more broadly.

“We could conduct significantly more inspections” using the technology-based program,” he said. “Through the use of this technology, we could potentially inspect 85 million vehicles, or roughly the same number of trucks that are weighed each year.”

Currently, Loftus said FMCSA and its state law enforcement partners inspect about 3 million trucks at roadside.

The technology, which allows for wireless transmission of electronic onboard recorder data and some vehicle data, can review a vehicle’s status in as little as “15 to 30 seconds,” Loftus said.

Those added inspections, he said, can help carriers by “leveling the playing field” and examining more trucks, and it also provides “an opportunity to provide credit for a positive or clean inspection at the roadside,” which can improve a carrier’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program score under the agency’s new safety monitoring system.

Chris Flanigan, a specialist within the technology division, said the agency “set a goal for ourselves of a field test” of the wireless inspection system by 2014.

That test, Loftus said, would take place in “multiple states with hundreds of vehicles.”

Flanigan told TRB that the wireless roadside inspection program is just one part of what FMCSA is looking at through what it called a “Smart Roadside” initiative.

That initiative, he said, has the goal of “sharing data seamlessly with interested parties in order to improve motor carrier safety and security, reduce unnecessary delays in the national supply chain, and increase productivity and freight mobility . . . through the use of interoperable technologies to share information.”

In addition to the wireless inspection program, FMCSA is eyeing other applications of technology, such as a universal identification process for trucks — which uses short-range communication, RFID or even optical readers — to automatically identify vehicles at weigh stations or checkpoints, he said.

Identifying those trucks can help with virtual weigh stations or other remotely operated screening facilities envisioned by the Smart Roadside initiative, Flanigan said.

Finally, he said, the program is looking at truck parking, and developing a system to possibly allow a driver to “reserve a space, or at least be aware of how many spaces are available” in a facility.

In the coming months, Flanigan said, FMCSA is going to begin the process of developing a prototype “Smart Roadside” system to test.

“We haven’t decided what we’re going to prototype,” he said, “that is going to be part of the process.”