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Wireless Roadside Inspections Promise Productivity Gains for Carriers

By November 13, 2015April 26th, 2019No Comments

Carriers could achieve substantial productivity gains and fuel savings if all goes as hoped in a long-awaited field test of a wireless roadside inspection (WRI) system to be conducted in five southern states starting this December.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) will engage 1,000 commercial trucks and buses in the test, which is scheduled for completion in 2017. By using wireless technology to increase 50-fold the number of inspections conducted nationally, the ultimate goal of the program is to make the operation of trucks and buses safer and more efficient. Manual inspections currently take 15 to 20 minutes of a driver’s time and can consume as much as a gallon of gas. States currently conduct 3.6 million physical truck inspections per year.

WRI captures driver ID in real-time, as well as other important information like carrier, vehicle ID, hours-of-service compliance, and vehicle condition. Law enforcement officials monitor approaching trucks via the web to ascertain whether or not they need to be pulled in for review. If everything checks out, drivers see a green light in the cab that indicated they’re approved to bypass the inspection point. If there’s a problem, a red light appears, signaling to the driver that they must pull over.

A sharp increase in inspections would generate more data for CSA profiles (Compliance, Safety and Accountability), some 80 percent of which today are incomplete because the nation’s 13,000 inspectors can manually conduct CVSA inspections for only one in 200 trucks that pass through an inspection site. Fleets that maintain good safety records should see improvements in their CSA scores and that in turn should lead to a reduction in their trucking insurance rates.

If reducing premiums for trucking insurance is a priority for your firm, contact the experts at Truck Writers.

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