Roadside inspections are necessary in the trucking industry. Roadside inspectors stand guard along our nation’s highways, flagging down trucks and examining them and their drivers. They prevent crashes by deterring unsafe practices and removing unsafe vehicles and drivers from our roadways. Oh, and they slow us down, may cause us to miss appointments, and hold us accountable to FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program that may misrepresent our actual safety posture. Level VIII inspections and future technology deployment might be changing this paradigm. Level VIII inspections are electronic, over-the-air inspections conducted at highway speeds and they might be coming to a roadside near you. It’s an initiative CVSA and FMCSA have been working on for years and on which they have been making impressive progress recently. The program is currently in phase 1 of its pilot demonstration, which currently involves 50 test sites across three states.

Six carriers are participating in phase 1 of the test, which involves trucks electronically transmitting basic carrier identification information (DOT number, Operating Authority, etc) over-the-air to roadside in real-time at highway speeds. The next phase will add data transmitted from ELDs including driver license information, medical certification status, and hours of service compliance information. For now, officials are merely testing the ability of the vehicle to transmit the data and for law enforcement to accurately receive the data. Later phases will focus on analyzing and acting on this data.

Since March, when phase 1 of the test started, the program has made more than 137,000 data transfers. That’s a ratio of 380 data transfers for every physical roadside inspection for the six carriers and three states in the test. With nearly 14 million large trucks registered in the US and only 3 million roadside inspections performed annually, the desire to move toward electronic inspections for many is both obvious and unquenchable.

A question on many people’s minds is how these inspections will impact carriers’ all-important CSA scores, especially given changes to the system expected to be released this fall. While the industry should demand answers to this question, we should also begin preparing for the inevitable move from an environment with physical roadside inspections to one having more electronic inspections. Prior to this shift, however, the key question that should be answered is how to leverage this new environment to improve safety.