Inspection numbers are down, and with state truck enforcement units struggling with staffing issues that predated but were certainly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, some in the roadside enforcement community see more automated inspections as a way to build those numbers. Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Roadside Inspection Specialist John Sova noted enforcement's desire to "leverage the use of technology as the number of inspections" has fallen, he said. "How do we get the best data to be able to identify carriers that might need additional intervention?"
The last year has been something of a watershed when it comes to concrete steps taken toward a future for roadside inspections that could in fact be well more automated than anything happening today. Various developments on the regulatory front have begun to lay the groundwork to (eventually) make a now five-year-old inspection standard a reality. Some benefits could be derived by truckers with "nothing to hide, nothing to fear," as the old saying goes, in the form of many more clean inspections.
Yet the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association recently flagged constitutional concerns around "automated surveillance" in the form of inspections. And seen in the context of recent moves by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration around its CSA Safety Measurement System and intention to move on a revamp of carriers' safety ratings, other watchers fear a data-driven approach to ratings could backfire for the smallest fleets.
Some independent owner-operators and very-small fleets view the recent CSA SMS changes as FMCSA offering a bit of a "kinder, gentler" approach with CSA SMS, in the words of transportation attorney Hank Seaton, with more of the smallest fleets likely to fly under the radar of the SMS's scoring metrics. Yet if automated inspections become a compulsory part of truckers' travels past scale houses and/or other mobile checkpoints nationwide, voluminous inspection/violation data collected could mean quite the opposite of kinder and gentler.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance in 2017 wrote and adopted its Level 8 electronic inspection standard as, essentially, a driver inspection. In theory, that inspection would occur without intervention of a trooper at a weigh station or roadside.
