Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
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36 | Overdrive | November 2016 The one-two combo of traffi c and hours enforcement packs the greatest punch for Washington state – with a technology assist. BY TODD DILLS CSA's DATA TRAIL STANDOUT STATES Washington The one-two combo of traffi c and hours enforcement The one-two combo of traffi c and hours enforcement The one-two combo of traffi c and hours enforcement Putting the move on moving violations, logs W ashington state logged a 2 percent increase in truck violations in 2015. Nearly all of that increase was seen in the category of moving violations, which Capt. Mike Dahl of the state patrol's Motor Carrier Safety Division says is the result of a rededication among troopers to targeting behaviors that are more often the cause of accidents. "It all goes hand in hand with our target of zero fatalities" by 2030, Dahl says, referencing a nationwide push for the ultimate in highway-fatality reduction. As part of that initiative, Dahl asked the state's crash analysts: "What are the top fi ve things causing our crashes?" As in other states Overdrive has profi led as part of its CSA's Data Trail series, the answer included not yielding the right of way, speeding and following too closely – by all vehicles on the road. The Evergreen State has held something of a high profi le for its leadership in the TACT (Ticketing Aggressive Cars and Trucks) program by deploying enforcement personnel with truckers themselves to ticket unsafe actions by motorists around trucks. "We do need to continue to educate, because the cars are doing a lot wrong," Dahl says. But in terms of the numbers in this analysis, it's clear that a focus on truckers' violations is on the rise. Dahl suggests that will be the case well into the future as "target zero" is emphasized. Washington has been an established leader in truck inspections; it's the fi fth most-intense continental U.S. state in Overdrive's CSA's Data Trail inspection rankings. The 2 percent rise in 2015 vio- lations represents 2,060 violations. As for moving violations, one road rumor is undeniably false, Dahl says. Olympia-based owner-operator Tilden Curl had heard that the state patrol was using its license-plate reading technology – installed at 10 of its 11 fi xed facilities around the state (fi ve ports of entry and six interior scales) – to enforce speed limits. If a driver makes the roughly 100 miles between the southern port of entry from Oregon on Interstate 5 to the Nisqually scale too quickly, "they can pull you in and write you a ticket for speeding just based on the time," Curl says. Dahl says that's not the case. His troop- ers "never use the license-plate readers for speed enforcement," he says. "I would not support doing that" since there's a lack of direct evidence of speed at any given time. But when it comes to citing for a false log book based on the evidence of license-plate readers, it's a diff erent story. Like its neighbor, Oregon, which records every truck that passes a scale in part for weight-distance tax purposes, Washington captures truck movements in a similar way with its license-plate-reading cameras. "A lot of people don't believe they track trucks like they do," says Curl. As Dahl confi rms, such records are